One of my favourite quotes is:

Individuals from this generation will surface as leaders in every field.  During this lifetime the future will be shaped by someone – no one knows who it is going to be – so you may as well throw your hat in the ring and say “it may as well be me!”

Right now in one of your classes might be the person that finds the cure for cancer, discovers life on another planet, brings world leaders together to solve a crisis.

Maybe it’s not as dramatic as that.  

Maybe you are a biology teacher and your love for the human body is transferred to your students who go on to become nurses and doctors.

Maybe you are an English teacher (or a teacher of the language of your country) and your love of books and reading inspires a new mother or father to transfer the love of books and reading to their children.

Either way, you get to shape the lives of adults (not just children and youth)

HERE IS A CHALLENGE FOR THIS WEEK:

Set yourself the task of instilling the values of the above quote in your students.

Greatness comes in many shapes and forms.

The point isn’t to teach your students how to be great.  When you do this, you are in danger of limiting their creativity and forcing them into your mindset.

It would be far better to foster the belief in them that they can be great.

What you are doing as a teacher matters, not just today, but for the rest of that persons life.

Here are some other great quotes for teachers

This timeline creation tool looks amazing

Check out Dipity.com to create your timelines

As with most online tools there is a free and a paid version.

The free version is fine for use with your students.  You will get some advertising and a little less control over design, but this isn’t a big issue.

SECURITY FEATURES:

Security is always a major consideration when choosing an online tool for my students.  With this timeline creation tool you can create timelines that are public or private.  You can also determine who can contribute to the timeline (any tool that encourages collaboration is a real winner!)

HOW TO CREATE TIMELINES:

The process to create timelines is really simple.  There are a number of search tools provided inside Dipity such as Google News and YouTube.  Your students can also use sources such as Pandora as well as copy timelines that have been created by other users of Dipity.

If your students already have a collection of links and information on their topic, they can also add it to the timeline manually.

PEER REVIEWING OF STUDENTS WORK:

Once your students have created their timeline in Dipity, the other students in your class have the ability to leave comments on their work.  As a teacher, you can also leave a comment, something that the students often appreciate.

Do you know of any other free tools that allow our students to create timelines?

Before I talk about the ‘how’ let’s talk about the ‘why’

Infographics are a great way for your students to present information in different ways.  Below are three examples of ways your students can create infograhics.

COMPARISON TABLES:

INTERESTING TIMELINES:

GRAPHING INFORMATION:

I love these posters because the students aren’t just mindlessly regurgitating information in text form but are processing the information and finding ways to express their information in simple and concise ways.

When your students create infographics, if they don’t understand the information they won’t be able to organise their thoughts.

WHICH IS THE BEST TOOL THAT ALLOWS YOU TO EASILY CREATE INFOGRAPHICS?

I tested a number of the infographic tools out there.  You might like to check out:

• Smore
• Infogr.am
• piktochart

Each of the above tools had reasonable user interfaces and weren’t too complicated to work your way through. but all of them were a paid service.  You could use a scaled back version of the software for free but it was a bit anaemic.

THE TOOL THAT WAS BY FAR THE EASIEST TO USE, WAS FREE, AND HAD LOADS OF FEATURES WAS:

http://www.easel.ly/

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT EASEL.LY:

• The user interface was really clean
• It was immediately obvious what you needed to do to create the inforgraphic
• There were lots of great templates to use (the three images above are examples of their templates)
• There were loads of images you could use
• Text editing was a breeze
• Every aspect of the infographic was customisable

SOME IDEAS TO HELP YOU CREATE INFOGRAPHICS:

• As a teacher you could easily create infographics to illustrate your topic area, giving the students an overview of the content
• Have your students create a procedure
• Have your students discover some fun facts about your topic and create an inforgraphic about their discovery
• Instead of getting your students to write another report, have them create inforgraphics for their next assignment
• Advertise your next school fundraiser or excursion

The options are endless

If your students create an infographic I would love to see it.  You can drop the link into the comment section below.

It is a short TED Talk video from 2012 by Peter Norvig about his journey of designing and delivering an online course.  The aim was to create a learning environment that felt like one on one tuition despite the fact they had over 160 000 enrolments.

This caught my attention because I had just been in a meeting with a school where they were debating some research that found that class size is not a determinate on student performance.

As you can imagine, the teachers were adamant that class sizes affected their ability to teach, and as a result the quality of the learning experience was diminished   The school board where arguing that they could cut costs and increase revenue through increasing class sizes and used the research to validate the claim that student results wouldn’t fall due to the increase numbers in the classroom

To be honest, it wasn’t my favourite staff meeting I had been invited to present at!

It is worth keeping in mind when you are watching the following TED Talk that the context is a university course.  However, if you are a teacher in a K-12 environment, you need to be aware that in a climate of shrinking budgets, and increasing political pressure to perform that ways of increasing class sizes is very much on the agenda of most governments and independent school boards.

TED Talk HIGHLIGHT:

01:45 – You can replicate the feeling of 1 on 1 tutoring

02:30 – They try to keep their videos to two minutes or less

03:00 – The use of open ended questions are essential

03:45 – In a lot of online classes, the video can be watched at any time.  Peter found it was essential to keep everyone working on the same thing.  The video was only available for 1 week

04:30 – Peers are the best teachers because they can remember what it is like to not understand

05:35 – A number of universities are now copying this model

You might also like to check out a playlist consisting of 12 TED Talks about re-imagining school.

Question: What’s the optimum class size?

The best way to explain Augmented Reality or AR is imagine going through life with a layer of technology superimposed allowing a unique blended experience where reality and technology seamlessly interact.

Augmented Reality first became popular in classrooms with teachers printing QR codes for their students to read with their smart phones.  The QR code would lead the student directly to a webpage or list of resources.  Teachers would use the QR codes to set up scavenger hunts and virtual field trips.

Scan this QR code to see where it takes you…

But Augmented Reality has radically developed  since the invention of the QR code.

Check out this amazing video to see how Augmented Reality is being used in the classroom.

Augmented Reality isn’t just great for younger students.  The following video shows you how you can use AR to teach students about the human body

You can see in the video you simply hold up a card in front of your computer and an interactive 3D image appears.

All of these Augmented Reality ideas are great, but they require you to have a smart phone or a laptop with an input webcam to capture the image.

Enter the Google Glass Project.

Google Glass is due to be released in late 2013 or early 2014.  You can see from the image below that there is a tiny computer built into the glasses frame.  This computer adds the layer of technology over your existing world without the need of another device.

It would seem that with Google Glasses, Augmented Reality will quickly become a part of your students life.  They will be able to search and communicate in real time.  This presents a real problem for schools that are struggling with their students using mobile phones in class, but that is a discussion for another blog post.