Using QR in the Classroom

You may have noticed increasing uses of QR (Quick Response) codes, for example, to make a trail of ecology facts in a national park, or to provide a self-guided tour of a museum exhibition. I've returned to this YouTube video, from the American TESOL Institute channel, several times, as it has some great ideas for using QR (Quick Response) codes with students:



http://youtu.be/V0kdbBTwF7U


The video describes what QR is, how you can make your own, and how you can teach students to make their own for content-based projects, to link to podcasts, to make electronic portfolios, etc. For example, as seen in this image, students can scan the QR with their mobiles to get more information about skeletal structure.





If students construct the content they create reusable learning objects for subsequent classes to read, listen to, and improve.

Thanks to Webheads for finding this great video originally. There are a number of other videos on QR with more ideas in the YouTube sidebar.

EduMOOC

Google's EduMOOC is astounding and fun. You can be in touch with 2500 teachers and learners in the grand experiment in volunteer, free, online learning.

Although the MOOC is just for this summer (July-August), you can use the discussions, videos, and resources (Diigo group) asynchronously. Read all about it at Polly Peterson's Education-Portal blog.
Sign in to Google first to access everything.

EFL CLASSROOM MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

This monthly blog/newsletter from EFL Classroom gives you ideas, resources, and a place to set up your own online classroom. Links to video talks, new online resources, ongoing discussions and blogs, student-created content, ideas for current seasonal holidays, and their own Diigo Group, et al.

EFL Classroom has developed well over the past year or so, and is well worth following.

Teaching Academic Writing

This is a great blog about teaching academic writing. The author, Dr. Rachael Cayley, Univ of Toronto, is obviously an experienced, well-trained teacher of composition. I'm looking forward to the subsequent issues.

Reverse Outlines

I have tagged this post with reading and mind-mapping, as Reverse Outlining is also a very useful technique for understanding academic papers and how extensive texts are organized.

Glogster

Just revisiting Gloster again. Could be very useful for creative students, perhaps to build a collage based on their reading of a work.

Here's a little poster I built with my granddaughter. (Actual size is 960 X 1300.) The app is free.

TED: John Underkoffler points to the future of User Interface

This video from the TED (Technology, Education, and Design)conference in February (Long Beach, CA) has some astonishing new ways to look at user wetware-computer connections.




It's amazing to see Tom Cruise's Minority Report interface now displayed with many different ramifications. The new interfaces use computations that are "space-soluable and network-soluable," allowing a user to drag/send their visual information from one "monitor" to another,both co-located and in space, with a hand gesture. In five years' time will this be the computer we get??

For more TED Talks see http://www.TED.com.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is an amazing third-generation search engine that can tell you almost anything about anything: math, chemistry, socioeconomics, geography, etc. You can input a formula, or just a few words as a question, and Wolfram will make the appropriate assumptions about what you want to know. Especially good with relational data, e.g., what's the ratio of France's GDP to Italy's?



The screencast illustrates a few of the many ways this tool can be useful: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

This should be an excellent classroom tool, both in content-based projects and math work, and for general English, writing research papers, making predictions, etc.