I'm just sayin'

Put this report:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/twitter/5050261/Twitter-is-put-on-new-primary-school-curriculum.html

together with this quote:
"Every company needs to embrace and leverage Twitter before Twitter replaces them."
(http://thebillionairegirl.wordpress.com/twitter-for-dummies/)

Heads up, Education. And educators!

From the height of this place

"At Google we are all technology optimists. We intrinsically believe that the wave upon which we surf, the secular shift of information, communications, and commerce to the Internet, is still in its early stages, and that its result will be a preponderance of good."
via googleblog.blogspot.com

The whole article strikes a chord within me. If you haven't read it, do. I'm impressed by its optimism. There's wisdom, too, in the author's predictions for the future of the internet. I'm blown away by Google's "observations on the future of the Internet for all of us to assess, consider, and carry as we do our work."

THIS is the kind of article that leads.

Describing Googlers, the author is surely describing all of us who live and work online:

"We are standing at a unique moment in history which will help define not just the Internet for the next few years, but the Internet that individuals and societies around the world will traverse for decades. As Googlers our responsibility is nothing less than to help support the future of information, the global transition in how it is created, shared, consumed, and used to solve big problems. Our challenge is to steer incessantly toward greatness, to never think small when we can think big, to strive on with the work Larry and Sergey began over ten years ago, and from this task we will not be moved."

TED: Ideas worth spreading

"Our mission: Spreading ideas." Just discovered this (free subscription) site, and wow!

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader....The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted."

Check out TED's theme site for How We Learn:

"Teachers of all kinds can find fresh resources--and inspiration--in this batch of TEDTalks. Some talks may shake your worldview...others celebrate the extraordinary power of teachers and schools--and share ways you can help them. Look here for pointers to amazing classroom tools and techniques."

Effective Practices | Sloan-C

Sloan-C's Effective Practices site is worth checking out.

"To help make quality online education accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, the Sloan-C community shares techniques, strategies, and practices in online education that have worked for them. All effective practices are peer reviewed to both insure quality and to give submitters some documentation for tenure and promotion files."

They've built some good search categories for the site:

Search by Pillar allows you to search by the five Sloan-C pillars, the building blocks of quality online education – learning effectiveness, scale, access, faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction – and/or subcategories within them.

Search by Context allows you to search by your perspectives (roles) in online learning, organizational type, or subject area domain, as well as by special cases of online learning (such as online collaboration, or large class size), and/or by subcategories within these.

Search by Technology allows you to search by particular technology categories – audio, video, synchronous, asynchronous, mobile, virtual, and digital resources – and/or by subcategories within them.

What's New returns the most recent effective practices added to the site.

SmartTeaching.org

"...a leading online resource for current teachers, and aspiring education students and student teachers."

My title link is to their library of Teaching Resources & Articles. Most of those are about teacher training and teaching career resources.

But also check out their blog, chock full of tips-n-tricks, tutorials, and more. For example, here's a list of titles in the August archives (so far):

100 Awesome Classroom Videos to Learn New Teaching Techniques

100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers

100+ Motivational Techniques to Take Learning to the Next Level

101 Ways to Cope with Teaching Stress

50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom

And for you Blackboard users:
The Ultimate Guide to BlackBoard: 100 Tips & Tutorials

How to Motivate Your Students

"...the reality of distance learning is that this rarely, if ever, happens across the board. You will, in fact, always find one or more students whose motivation is just lacking. Without motivation in an online class that student will do poorly, and you'll feel pretty bad about it as well. You can't be a cheerleader every moment, but you can present your course so that the material becomes understandable, real, and exciting! Once this happens, students will suddenly take notice because they have discovered that the subject of your course talks to and about them. Here's how."

eLearn Magazine: Education and Technology in Perspective

I just discovered this site, chock full of Very Interesting reading that will keep my busy for a long while. Topics are very current and relevant. Categories include: Best Practices, Case Studies, Tutorials, Reviews, Research papers. Articles are grouped by Design, Technology, Usability, Business, Culture. The site "offers a community hub for e-learning professionals on the Web, providing a wealth of public forums for the free exchange of ideas. Our targeted readership includes both providers and consumers of online learning, with a special emphasis on teachers, managers, and administrators working to develop educational programs or classes on the Web." I investigated the "about us" page and discovered that one of my eLearning gurus, Stephen Downes, is on the Editorial Advisory Board, and another (more recent) personal guru, Lisa Neal, is the Editor-in-Chief. Yay for the online version of 6 degrees of separation.

Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional « Lisa Neal

Lisa Neal addresses the question: "You need a break and, instead of heading to the coffee pot, what can you do in 10 minutes that will refresh and energize you and increase your job satisfaction and career success?"

10 facts about learning that are scientifically proven and interesting for teachers

"The problem I had was whittling it down to ten!" says author Donald Clark. He concludes that "Many teaching practices are in direct opposition to the psychology of learning."

List of 20 Education Blogs

Greg Ritter's Blog Habit post in educate/innovate explains: "I've decided to share a list of some of the educational technology blogs that make up part of my daily fix. What follows, in no particular order, are twenty of the best education blogs as judged by . . . well, me. It's a totally subjective list and it's by no means exhaustive, but all of these authors post regularly and all of them have introduced me to great new ideas at one point or another. But if you should get hooked yourself, you can't say I didn't warn you. ;-)"