For many web design professionals, there was no option but to be self taught. Years ago, the academic qualifications simply didn’t exist. Sure, you could study design, but you’d be left to learn the technology by yourself. You could take an I.T. course, but you’d be lacking design skills.
There are lots of advantages to be had by employing tablets in the classroom at various levels of education. You can encourage greater student engagement and an expansion of the learning environment beyond school hours. Hardware is only part of the jigsaw, though. You also need the right software to help engage those eager young minds. If you’re using tablets with your students then you’ll appreciate great educational apps.
We’ve already looked at the best back to school apps for students to help them keep organized, but what about teachers? How about a communication network built with teacher-student relations in mind? Apps for scheduling and recording attendance could prove handy. There are also some great options for creating tutorials and accessing information on different subjects. Let’s take a look at the best apps for teachers and educators.
As a mom of three boys, I see first-hand how making activities into a game suddenly turns stubborn stand-offs into engaging fun.
My boys were fascinated with baseball statistics and learned percentages and fractions by following the exploits of their favorite players. They insisted on being the banker in monopoly, only to be disappointed when they later learned all U.S. currency is just plain green and not all the colors of the rainbow they were used to. Today, there are gadgets like ibitz which turn walking and exercising into a fun, rewarding game-like experience.
Some people refer to this as “gamification” which means applying game thinking or even game mechanics into a non-game context. As an example, I have no problem if my boys prefer to use a Math Baseball iPad app to practice math facts instead of a printed worksheet. When I see my kids’ teachers incorporating games into learning, I say “Bravo”. Anything that inspires them to learn by making it fun is okay by me.
With new games like SimCityEDU — which teaches students STEM subjects in a virtual environment — I wondered if bringing games into the classroom would support or distract from learning. Here's what I found out.
The public Internet now houses over 630 million sites, a number that is growing each month. And each of those sites can have thousands or millions of individual pages (CNN.com, for example, has over 47 million pages indexed on Google, and adds thousands each day).
Free access to all that information is, on the whole, a very good thing for society. More people can stay informed, more voices can reach an audience. Writers aren't constrained by column inches or page counts or the cost of ink, meaning stories can be reported with greater depth, with more multimedia or with previously unimaginable interactivity.
But all that flowing information can also present problems when people are unequipped with the tools and skills necessary to make sense of it.
As time marches steadily forward and the technology around us continues to push its way more deeply into our lives, both personal and professional, the question of how to best educate our population is raised over and over again.
With the shared understanding that, whether welcomed or not, high technology is currently making its place known in schools of all varieties, educational administrators and decision makers are hard at work debating the benefits and potential drawbacks of the digital classroom.
Last month, TED announced its new education initiative -- fittingly named TED-Ed -- with a YouTube channel showcasing teachers' lessons presented as animated videos. Today, the program moved forward, as TED opened up a beta version of a website meant to complement those lessons. Though there are plenty of study aides here, ed.ted.com is really about the grown-ups on the other side of the classroom. The site lets teachers with a TED account "flip" videos from TED-Ed and YouTube -- i.e., customize them to include multiple-choice and open-answer questions and links to additional info on a topic. Currently there are 62 videos and 238 "flips" available for viewing, but TED is gearing up for a full launch to be timed with the new school year in September.
Since Apple announced that it's getting into the digital textbook business, there's been a lot of talk about tablets in the classroom. Do they belong there — and can they help students?
When starting as a designer, you might encounter some issues along the way, especially in the relationships you develop with your clients. This happens mainly because the clients quite often have the wrong idea of what we actually do and think that “anybody can design a website”. In their opinion it is as easy as opening Photoshop and drawing something, then writing three lines of code and there you go, you have developed a website.
The Simpsons is a show that has been a part of television for over 20 years. It has even claimed the title of being the longest running scripted show in the history of television. It has gone from “Eat my shorts” to covering every type of controversial issue engrained within American culture. And while people around the country (and beyond) enjoy watching it, there are actually things that entrepreneurs can learn from the successful long-running series.
Every single member of AmeriCorp's Teach For America -- more than 9,000 strong in 38 states -- has received a first-generation iPad, reports CNN.
Apple started collecting old iPads from customers buying iPad 2s, inviting them to donate their old devices to teachers in low-income areas.
The iPads were refurbished and distributed to the Teach For America staff over the past two weekends.
Apple hands out refurbished iPad 1 units to the thousands of members teaching for Teach for America.
Though Apple has had more money than the U.S. government, and even beat out Exxon Mobil as most valuable in the world, the company is known for sitting Smaug-like on its horde of profits. However, during the past few weeks, Apple has steadily been implementing a charitable program which began last year—over 9,000 (not a meme) free iPad 1 units have been shipped to Teach for America corps in 38 states.
Some of the world’s most masterful marketers are, first and foremost, master teachers.
You’re a teacher when you write a blog post that helps solve a tricky problem your audience is facing.
You’re a teacher when you lead a webinar.
There's a lesson to be drawn from two big stories we've been covering a lot: The rise (and fall?) of Groupon and the jobs crisis in America.
If you haven't been paying attention, here's the deal with Groupon: The high-flying deals site is desperate to do an IPO, as it badly needs the cash. It's still growing like crazy, but it's a cash-burning machine. Unfortunately its business model is drawing more and more skeptics right as the stock market and economy are behaving badly.
J. K. Rowling is the English writer who has authored all seven beloved Harry Potter novels. Her rise to fame and fortune is inspiring. As of June, 2011, she has sold over 450 million books that have been translated into 67 languages. The final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was the fastest-selling book of all time.
There’s a belief in this country that every student should graduate from high school with the same standard set of knowledge. This standard curriculum is lengthy, and states spend many years—and plenty of money—creating fancy bullet-pointed lists of the subjects students are expected to know.
Sadly, the list of facts and formulas students need to perform well on a standardized test is freakishly small in comparison. And, because education policymakers have narrowed teachers' focus to these few topics, it becomes tempting to resort to drill-and-kill teaching methods that cover information in a generic, surface-level way. Unsurprisingly, instead of fostering curiosity—which is much more important in the long term than rote memorization—this approach causes students to tune out.
