Live Binders

Mickie Mueller is an educational technology facilitator in a Public School in New England and she is also a Google trainer, so I shall be looking at her Google training material for some new and innovative ideas. Sh is an avid supporter of Technology for learning her passion runs through all her work that I have found on line. I found this useful collection of Technology Tools on Live Binders that she has written. There are some great ideas and practical applications of the online tools. There are also lots of other really useful folders that are worth investigation written by other authors too, but as usual be discerning with the material that you select for use in your learning and teaching.

Free Technology Tools for Teachers

Social Networking & Learning

After a busy with my fabulous new group of PCET students I began to reflect on the day’s activities. The course I am teaching is a 7 day intensive ICT module for teaching and learning. The students are very eager, interesting and interested and so a pleasure to engage with. Their ICT skills range as you would expect from any new group of people, but what they do share is their understanding that ICT is a valuable teaching and learning tool. We learned such a lot together yesterday.

The main aspect of the day was to discuss the place of social networking in education, in particular to aid reflective practice. My challenge, however, is to teach the students about applications that they can use in their teaching and learning, without keeping them too long on the computers, as the course is all day! Ideally the discussions would have taken place on the forum setup on Moodle our university VLE. So, to avoid over use of the technology, they used felt pens and sheets of A3, with pleasure I might add. The downfall was that there was no record after they fed back their group responses as there would have been on the forum. The forum would also have allowed for follow-up contributions and reflections, but it was a necessary sacrifice for my group’s well-being.

We had lots of issues setting up blogs using Blogger. The main issue, which I suppose is really intended to be an asset, was that fact Blogger constantly encourages sharing with Google+. I wanted to keep things simple and separate but these days it is getting harder to do. The bonus with all the instant linking is that you are sharing your information with your ‘circles’ as they are called in Google+ and they can easily be linked to your Facebook and Twitter friends and followers. You just need to be aware of this and to be sure that it is what you really want. My advice is that you don’t rush setting up these new accounts and that you read all the pop-ups so that you don’t accidentally share!

21st Century Learners do we learn differently?

Most of us will have a mobile phone with the capability to access more information than is held in a university library, the idea of classroom as the place you go to acquire knowledge is out dated. However, education establishments such as schools and universities, still have a very important role to play as the start point and guidance of inquiry, so the role of the educator is not yet defunct!

As a student you are an expert in your own learning; you know how you learn best, and what you are most interested in. An interest in learning is the key characteristic that teachers share with their students and education establishments, at all levels, stand to benefit from working with students rather than performing for them. With the help of technology and radical re-imagining of time and space, lessons no longer have to adhere to the ‘one size fits all’ approach characteristic of the traditional system. Students stand to gain a lot from more personalised lessons and greater autonomy over their own learning.

But do we actually learn differently?  Most certainly the access to information is different; we are the ‘instant access generation’.  In my house certainly, if someone asks a question that we can’t answer we simply ‘Google it’, if we need to see how it is done we ‘Youtube it’, and if we want advice we ‘Tweet it’.  It can easily be used to challenge too, so that a simple discussion can quite easily turn into informed debate!  This is happening in classroom too.  My second year undergraduate students were debating the value of gaming in education.  The first speaker had made their opening comments, based on literature gathered both online and from other sources, the challenge became much more substantial when the opposing team where researching the comments in real-time.  A very interesting debate ensued!  So it’s not the way we process the information that is different, but our needs have changed.  We have easy access to vast amounts of information, far more than ever before.  As educators our job is to teach our students to be more discerning with the information they find as the need to amass it is less vital, more necessary is the ability to locate, evaluate and disseminate.

It is from this that I begin to assess the range of Google Apps for Education as it seems to be a hot topic in education at the moment. Apparently hundreds of thousands of schools are adopting this free resource which is changing the way teachers and students collaborate on work and share information.  - See more at: http://tinyurl.com/8254ytd.  There is a good write up at http://edgalaxy.com/google-for-education complete with suggestions for use and Twitter feeds for feedback, what more can you ask for?