Are ‘Learning Styles’ a Symptom of Education’s Ills?

Shocker Alert! 

The NY Times reveals "learning styles" as a largely baseless theory.

"Do [your students] like to learn by seeing, hearing or doing?

"According to some education researchers, it may not matter. They say the idea of teaching according to students’ “preferred learning styles” — auditory, visual or kinesthetic — has little to no empirical backing. But although criticism may be denting the idea’s popularity, it still persists — which may say something larger about the way teachers today are trained."

Read here for the full article. 

Tweet

Help Students Search more than Google

Ever Heard of Google Books, Scholar, and News Archive?

Using these can often find resources not easily discovered simply using Google.com.

Here is a video concerning Google Books:



Here is a video about Google Scholar:



Here is one about Google Newspaper Archive:

Tweet

Using Storify in Canvas

Looking for a new and exciting way to present related articles, videos, blogs, and images over a particular topic? Would you like to have one link in your modules where students can access all of these Internet resources with one click? If so, you may want to check out a great App that works beautifully in Canvas called Storify.

What is Storify?

• A user-friendly way to make the web tell a story
• Helps you make sense of all the "noise" on the Internet
• Brings together scattered media into a coherent narrative
• Editable even after you publish; keeps your stories up to date and relevant
• Build your own Storify or select from a wide variety of published Storifys

Applications

• Instructors can put together a current and comprehensive story to provide emphasis on a particular topic, public figure, geographic local, etc....
• A different and much more interesting way for students to present research
• Provides 'one-stop shopping' for supplemental learning media

How to incorporate Storify in Canvas

• Add a direct link to your modules by using the External Apps feature in Canvas
• Embed it to a wiki page using the embed code provided for each storify

Take a look at a great example where articles are shown with notes added prior to the article:

Tweet

Web 2.0 Research Tools: A Quick Guide

You may wish to share some of the tools in the book, Web 2.0 Research Tools: A Quick Guide, with your students. It is packed with Web 2.0 tools, suggestions for their use (especially for research), and clear instructions for beginning users. We have presented many of the tools in this blog but Web 2.0 Research Tools: A Quick Guide is a great compilation and does include some tools we have not mentioned. The tutorials are well made and quite useful. A PDF version of the book is available for free download.

Tweet

Video Resources

(This was originally posted by Linda Wapelhorst on 12/19 in Butler Online's Advent Calendar)

Visitors to Documentary Tube can select from twenty-two categories of documentaries including art, health, science, travel, history, and several others. The menu includes a cover picture as well as a brief blurb describing the content of the movie. Each week, the website features the top 100 documentaries being viewed. Some are basically entertaining while others present emotionally-charged issues. There is also a search feature.World News Presents: This Day in History is presented by ABC News and, as the title suggests, provides a short video about what happened on a given day in history. For instance, on December 10 the video is "Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. accepts the Nobel Peace Prize".

Tweet

Open Culture

(This was originally posted by Linda Wapelhorst on 12/15 in Butler Online's Advent Calendar)

Do you sometimes wish you could have a guest speaker in your online course? Well, Open Culture just might be the answer. Open Culture boasts content from "290 Cultural Icons: Great Artists, Writers & Thinkers in Their Own Words". Included, for example is a video interview in which Isaac Asminov, shares insights on science, computing, etc.

Also accessible here are "435 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc." Freely viewable are films such as A Farewell to Arms, Great Expectations, Moulin Rouge, etc. You can also downolad free audio books here.

Tweet

Web Notes

(This was originally posted by Tara Canfield on 12/2 in Butler Online's Advent Calendar)

The Ghost of Christmas Past visited me last night and told me that I need to learn from my past!!! So, for today we are all going to learn from a past blog entry made by Linda Wapelhorst on September 13, 2010.

"I have discovered that the Awesome Highlighter site is not operating right now. I'm not sure if this is permanent but it caused me to search for a replacement. This turned out to be good because I found Web Notes. Web Notes is easier to use and has more options.The demo below shows all that you can do with Web Notes.This would be a great tool to share with your students who are required to write a research paper or for you, as an instructor, to highlight the pertinent information on a web page. You can highlight, add notes and share in a number of ways. Web Notes also provides storage for your annotated pages. These can be private or public. You might find the Web Notes Tutorial valuable."

Tweet

Voices of a Generation: Students Speak Out

In September 2011, Ann Curry hosted Education Nation's first student panel discussion, "Voices of a Generation". Young people provided insight into what they think needs to be done to ensure that every student receives a world-class education. Click "Voices of a Generation: Students Speak Out" to view the video. Some of the student comments included:

1. Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.
2. We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype
3. I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that. 
4. We learn in different ways at different rates.
5. I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.
6. Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking.
7. Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.
8. We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.

Tweet

The Open University

Are you looking for some professional development points, or just a site that offers some great information for your students?

The Open University offers both and much more! What I like about The OU is that the site offers many free articles and videos in the OpenLearn area that you could use for your classes. If you are just interested in videos, then you can also search their YouTube channel. Some of the subjects covered include history, the arts, education, and science and math.

Tweet

Searching the Web

If research is required in your class, you can count on your students using the Web. Do they however, know how to efficiently search for information?

Most of our students are familiar with looking up small bits of information on the Web and just aren't aware of how to narrow down their search results. Commoncraft has produced a short video that could really help your students with their research. This video demonstrates different techniques for researching the Web, is only three minutes long, and very informative.

Commoncraft is a company that focuses on taking a variety of topics and explaining them in three minute videos. They also produce custom videos for other companies, but they have a online repository of videos for evaluation.

Tweet

21st Century Educational Reality

We are constantly bombarded with statistics that seem to indicate how poorly America's students and, indeed, our entire educational system measure up to those of other countries.

Well, take heart. This video explains how some of the statistics can be misleading depending upon how they are disaggregated. This video points out some encouraging trends.

Thanks to Eddie Andreo for sharing.

Tweet

Newspaper Research

If your students need to research current events for your class, a great source for them is http://newspapermap.com/. At this site you can look at newspapers from around the world and even have them translated in other languages.

Tweet

Google Sites Tutorial

OK, so you have looked at Google Sites and thought how great it would be to create your own portfolio or have students develop a portfolio for your course. It can be difficult however to just jump in and start using such a powerful tool.

Mary Fran's Google Sites Tutorial to the rescue!! Here you will find not only tutorials for each step but videos as well. The tutorials are short and easy to follow. Give it a try over the break and you will be ready to have your students begin using Google Sites in the spring semester. I know I plan to!

Tweet

Web Notes - to replace Awesome Highlighter

I have discovered that the Awesome Highlighter site is not operating right now. I'm not sure if this is permanent but it caused me to search for a replacement. This turned out to be good because I found Web Notes. Web Notes is easier to use and has more options.The demo below shows all that you can do with Web Notes.
This would be a great tool to share with your students who are required to write a research paper or for you, as an instructor, to highlight the pertinent information on a web page. You can highlight, add notes and share in a number of ways. Web Notes also provides storage for your annotated pages. These can be private or public. You might find the Web Notes Tutorial valuable.



WebNotes Screencast from Alex King on Vimeo.

Tweet

Google Instant

OK, I know some of you can't stand to wait more than a tenth of a second to get your answers to all of life's questions. So yesterday Google launched Google Instant. Watch the video and then watch the difference when you use Google for your next internet search. By the way, it can be turned off if you don't like it.

I have to hand it to Google. They are committed to continuous quality improvement! Enjoy.

Tweet

Connexions

Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

• authors create and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
• learners find and explore content

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.

Tweet

Jog the Web

"JOG THE WEB is a web-based tool that allows anyone to create a synchronous guide to a series of web sites. Its step by step approach of taking viewers through web sites allowing the author to annotate and ask guiding questions for each page is unique".

You can search and link to jogs created by others or make your own. This is a great way to lead students through a series of web pages. You can make notes for students along the way for each site. Give it a try and start creating your own Jogs.

Tweet

Paper Rater - a Benefit for your Students

Paper Rater is a currently free service that spell checks, grammar checks, (yawn) but it also does a readability index for vocabulary and style...and it does a simplistic TurnItIn-style originality report.

At the moment, all said service are free. Between this tool and using GoogleDocs, students could have life pretty easy!

Services include:

* Grammar & Spelling Check
* Free Online Proofreading
* Plagiarism Detection
* Writing Suggestions
* No Downloads

Thanks to Mark Jarvis for this post. We appreciate the input!

Tweet

Google Wonder Wheel for Research

Have you used Google's Wonder Wheel search feature? It is an interesting way to search the net. The first video below explains Wonder Wheel, and how to access and use it.

The second video is more applicable to us as educators. The presenter offers some thought provoking reasons for the use of Wonder Wheel, and excellent points for designing assessment tasks that challenge students while impeding "cut and paste" papers.

Tweet

Google Search Tips

Do you think you know all there is to know about how to search with Google? Well, watch this Prezi presentation. I bet you will learn at least one new search trick. I learned several!

Tweet