Education 2.0 & 3.0

Here’s a round-up of full-featured and reasonably priced eLearning tools that will kick start your creativity and help you design compelling course content.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Slidesgo is a platform that offers a wide variety of free Google Slides and PowerPoint templates. The way it works is simple: search the library, save the ones you like to your Google Slides or PowerPoint, open the saved version to customize and edit them the way you want.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

“Real world projects have to be projects that matter to kids” is something that I say whenever I give my presentation, Connecting Kids With Projects That Matter to Them. When the problem they’re tackling matters to them, students feel ownership of the project process. Even a cursory glance at Tract reveals dozens of interesting projects undertaken by students that could be interesting and meaningful to your students as well.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework allows us to understand the importance of utilizing web 2.0 in teaching and learning. Social annotation tools such as Hypothes.is allow teachers to fulfil the three essential UDL components: engagement, representation, and action & expression through thoughtful use of the platform.

 

Social annotation tools such as Hypothesis and Voice Thread, when used well, boost student engagement, enhance critical thinking, expand reading comprehension, and increase student interaction. Of the several social annotation tools currently available, our institution uses Hypothesis. Hypothesis’ motto—“Making reading active, visible and social”—sums up why we think social annotation is so valuable for our students: it engages students and invites them to read and think together as a group by sharing real-time annotations of websites or PDFs (Hypothesis, 2021). The richly multimodal, interactive nature of Hypothesis offers instructors a platform through which they can employ the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to improve engagement and accessibility for all learners.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Students must understand how to recognize reputable information and how to identify credible, high-quality journalism. Bias is everywhere, and it’s necessary for young people today to identif…

Via Elizabeth E Charles

A reader recently emailed me looking for advice on how to create narrated video based on slides made in Canva. She didn't want to record her own voiceover audio. My suggestion was to try using Narakeet to have the slides converted into a narrated video. 

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Semantic Scholar is a good academic search engine that allows you to search millions of scholarly articles for academic content relevant to your research topic. Unlike other search engines, Semantic Scholar combines the power of artificial Intelligence, machine learning, language processing   with semantic analytic search enabling users to get more accurate search results. 

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Last week TED-Ed released a new video lesson titled This Tool Will Help You Improve Your Critical Thinking. As I wrote last week, I almost immediately used the lesson in one of my computer science classes. Writing that blog post and using that lesson inspired me to take a look back through my archives for other lessons and resources for teaching and learning about critical thinking. Here's my updated list of resources about critical thinking and logical fallacies. 

Via Elizabeth E Charles

If you are a tab collector like me and like to have several tabs open simultaneously on your Chrome this little hack will definitely be of great help. I used to (and still do) rely on the services of the popular Chrome extension OneTab to organize and declutter my tabs. 

Via Elizabeth E Charles

In this blog post, Pip Divall, Clinical Librarian Service Manager at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and CILIP Information Literacy Group’s Health Sector rep, gathers together useful resources for tackling Covid-19 vaccine misinformation during the global pandemic.

Via Elizabeth E Charles