Professional Learning Activity

The links below have been compiled with the intent to provide an overview of trends and opinions, as well as some hard advice and useful resources, across a spectrum of transformative effects in education as a result of the impact of technology.

Skim through and, with an idea of your own skill level and areas of interest, sample the least disruptive trends (like the replacement of paper texts with electronic ones), through the introduction of new T&L models (such as ‘flipping’) to wholesale re-imagining of the learning environment where all communication is mediated by communication technologies.

Please feel free to add comments, including other interesting links you come across, at the bottom of the page.

My Teacher is an App, Wall Street Journal, is a good place to start.

Head over to Classroom 2.0 and sign up if you haven’t done so. Spend some time looking around at the topics being discussed & be a fly on the wall for a while to get a taste of the varied levels of expertise. You can easily spend the entire session browsing this site and you’ll probably find you need to come back to it over and over.

So you, and more importantly the kids in your class, have an iOS device – probably an iPad,  almost certainly an iPhone or iPod Touch. What do you do now? Maybe you could incorporate some of the following apps into lesson-starter activities. Or as a reward for completing set tasks. Or to break the monotony of ‘boring’ memory work in class. Or to refresh minds when they hit the 45-minute wall. Whatevs.

• problem solving for lower primary students with Where’s My Water
• Richard Dawkins’ Magic of Reality interactive children’s book
• visually stunning textbook about the Solar System
• Phaidon’s history of 200 years of industrial design
• a complete composition and recording studio on the iPhone: Garageband

The AppsInEducation blog (run by an Australian teacher of Visual Arts) specialises in lists of iPad apps curated by subject area, together with articles – like his eTextbook Manifesto – that provide well-considered, hard-won food for thought.

The Victorian Government has a similar site called iPads for Education.

And here’s another. Again, easily scanned by subject area.

Skim the product description page for HMH’s Fuse Algebra text. Also, here’s a page with links to the research white paper for further reading.

The excuses for replacing paper with e-books are running out fast: research indicates that kids probably comprehend both with equal capability.

Reading just a bit too hard? Feel like chilling out in front of a video? Try these and then browse the comments or follow the ‘Related’ links to see the kinds of ideas, ideals and idylls we can look forward to.

• Reconceptualising the K-12 Model, Vimeo. This one is an hour long, so you might want to bookmark it.
• Gaming to Re-engage Boys in Learning, TED.com
• A message is more effectively conveyed when augmented by animation to reinforce the main points.
• Here is a filterable list of the roughly 1000 TED talks available online.

Scootle is busily aligning resources with the Australian Curriculum. Lots of concrete help available at that site. More than 9000 digital curriculum materials already available.

Already on Twitter? Maybe you could follow @21stCenturyTch. In the past week alone they’ve linked to articles on handwriting, parent engagement, Apple’s eText initiative… The list goes on. The main article on their website makes for good reading, too.

Is your LinkedIn profile up to date with the start of the new year?

What on earth is this ‘flipping’ I keep hearing about?? This. And this. Could you apply this in your classroom? What new skills would you need?

From Banning to BYOD. Familiar…

Don’t have an iOS device? Not planning to let the kids use their phones in your classroom until someone holds a gun to your head? That’s okay too. Here’s something a little more traditional for you: the top 100 websites of 2011 according to Tech & Learning.com. Use a 486 or eMac to access them if you’re really feeling old-school.

Captain James T. Kirk famously bellowed: “KHAAAAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!!!” If you haven’t yet, you should acquaint yourself with the material on offer at the Khan Academy (iPhone Apps also available).
And you should also watch Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan again, too.

iTunes U. Imagine a world where every course a kid could undertake is readily available online. Free of charge. What value would teachers then provide? What value will you provide?

Apropos of which, have you browsed through MIT’s free OpenCourseWare library lately?

If you’re looking for a concrete suggestion, perhaps you could begin generating web-based tutorials with ShowMe for iPad. Or try making a brief podcast for your students.

Our school will embark on a BYOD model from 2013 in the Middle Years. What might it look like? To give you a taste, here are the public documents for two trail-blazing schools: Illawarra Grammar School in NSW and the Corcoran School District in California.

Locally-based professional associations are massively useful. ICT in Education Victoria (website, twitter) provide PL opportunities all year ‘round (.ics-formatted calendar here). Conferences here. Edsoft events here.

The facts: Census data on internet usage for Australian kids.

I love infographics: mobile usage, social media and mobile gaming. These are trends that education needs to harness, or else face irrelevance.

We can rest assured there is nothing to worry about. The path of this potential harbinger of doom is well understood and highly predictable. No danger at all. This time.

More from NASA. Or Google it – news outlets have started to pick up on it.

This is a young star, surrounded by a ‘circumstellar’ disk of dust twice the diameter of Pluto’s orbit around our Sun. The disk itself has a number of clearly visible arms, much like those we are familiar seeing in the much larger structures of galaxies.

I’m reminded of the quote attributed to J. B. S. Haldane : “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

via NASA

The impression of feathers is particularly clear.

The discovery is outlined in some detail at the i09 blog or you can read about the find at Nature and the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking page.

I know someone whose regular cure for a headache is to wash down a couple of Nurofen tablets with a tall, strong latte (2 sugars, please) so this news’ll be unlikely to dissuade her from that habit!

Research from Japan indicates that kissing acts to reduce levels of an immunoglobulin responsible for allergy symptoms, easing those symptoms in the test subjects who presented with eczema and hay-fever.

The advantage of still being able to operate heavy machinery is a bonus.

Like, for instance the age of the Earth.

This post is one of the best (read: concise) overviews I’ve read of why we should expect the age of the earth to be around the 4.5billion mark. It’s one of the best because it comes right out and acknoweldges the variation of conclusions, but in such a way as to explain that they would be, in fact, just what should be expected.

Anyway, have a read – it won’t take you long.

Pic above is an artist’s impression of the formation of a proto-planetary body, accreted from a disk of stellar debris. Via Wikipedia.

In a nut-shell, people who were close to their caregiver between 12 and 18 months (mum, in most cases, I guess) found it easier to get past disagreements with their romantic partners in adulthood.

The researchers suggest this means that if your caregiver is better at regulating your negative emotions as an infant, you tend to do a better job of regulating your own negative emotions in the moments following a conflict as an adult.

And there’s more: one of the study’s authors, Jessica Salvatore, says they “found that people who were insecurely attached as infants but whose adult romantic partners recover well from conflict are likely to stay together … If one person can lead this process of recovering from conflict, it may buffer the other person and the relationship.”

So even if one person has difficulty getting over conflict, as long as the other partner doesn’t then this won’t have to be a significantly negative aspect of the relationship.

via Science Daily

If you do as well then you’ll love the slideshow, presented at Science magazine’s site, of the 10 final nominees for the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2010.

Previous years’ nominations can be perused here.

I caught a whiff of this at Wired.

You can follow my feed @mrwever where I’ve set up a number of Science and Tech identities to bolster the (admittedly meagre of late!) updates authored by yours truly.