One of the new summer books I read (actually listened to on tape) was NOW YOU SEE IT, by Cathy Davidson, who was the Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. In 2003, Duke University as one of the eight Apple innovation campuses gave their undergraduates iPods to explore for new academic uses. What happened was truly innovative. She discusses new theories of learning by Doidge and others. A great read (or listen)!
Test your attention skills….Gorilla in the Room Experiment
Reminiscent of the back to school essay, “What I did over my summer vacation” – I am posting how I spent my summer with technology. In fact I did not learn how to use diigo, but spent the summer exploring and using Zotero.
It is open source tool for research. Zotero is a firefox add-on application that allows you to save, organize, and cite your.
It creates bibliographies (in any format) based on the citations it has captured.
Amazing for students writing research papers!
We had a wonderful F2F on tuesday. The topic was collaborative tools and we (collaboratively, of course!)
decided to pick one new toy/tool to learn about this summer, and blog about it. My tool will be diigo – a centralized location for bookmarks, notes, etc that can be accessed from anywhere. more about this when I learn more……
Is there a tool you want to learn about and blog about? join the conversation!
As usual, this weekend I was careening around the web, and reading about education. I was looking at my colleague, Alexandra Pickett’s blog.
What tools would you like to explore this summer?
http://etap687.edublogs.org and reading about her top 10 cool tools!
Here is my “Top 10″ list for 2011:
- jumpscan – qrcode generator creates a smartphone scan-able code to quickly and easily share contact info., social media, website, and email address.
- quora – Social Q&A. you can follow not only people, but topics and questions.
- ipad – The iPad is the first tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. Announced on January 27, 2010, it is part of a device category between a smartphone and a laptop computer.
- amplify – Amplify gives an easy way to clip, share and spark conversation around articles, blog posts or anything else you read on the web.
- audioboo – a mobile & web platform that allows you to record and upload audio.
- voki – create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages.
- diigo – social bookmarking tool.
- ning – a social network platform that i used to create : http://slnfacultyonline.ning.com/ – JOIN!
- youtube – watch and share originally-created videos & .vyou – broadcast video structured as conversations.
- glogster – multimedia online posters.
did not quite make the list, but still very cool:
- wiffiti
- http://issuu.com/
- http://www.wallwisher.com
We had a wonderful F2F about interdisciplinary conversations last week!
One of the (many) conversations we had was about creativity–how you inspire
your students to stimulate creativity. Is it really something you can teach?
I think creativity can be taught, you can help your students open their eyes
to the world around them and connect the dots of what they are seeing.
What tools do you use to communicate collaboratively?
Bob Hebert of the New York Times in his op-ed piece on Sunday discusses the controversial book Academically Adrift’s premise that college students are actually learning very little in their four years of higher education.
What do you think?
What do our students learn in their four years at FIT, and what should they learn?
What do you think our students need to face the challenges of the 21st century? How do we empower them to meet these challenges?
The first interdisciplinary lunchtime conversation took place last week!
It was a full house with animated discussions about teaching, learning and the challenges we encounter. The faculty (and staff) who attended will be receiving an invitation to join the blogging ranks. At the next meeting we will do a demo. on WordPress basics!
Bring your lunch!!!! See you March 22, Tuesday at 1 pm in D-331A
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