Category: education

edX is throwing a 2 year anniversay party

mtadros

edX is throwing a global birthday party to celebrate edX’s 2nd birthday and you’re invited!
edX party
Please join as we celebrate two years of edX. On Thursday, May 15, 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. EDT, join the party virtually via live stream. We’ll be taking questions live on air via Twitter and Facebook using #edXturns2. Tune in for a chance to ask us your questions, meet your favorite professors and win cool edX prizes.

resources for faculty

mtadros

Sometimes as faculty we just get stuck with finding creative ideas for our classes. Here are some resources that might be helpful:

  1. Merlot’s materials
  2. Tical’s tools and templates
  3. Iowa University’s techniques for creative teaching
  4. SNU’s creative ideas for teaching [pdf]
  5. ideas to inspire

In addition there are prominent organizations that have Teacher resources. Eg.

  1. For pre-college: Discovery Channel’s free teacher resources
  2. Library of Congress’s Teacher Resources
  3. National Geographic Teacher Resources
  4. The Guardian’s Teacher Network
  5. BBC schools for pre-college students

Finally, there is 101 ways for teachers to be more creative and this article as well 22 simple ideas for harnessing creativity in the classroom

education resources

mtadros

Since this blog deal with free materials, whether in learning, open courses, free software and the like, here are some  more resources:

  1. “MOOC List” is an aggregator (directory) of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from different providers.
  2. Open Learn
  3. Class central: I wasn’t impressed. It is confusing and disorganized but worth looking into. It is basically a MOOC aggregator from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. offered via Coursera, Udacity, edX, NovoED, & others.

I should mention that there is a mooc site that helps universities create their own moocs.

best 7 sites for learning programming/code online

mtadros

Online learning has been around a long time but we have new tools that enable learning both on and offline. Here are a few:

To learn code/computer science/programming/design:

  • Khan Academy: needless to say it covers many topics and has a great and easy interactive interface using processing.js
  • Udacity: Advance your education and career through project-based online classes. You even get certificates from an accredited school if you pay approximately $40 at the end. This is a no-nonsense course – intensive and could last for 5-8 weeks depending on the topic with quizzes and assignments that you will need to submit.
  • Code Avengers:  requires payment but uses processing.js which enables online javascript testing.
  • Code : high-profile site – has some projects free and others paid.
  • Code school: Code School teaches web technologies in the comfort of your browser with video lessons, coding challenges, and screencasts. You may choose from their catalogue.
  • Coursera: online courses on almost everything and anything. And it’s free! Very similar to Udacity in terms of its intensive courses and assignments and lengths.
  • edX : great courses where, like udacity, you could get a certificate after completing a course.

This I haven’t tried yet but is a brilliant idea:

  • KALite: KA Lite is an offline version of Khan Academy that runs on almost anything  to help those without internet access.

There is also a training environment at Scratch which is an MIT project and is free to use and practice.

 

 

new education resources

mtadros

It’s been a while since I last blogged. However here are some great resources for educators:

  1. New Horizons has created an excellent database of reviewed learning tools and you may look for tools based on level of education.
  2. Museum Box: a fun tool for presentations especially in the humanities field [requires financial subscription]
  3. If you want to create animations similar to the RSA animations, you have the opportunity to do so via Sparkol –  fantastic tool for any kind of presentation. Pricey though.. but worth it if you can pay.
  4. Movly is another presentation and animation tool that is available for free – and you may pay for advanced features, though not as excellent as sparkol
  5. Emaze lets you create beautiful presentations but somewhat slow. However it could be downloaded in its entirety so you don’t have to wait for the presentation to load.
  6. Tagxedo, word cloud with styles – similar to Wordle.
  7. Visuwords: where you may look up dictionary words and the result is giving you the word as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. It also tells you the relationship between words.
  8. Polleverywhere: wherey ou may poll your students instantly in class.
  9. Wikihood’s ultimate goal is to organize the world’s knowledge – stored in the Wikipedia – for any location worldwide, accessible to anyone anywhere.

Besides those, one of the most exciting technologies  to-date is augmented reality. while I love it and find it thrilling as pages come to life, it is still unsophisticated. The requirement to download specific software each time you want to run an AR is daunting. I think it will take off once we can view any AR marker just by opening the camera.

Here are some tools:

  1. Aursama: either download on your mobile – which is very easy to use and create on the fly auras, or use the aurasma studio.
  2. Zooburst allows you to create animations online.
  3. Information about augmented reality in education is also on this wiki
  4. Imaginality unleashed

This is a great example of creative augmented reality: The Sancho Plan video he Sancho Plan] is a group of writers, musicians, animators, designers and computer programmers who use create interactive entertainment. On March 24, 2010 at the BBC Big Screen Millennium Square in Bristol, they created an augmented reality performance where the participants were able to control the music and movement.