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Principles for a New Media Literacy
Media literacy principles for consumers and producers. Much of this is about information literacy--learning to be skeptical of sources, learning to filter out the unimportant, watching for credibility, providing accountability, active participation.
Weblogg-ed » Response to Jay Matthews at the Washington Post
Will Richardson responds to a Washington Post article that calls 21st century skills a "doomed pedagogical fad."
With access to the Internet, and with an understanding of how to create and navigate these online, social learning spaces, opportunities for learning widely and deeply reside in the connections that we make with other people who can teach or mentor us and/or collaboarate with us in the learning process. That, I think, is where we find 21st Century skills that are different and important. Sure, those connections require a well developed reading and writing literacy, and critical thinking and creativity and many of the others are skills inherent to the process. But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.
To me, that’s what 21st Century Skills are all about, teaching our kids to navigate the world as they are experiencing it, not the world we experienced.
40 Beautiful Free Icon Sets - Six Revisions
Free icons for web design or elearning design. Note that not all can be used for commercial applications--check the individual licenses.
reinventingpbl wiki / Content and Tools-ISTE IEEW
Resources to accompany the book Reinventing Project-Based Learning
authorSTREAM Online PowerPoint Presentations and Slideshow Sharing
Similar to Slideshare, this site lets you upload PowerPoint presentations for online sharing. However, this site also allows conversion to Flash while keeping all transitions and animations.
EDTECH: Focus On K-12 - Getting Animated
Example chemistry lesson plan where students create animations to demonstrate chemical elements and compounds
Multimedia Physics Studios - Table of Contents
Collection of physics animations illustrating concepts from introductory physics
Animations
Library of science animations, movies, and tutorials, sorted by topic (chemistry, microbiology, protein synthesis, etc.)
Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project - Topics
Collection of resources for project-based learning with multimedia, including planning, implementation, and assessment
Project Based Learning
Principles for designing project-based learning
e-Portfolios or Assessment Management?
Looking at the differences between e-portfolios and assessment management systems. According to the author, assessment systems are more like traditional grading and are institution controlled rather than being student-centered portfolios.
Dynamic FAQ Page - A Lesson in Accessibility and Progressive Enhancement
Slick looking dynamic FAQ built with jQuery, where each question is in a box with a tag to click for the answer. The great thing about this technique is that it's still accessible to screenreaders because the content is still visible even without Javascript and CSS.
Tutorials | elearninglive.com
The goal here is to create Flash tutorials specifically for instructional designers and e-learning developers. Right now there's only one tutorial (on creating a drag and drop activity using ActionScript 3.0), but he plans to add more over time.
gotoandlearn.com
Free video tutorials on Flash
How To Master Photoshop In Just One Week :: Elite By Design
Three-part series of tutorials on Photoshop--basically a crash course to learn the software
Census: More than 54 million disabled in U.S. - Health care- msnbc.com
US Census statistics on disabilities. If almost 20% of the population has some sort of disability, isn't that significant enough for us to take accessibility into consideration when developing online learning? If you want stats to justify why accessibility matters, this is a good place to start.
More than 54 million U.S. residents, or about 19 percent of the population, have some sort of disability, the U.S. Census Bureau reported.
Sakai 3 Proposal
Vision for what Sakai could look like in the future. The authors envision an LMS based on widgets with lots of flexibility, social networking, and content creation tools. The proposed changes to the organization (doing away with sites) would make Sakai much more flexible outside of a traditional academic course environment. The ability to have groups persist outside of courses would allow cohorts to be part of a group together, which creates some interesting possibilities.
"In summary, our ambition is not merely an incremental improvement of Sakai nor is it to copy Google. Our goal is not simply to create a better and cheaper version of Blackboard. It is time to arrive at a clearer understanding of the capabilities that represent needs unique to education and for the Sakai community to focus its development effort on providing these capabilities while taking advantage of established open‐source efforts to provide more generic capabilities. We should, in short, strive to create a different type of academic collaboration system."
My Top 25 blogs for 2008 | The E-learning Curve at Edublogs
Michael Hanley has collected his list of top 25 blogs, related to e-learning, learning, training, and education. I'm on the list, and I recognize most of the names here, but there are some blogs that are new to me.
W3C Web Standard Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web
Press release on the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, with links to more information. "WCAG at a Glance" is a quick overview of the standards, but probably only helpful if you're already somewhat familiar with online accessibility.
<p>WCAG 2.0 explains how to make
content:</p>
<ul>
<li>Perceivable (for instance by addressing text alternatives for images,
captions for audio, adaptability of presentation, and color contrast);
</li>
<li>Operable (by addressing keyboard access, color contrast, timing of
input, seizure avoidance, and navigability); </li>
<li>Understandable (by addressing readability, predictability, and input
assistance); and </li>
<li>Robust (for instance by addressing compatibility with assistive
technologies).</li></ul>
100 Conversation Topics : eLearning Technology
A list to go to when you're stumped for something to blog about. Imagine you had a conversation about one of these 100 topics related to learning, e-learning, and technology.
YouTube - A Shared Culture
Introduction to Creative Commons explaining how CC licenses benefit content creators who want to share their work with the world. Includes an overview of the differences between licenses.
Collaboration Tools : eLearning Technology
Text version and list of tools for screen sharing, VOIP, video conferencing, web conferencing, multimedia presentations, file sharing, and more. The mind map version might be easier to understand than the text list, but having the list as a starting point for your own research is nice.
SpeEdChange: Toolbelt Theory for Everyone
Ira Socol's "Toolbelt Theory," the idea that we all need tools to help us survive in the the world, and every individual needs a different set of tools. The is a broader idea than just accessibility; it's about giving all learners control of their own tools to find what works best for them.
How will your students communicate when they leave school? How will they gather information? How will they say what they need to say?
The thing about toolbelts though, is that no two people ever really need the same one.
So the trick to tool use is to learn to evaluate tasks and environments and your skills and the tools themselves as they change and determine what works best for you. I call this the "TEST" - <span style="font-weight: bold;">T</span>ask - <span style="font-weight: bold;">E</span>nvironment - <span style="font-weight: bold;">S</span>kills - <span style="font-weight: bold;">T</span>ools, a specifically ordered reframing of <a href="http://sweb.uky.edu/%7Ejszaba0/JoyZabala.html">Joy Zabala</a>'s "<a href="http://www.ode.state.or.us/initiatives/elearning/nasdse/settintrogeneric2005.pdf">SETT</a>" protocol. A specifically ordered reframing designed for self-determination.
And on top of this, the tools most schools are devoted to are antiques which serve few functions anywhere outside of school. It is as if you were learning to build homes but were allowed to use only tools invented before 1940. You'd be close to unemployable when you finished that training.
The only way to allow students to assemble this essential toolbelt for information and communication is to to throw open your classroom and let the world in. How will your students know which calendar works for them - the one on their phone, Google Calendar with SMS appointment texting, Microsoft Outlook, or any of a dozen paper systems unless you allow them to try them out?
eLearning Tool Chest
E-Learning book reviews, software reviews, industry news
Blogging as Reflective Practice | Adventures in Corporate Education
Thoughts on blogging as reflective practice for learning, with benefits in both the activity of writing and the social connections
So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).
Usability in eLearning « eLearning Weekly
Brief intro to usability and a collection of resources for usability and usability testing
FeedVis: top 50 edublogs
Cool way of visualizing changes in word clouds over time in 50 of the top edublogs, pulled from their RSS feeds and continuously updated.
Weblogg-ed » New MacArthur Study: Must Read for Educators
Selected points from a MacArthur study, "Living and Learning with New Media," with points about how technology can help students become more self directed and allow them more control over their own learning
NSSE 2008 Results
Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement. The full report has limited information about online learning, but does include results showing that students in online courses report more deep learning, intellectual challenge, and reflection than those in face-to-face courses.