The Weekly Roundup - February 15th, 2014

2/15/2014

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a happy Valentine's / Love and Friendship Day yesterday! Today we begin the Roundup with a new post from Dave Guymon at Getting Smart on "The 5 Steps of Effective Technology Integration." Guymon does an excellent job simplifying and explaining the process that teachers and schools should go through when attempting to integrating new tech into the classroom.

Lisa Nielsen at The Innovative Educator has an excellent post on students and social media entitled, "Another Reason Responsible Social Media Use Must be Taught to Students AND Adults." Nielsen writes about a recent example of the positive influence social media can have, and ends by asking if educators and parents are confident that we have prepared our students to behave safely and responsibly online.

Here are a few of the great new resources from FT4T:

Lately, there has been a lot of talk on Connected Learning, its importance in the classroom, and its relation to educational technology. If you want a good introduction to the idea of Connected Learning, Katie Lepi's new post at Edudemic is a great place to start, "What is Connected Learning?"

iLearn Technology has a new review of "EDpuzzle: Like Video in the Classroom 2.0." EDpuzzle lets teachers edit, crop, add notes, or insert voice overs to videos. Plus, you can embed your own questions within the videos as well. It's a great tool (similar to Zaption and EduCanon) and worth checking out!

Here is a sampling of ET&ML's posts from the week:

Up next, Katrina Schwartz at Mind/Shift asks, "If Robots Will Run the World, What Should Students Learn?" It's an absolutely wonderful article that discusses the future of education, the importance of creativity and metacognition, and how educators can help in this process, especially by making education more of a collaborative process. Definitely worth reading.

For all you augmented reality fans, Drew Minock over at Two Guys and Some iPads has an excellent new review, "Zientia: Changing the Way We Learn with Augmented Reality." Zientia is designed to be used with chemistry, geometry, and anatomy, and you can check out Minock's review for all the details, photos, and videos of the app in action.

As always, EdReach has a great collection of podcasts:

Finally, for anyone who is in a generous mood today (or just likes learning about new edtech that is in development) I wanted to share an exciting new Kickstarter from former teacher Daniel Fountenberry entitled "Books that Grow." It's an excellent project that looks to create digital books that can adapt to students' learning levels. You can check out the Kickstarter or home page for more information.