Summary: Chris, Jamie and Michael discuss the articles of the week, enjoy an interview with James Sanders of ClassBadges.com and share their tech tips of the week. Articles of the week Kinect in the Classroom: Scratching the Surface of Potential Cheryl Arnett, a 19-year veteran teacher at Sunset Elementary School in Craig, Colo brought the Xbox Kinect into her classroom. Her reasoning? “Bringing technology into the classroom inspires them,” she said. “Their lives are different than ours were, and just giving them a book and a worksheet is not always appropriate anymore. I’m fascinated by Kinect. There’s power for kids in things that capture their interest and are also something they can learn from. We’ve barely scratched the surface of where this can go; it’s limited only by our imaginations.” About KinectEDucation See how the Kinect is being used in education at Kinect EDucation. "KinectEDucation is an educator-driven community resource for developers, teachers, students, enthusiasts, and any other education stakeholder to promote the use of Kinect applications in classrooms. Our goal is to transform classrooms to a 21st-century model of learning with accessible technology – to integrate a “connected education” – and we want you to be a part of this! Join the movement!" Ignore The iPads! How Disruptive Technologies Are Leading the Next Great Education Revolution -- THE Journal "Thornburg contends that, in the whole of human history, only three major technological revolutions have fundamentally resculpted education. The first two are taken for granted: the construction of a phonetic alphabet, and the propagation of the mass-produced book in the 16th century. These changes seeped into education because they were consumer-driven, and ultimately too big to ignore. Thornburg argues that mobile device technology has placed us on the cusp of the next great revolution, which is already very much in progress and is certain to affect education. Like its predecessors, this one is consumer-driven, and has the potential to drastically transform an education environment that has become, to his mind, too focused on assessment and evaluation." Ed Tech Coaching: Let's Stop Talking about Teaching with Technology, and Start Talking about Teaching Maybe we focus too much on the tools just to indulge our ADD and call it better teaching? Dawson student offered job, scholarship Classic case of white hat hacker doing good for a school. Wonder why the school overreacted and kicked him out. How mainstream video games are being used as teaching tools | eSchool News Interview of the week: James Sanders of ClassBadges.com ClassBadges is a free, online tool where teachers can award badges for student accomplishments. Through your teacher account, you can award badges customized for your classroom or school. Elementary Middle School High School Mathletics is the world's most used maths website! It is next generation in learning, helping students enjoy maths and improve their results. Mathletics covers the full Kindergarten to Year 12 curriculum. Flipboard Designed for iPad and iPhone, Flipboard is a personal news magazine filled with everything being shared across the Web, from breaking news to stories on world events, sports, travel and more. Simply pick a few topics and your Flipboard is instantly populated with the news you care about. Symbalooedu allows you to organize and share the best of the web with your students. This web curation tool allows you to organize your teaching resources all in one place. That one place happens to be the web that is accessible anytime, anywhere, from any device. Symbaloo promotes innovation while maintaining the ability to simplify digital curation. It is easy to create a webmix and share it with anyone whether they have a Symbaloo account or not. Take a moment and discover how Symbaloo works.
