Sylvia Duckworth

Today, Sylvia Duckworth published another three of her fabulous images which capture the essence of the words of other educators.  We are so lucky to have her hard work and talent being shared.  I particularly love this latest one summarising the  words of Vicki Davis aka Cool Cat Teacher. Two talented women in education - thank you!!

20th Century Pedagogy on 21st Century Devices

      I recently gave a presentation at Teach Expo in Gisborne, entitled 20th Century Pedagogy on 21st Century Devices. I wanted to highlight my view that just because you have devices in your class and are using them, it doesn't mean that they are used well or appropriately to develop 21st Century skills.       Devices can be very expensive pen and paper if not used appropriately. If you and your students are just using your devices for word processing and research, you may well be using 20th Century pedagogy, and might as well ditch the expensive tools for old fashioned cheaper pen, paper and books.  
                      
       I gave the participants in the workshop some examples of 20th Century pedagogy that I had observed and we spent time working out how the teacher might have done things differently. I am publishing a shortened version of my presentation here to provide a bit of thought stimulation on how devices could support 21st century learning. This version only refers to phone and ipad use in the classroom, although if you click on the links in slides 27 to 33 and fill out the surveys, don't limit yourselves to answering just about those devices.  The responses are visible in slide 33 so that everyone can share their ideas.
If you view the presentation in slides, you will be able to see the notes which contain a number of links to a number of resources that I provided.
I am looking forward to seeing some shared examples of how you have used 21st Century pedagogy, supported by the use of digital technologies.

Can't remember where you saw that awesome article?

I am constantly surprised by how people lose things.  I don't mean in your home or at school.  I mean  - on the internet.  There are two really simple things you can do to help you find things you want to look at again.
1.  Get a Diigo account.

Diigo: 

• Install the diigo extension on your Chrome browser.  
• Use it by clicking on the extension and adding tags (labels which identify what the article is about). 
• Look it up later in your library using the powerful meta search (which searches your library by tag, title and content of the saved url.)

2.  Use the bookmarks bar in your Chrome browser.  

• Hit the star to add a URL to your bookmarks
• Organise it into folders
• Click on the bookmark to find the page again.

I use the first option when I am bookmarking pages which are interesting or relevant to my work.  I use the second option to access the most frequently used sites for my work.  

This is what they look like:
Firstly the Diigo extension has a drop down menu which allows you to save or search in your library:- 

Diigo bookmarklet extension

With Diigo you can have a free account or a free upgrade to the premium educator account.

There are a heap of other really useful functions on Diigo, including social bookmarking (sharing your bookmarks with others and following other people who share your interests.  I encourage everyone to have a further look on Diigo tutorials on youtube and on the Diigo homepage.
Secondly bookmarking with folders on Chrome allows you to have a dropdown menu on your bookmark bar to readily access your most frquently visited sites.

I have made a quick video which shows you both bookmarking systems in brief.  Here it is, good luck and I hope you can find what you want to a lot easier from now on.