Open Education Sites Tweets of the Day 6/3/2012

wordle indeed

Here are several sites from KQED, Mind/Shift How We Will Learn in San Francisco. And the opportunity of a lifetime for teachers to create their own textbook through online sources before the thought police get involved. There's a rumor even the Bible might be involved.

1. 'How Open Education is Changing the Texture of Content'

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/05/how-open-education-is-changing-the-texture-of-content/ '

2. 'Open Education Sites Offer Free Content for All'

 http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/10/open-education-sites-offer-free-content-for-all/ 

 '10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)'

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/05/10-open-education-resources-you-may-not-know-about-but-should/ 

3.  'Teachers’ Customizable Curriculum: 5 More Resources'

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2010/10/teachers-customizable-curriculum-5-more-resources/ 

4. 'Teachers’ Customizable Curriculum: 5 More Resources'

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2010/10/teachers-customizable-curriculum-5-more-resources/ 

5. 'What can computers teach that textbooks and paper can’t?'

 http://www.collisiondetection.net/

This is a very rational article that uses reason to see what the role of computers could be in the classroom.

Here are some thoughts:

'Randy Yerrick — an associate dean of educational tech at the University of Buffalo — makes the take-away point: The chief reason to use high-tech tools is when you want to teach in a fashion that has “no good digital equivalent”. Or to put it another way, only use computers in situations where you want to do something that can’t be done without them.'

And examples:

 1) Teaching complexity. Computers are great at teaching concepts that are hard to grasp when you merely read about them, or try to execute them with pencil and paper.

 2) Seeing patterns in the world around you. Computers are also great at doing data visualization — helping students quickly see patterns in massive corpuses of data.

3) Dialogue. Computers also let teachers and students have dialogues that aren’t easily possible in regular face-to-face formats.

Good thinking. The collaboration of the online community is already here, let's use it wisely for the kids.

P.S. I have no idea why this is in all caps, just know I'm not yelling at you.