Richard Byrne has updated his free Practical Ed Tech Handbook for 2018. For many years, Richard has created and curated a wealth of teaching resources and made them freely available through his blog Free Technology for Teachers and other online platforms. If I was stranded on a desert island, this would be my go-to source of technology for pedagogy. It’s aimed at school teachers but meh…good pedagogical praxis is universal.
Video editors may be feature-packed or free – but usually not both. Or so I thought – til I found HitFilm Express. I have pretty limited know-how in this area but I’m able to use this straight out of the box to make basic edits and judging by the feedback around the web, it can do very schmick things as well. Well worth disabling your ad blocker for – you’ll need to do this to access the desktop download –…
Skype is often the goto application for videoconferencing (Google Hangouts is also great) but there are alternatives. Zoom is a free, easy to use cross-platform application that prompts recipients to download a small app, although you can just use their web client, albeit with reduced functionality. You can also record up to 40 minutes and download the MP4, host up to 50 participants, and hold an unlimited number of meetings. You can also videoconference people via the popular Facebook messenger platform through…
Using ‘real world’ datasets is a great way to engage students by providing them with an authentic element to their learning experience, as well as familiarizing them with their future environment. The AIHW website stands for “authoritative information and statistics to promote better health and wellbeing” and provides links to all sorts of health-related databases. Like all good government websites I suspect this will suffer from link rot even before the blog is published. The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is a partnership led by…
Ben Schmidt’s gendered language in teacher reviews – This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. Blog from The London School of Economics and Political Science: Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.
GoConqr – Online curation of resources such as images and videos for content, including a repository for user-created resources which may be kept behind an interest group wall. ClassHook – Online curation of popular (some of them anyway) videos classified according to the academic principles they demonstrate. Great for engagement and flipped classrooms.
Annotated bibliographies are things of beauty for anyone undertaking scholarly works. The Science of Learning – brought to you by the Deans for Impact, this short fact-filled document provides not only a summary of recent (to 2015) research in cognitive science but also packages it around six key questions all educators will find useful. They even pooh pooh some common misconceptions about how students learn and think, including the oft-cited ‘students have different learning styles’ trope. Should you add a talking head…
Pedagoggles: Exploring teaching practice – strategies from the Centre for Teaching and Learning: Georgian College include assigning a stakeholder point of view, requiring higher level thinking, interviews or oral reports of papers (with questions after!)
Digital literacies for the health sciences – a useful and user-friendly site from LaTrobe University. Includes a digital literacy framework and a curriculum mapping tool. Check out the ‘Developing themes’ menu item.
Kaizena – provide voice feedback to students via google docs, sheets or slides. Free 🙂