The Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008, compiled by Jane Hart, has been finalised for this year. Below are the The Top 100 Tools For Learning 2008 as a slide show. You might have seen this but I thought I would share it here. The list is based on the contributions of 223 learning professionals from around the world. Making it to number 1 is the very adaptable social bookmarking tool Delicious, that many of us use, although I do use Diigo as well. It replaced Firefox, which is at #2. Google Reader, Skype,

This video has the title “New Media Literacies”  It has various people talking about the “new” literacies. What these are and why and how such literacies are important to people today. Members of the research team at Project New Media Literacies discuss the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully engage with today’s participatory culture. Featuring Henry Jenkins.   One of the comments left about this video was: These people are talking about literacy, but they use words that do n

YouTube has such an amazing array of videos. This was an interesting look at the Russian Revolution The video below was shown to me by one of our students. This boy came to our school from Vladivostok, knowing very little English, in year 7. Today he sat his last year 12 exam, history (revolutions). He has worked hard and done very well over the years. He has always loved talking about his native country, and been very proud of many of the things it has achieved. He has a very dry sense of humour and we ha

The Sorcerer of the North Trailer. Released for US market a few weeks ago.  I am working on my presentation about using book trailers with students as an alternative way to respond to their reading. I am also creating a wiki about all things to do with reading. This will be my second wiki and I hope to explore more visual options and create something useful for teachers to begin with. Today I have finished/finalised a rubric I created to assess book trailers created by students. It can be found on th

Here is a new video explaining the basics about phishing and how to avoid getting caught. It is from my favourites, Leelefever, and called “Phishing Scams in Plain English”. These are such great little videos to help people get a handle on some of the intricacies on the web, although I’m not sure where “Zombies in Plain English” fitted!

Below is a brief video (tweet by Dean Basler the other day) that summarizes some thoughts I had after listening to a conversation the other day. It also follows on from my “good grief” post. Society today seems to want every child to only experience “success”. Often schools are told “No competition” because that means there will be winners, which is fine but also “losers”, which is not. Tell that to the paralympians who competed a short time ago! Whilst I believe that everyone needs

Another approach to the 21st century learning discussion

Continuing on my ever-present interest in how to best use the internet to increase understanding and gain knowledge, I have been investigating various tools whilst on holidays. I will write some posts over the next week or so about PopGist (a search engine which interrogates traditional search feeds; major blogs; and discussion threads), WideExplorer (a way to view, search and rationalize the way the web is explored, visiting multiple websites simultaneously and horizontally), Scour (a social se