This clip is from Smarter Everyday
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Tools for Exploring and Making Interactive Timelines
Timelines are important tools for exploring a brief period of time or a topic that spans centuries. Students will learn the chronology of historical events and begin to see the cause-and-effect relationships between time periods. The interactive timelines on this list cover everything from the American Revolution to the concept of freedom in the U.S. to art history. As they gain insight and perspective into the curriculum by interacting with the timelines, students can use the creation tools to make their own.
excerpt from Common Sense Education. Full article here.
Just some examples of Timeline creation tools
Just some examples of Timeline resource tools
excerpt from Common Sense Education. Full article here.
CommonSense Education: 3 Budget-Friendly Ways to Take Science Learning Outside
Below are excerpts from the blog post, " 3 Budget-Friendly Ways to Take Science Learning Outside" from the Common Sense Media site.
Here is a link to the full article
1. Use Apps That Collect Scientific Data
Science Journal is a lab-sensor app that uses your Android or Apple phone or tablet to collect scientific data: light, sound, motion, and more. 2. Participate in Citizen Science Projects
Citizen science allows students to share local scientific data with scientists, and it helps them see how they can make meaningful contributions to science. There are many citizen science projects out there, from NASA's SMAP program, which helps make teaching about soil a little more exciting, to Project Squirrel, which helps students and scientists learn about the local ecology. 3. Collect and Share Data Using Collaboration Tools
Many of us remember the time when, while conducting an experiment, we would collect data and then write all the results by group onto the board. Then each class would have to input these into the computer or on a sheet of paper. It was essential for students to collect and analyze data, but this process was extremely time-consuming. Collaboration tools like Google Spreadsheets changed all of this and made it so easy and manageable to share data and compare data from other groups and classes. This frees up more class time to analyze and reflect on the data and have in-class discussions on what the data means.
Link to the full article
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Google Classroom: Essentials
This graphic was created by Alice Keeler.
@alicekeeler
Please feel free to use this with teacher trainings, with students and in presentations. Please do NOT publish this publicly.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Pear Deck: Have students draw on a slide
Would you ever like students to mark up some text or draw a graph?
Using the Drawing slide, students can draw, annotate, and label on any image you desire. Find your classroom's next Picasso!
Drawing Examples
| Learn How to Make a Drawing Slide |
Official: Flash is being killed off by Adobe
Here it is, hiding halfway down the company’s latest press release, like a guillotine in a crowded town square: “Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash.” Boom. That’s the sound of the blade dropping, and Flash, finally, thankfully, mercifully dying. Because Adobe just killed it.
It’s actually slightly more complicated than that. Adobe is working with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla to put that last nail in Flash’s coffin over the course of the next three years. The Adobe statement continues, “Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.”
Read full article
https://gizmodo.com/adobe-is-finally-killing-flash-for-real-this-time-1797231399
To lose old styles of reading is to lose a part of ourselves
Sometimes I think we’re living in the end times:
Out for dinner with another writer, I said, “I think I’ve forgotten how to read.”“Yes!” he replied, pointing his knife. “Everybody has.”“No, really,” I said. “I mean I actually can’t do it any more.”He nodded: “Nobody can read like they used to. But nobody wants to talk about it."
I wrote my doctoral thesis on digital literacies. There was a real sense in the 1990s that reading on screen was very different to reading on paper. We’ve kind of lost that sense of difference, and I think perhaps we need to regain it:
For most of modern life, printed matter was, as the media critic Neil Postman put it, “the model, the metaphor, and the measure of all discourse.” The resonance of printed books – their lineal structure, the demands they make on our attention – touches every corner of the world we’ve inherited. But online life makes me into a different kind of reader – a cynical one. I scrounge, now, for the useful fact; I zero in on the shareable link. My attention – and thus my experience – fractures. Online reading is about clicks, and comments, and points. When I take that mindset and try to apply it to a beaten-up paperback, my mind bucks.
We don’t really talk about ‘hypertext’ any more, as it’s almost the default type of text that we read. As such, reading on paper doesn’t really prepare us for it:
For a long time, I convinced myself that a childhood spent immersed in old-fashioned books would insulate me somehow from our new media climate – that I could keep on reading and writing in the old way because my mind was formed in pre-internet days. But the mind is plastic – and I have changed. I’m not the reader I was.
Me too. I train myself to read longer articles through mechanisms such as writing Thought Shrapnel posts and newsletters each week. But I don’t read like I used to; I read for utility rather than pleasure and just for the sake of it.
The suggestion that, in a few generations, our experience of media will be reinvented shouldn’t surprise us. We should, instead, marvel at the fact we ever read books at all. Great researchers such as Maryanne Wolf and Alison Gopnik remind us that the human brain was never designed to read. Rather, elements of the visual cortex – which evolved for other purposes – were hijacked in order to pull off the trick. The deep reading that a novel demands doesn’t come easy and it was never “natural.” Our default state is, if anything, one of distractedness. The gaze shifts, the attention flits; we scour the environment for clues. (Otherwise, that predator in the shadows might eat us.) How primed are we for distraction? One famous study found humans would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit alone with their thoughts for 10 minutes. We disobey those instincts every time we get lost in a book.
It’s funny. We’ve such a connection with books, but for most of human history we’ve done without them:
Literacy has only been common (outside the elite) since the 19th century. And it’s hardly been crystallized since then. Our habits of reading could easily become antiquated. The writer Clay Shirky even suggests that we’ve lately been “emptily praising” Tolstoy and Proust. Those old, solitary experiences with literature were “just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.” In our online world, we can move on. And our brains – only temporarily hijacked by books – will now be hijacked by whatever comes next.
There’s several theses in all of this around fake news, the role of reading in a democracy, and how information spreads. For now, I continue to be amazed at the power of the web on the fabric of societies.
Source: Doug Belshaw in 'Think Sharpnel' quoting The Globe and Mail
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