Saturday, August 13, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, August 06, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Saturday, July 02, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Saturday, June 04, 2011

LWCBookmarks (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of LearningwithComputers group favorite links are here.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm (Wired Magazine: 16.05)
. . .
Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. . . .
. . . [L]aws of memory wreak havoc on students and teachers. One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. . . .
(Gary Wolf, The problem of forgetting, ¶¶6-7, 04.21.08).

Friday, July 09, 2010

New Look and Old Look

This post, the first since a template update necessary to enable modifications such as the addition of a Recent Comments feed, displays the old look in a series of screenshots. These pictures show the previous home page layout and sidebar elements. Hopefully, as time permits, one or more of us will be able to restore other page elements, such as the LwC logo, to make the new look into a fair facsimile of the old one.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Personal Start Pages

pageflakes - teacher edition

Welcome to personal start pages for LwC! Over the next few weeks, we'll be exploring personal start or home pages, especially Pageflakes. With Pageflakes and similar online tools, you'll be able to create your own personal start page, bringing everything that you are interested in to one place! This makes it easy to see when your favorite blogs and sites have been updated, what your friends are saying on Twitter, or even what the weather is like! In order to get started, we'll review the very basics of RSS and then we'll get started creating our own personal, class, and professional pages using Pageflakes. As you'll see, you can easily customize your Pageflake to suit your interests and needs. Finally, in addition to Pageflakes, try out alternate tools, such as Netvibes and iGoogle, or even Protopage.


Week One Tasks: Personal Start Page Basics

1. Watch Nik Peachey's training video and/or read his post about start pages
2. Check out options for creating your personal start or home page, including Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle, Protopage;
3. LwC members who already have a Pageflakes or start page, please share your URL with the group, so others can peruse sample pages from LwCers who already using them
Optional: If you need more information about RSS, please see Common Craft RSS in Plain English video

Questions: Please post a comment here on our LwC Blog.
How would RSS be useful for educators?
What is a Start or Home Page and how would it help you?
What are your initial impressions of Pageflakes?
Which option for creating your homepage will you try and why?
Other comments or questions?

Monday, March 24, 2008

Who are you online?

The question of anonymity on the Web seems to me a heated and
never-ending debate. Should we reveal our true identities online? Or
should we hide who we truly are and go around cyberspace as
anonymously as possible?


In favour of the first position, I've heard:

  • People like real names. It's much easier to trust content posted by someone you can track back in time, and this helps you get readers more realistic perception of the poster.
  • The more background information you give about yourself, the less likely your readers are to misinterpret your words.
  • For educators, addressing a group without introducing themselves seems unthinkable (at least in my culture). Conversely, I would personally refuse to teach someone who refused to identify themselves. Why would I do otherwise online?

Against revealing your true identity online, it's been said that:

  • The Web is the place for anonymity by excellence. (I do not support this view, I actually believe this idea goes against true communication)
  • You cannot control who has access to your information online. Therefore, it's wise to protect your privacy. (I do agree with this view to a point, though I guess it's time we started questioning how "private" our identity is even before we go online when so many sites can post about us!).

A solution reconciling all arguments (except perhaps the unlimited right to anonymity) could be the systematic use of aliases and an avatar instead of a photo.

In conclusion, I can certainly understand somebody's decision to use different aliases to post about their professional life from family news. What I find hard to deal with is somebody who asks for support from a community I belong to, and at the same time refuses to open any doors to collaboration with me by not revealing who they are.

In this video clip, Dick Clarence discusses Identity 2.0. Enjoy!

 

Can you add any arguments to the ones mentioned above? Would you like to share your views on our online identities? Post a comment below! (or write a post in your own blogs and trackback here).

Gladys

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Speaking Activities

This month's focus is on sites that promote speaking activities. You can find hundreds of links that relate to this topic on my English For Beginners page under Audio Conversations and on my English Themes for Beginners/Early Intermediate page under Conversations.

However, since the best way to encourage speaking in English is by having students.....speak, I'd really like to highlight the hundreds of links I have on my Examples of Student Work page. There, you can find countless activities where students have to actively participate in speaking instead of passively listening. The best of this category include:

* Ones where students sing karaoke and record their masterpieces. Two of these site are Sims On Stage (formerly known as Singshot) and KSolo.

* Links where students record messages that virtual alter-egos of themselves speak, such as Voki.

* And, of course, there's Voicethread, which allows students to create narrated slideshows.

Larry Ferlazzo

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Reading Treasures Show


This is a wonderful recording of an Alado session which took place some time in August 2007, called "Reading Treasures Show". Teachers from various countries talk about what they do to create reading opportunities for their students. I'd like to congratulate all of them on this wonderful work!
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THEIR DISCUSSION