This has always been a concern by teachers, whether in students’ work or preparation of teaching resources.
Found this article in Techlearning. It’s a good reading for updating oneself on copyright and fair use, especially in the education setting.
Rubric for assessing blogs
Found a sample of a rubric for EL which we may adapt for assessing the postings by our students. Score of 0-5 were assigned to the following domains:
1. Regularity
– of posts, how often, the frequency
2. Extra exposure to language
– use of language beyond classroom, through self-reading
3. Reflection
– of things heard/learnt in/outside classroom
4. Organisation and Vocabulary
– of thoughts, of words used (esp new ones)
5. Accuracy
– grammar, typo
[source: Edubloggers Link Feed]
Games – Play Online With No Install
Found this page, like what the owner says, it’s a “Complete Waste of Time”, so unless you are checking out what are some of the games our students may be playing when they logon, else dun look here 😛
You have been warned.
Blogs under ‘control’
During the sharing on last week, one issue that was raised: “If we were to allow students to create their blogs in blogger.com, how can we manage the blogs, which include who are the people viewing, the things put up etc?”
The key word here is _manage_, but control could be the meaning from within.
In time to come, I am quite sure that many, if not all, vendors will build in a blog function in their LMS/CMS. This would allow us the control we desired. But is this as desirable as it seems, especially if we place our students in the center, and think from their perspectives?
Personally, I believe that this is a great drawback on blog itself, as a platform per se. Youngsters worldwide are readily embracing blogs because of one key thing in blog — the sense of ownership.
Hosting blogs in a controlled environment such as a LMS/CMS is giving up much of these ownership. The people who are allowed to view my blogs may be restricted, the things that I am going to blog is likely to be restricted, the look and feel of my blog is going to be restricted etc etc.
Blogs on free platform will free our students from these. It will return this sense of ownership to them coz they are virtually in control of everything.
To control or not to control, each has its (dis)advantages, so its something we may want to park at the back of our mind during our planning stage.
There is this reflection posted by Will Richardson expressing his thoughts about blogs not just be outside CMS but “should be outside school altogether”. Check it out.
Top researchers are gamers ?
Many of our students are hooked to different types of games (pc, ps2, xbox, mmorpg etc) and it has been deemed by many teachers that these games are a waste of time. Well, interestingly, this article points out that 3 of the world’s top researchers believed it to be otherwise.
As a computer gamer myself for the past 17+ years, I have learnt much from games. Besides facts which are obtainable by reading books, the training of reflexes (physical and mental) is perhaps something unacheivable by reading alone. The use of games can definitely complement the use of books in teaching and learning. One should not look at it as though books and games are mutually exclusive. Now that we are also going to explore games in our R&D work, wow, it’s going to be very exciting indeed.
[source: slashdot]