A Handy Guide to Everything Teachers Need to Know about Edmodo

Edmodo is one of the promising web technologies that is making a strong foothold in the field of education. It has been embraced by several school districts and  is being widely used to host online classes and connect students with their teachers. I personally see edmodo as a very robust alternative to the traditional Moodle.

What is edmodo ?
Edmodo is a web-based platform that provides a safe and easy way for your class to connect and collaborate, share content, and access homework, grades and school notices. It is like Facebook but in a safe and  controlled environment appropriate for school.

How can I use edmodo with my students ?
Edmodo provides you with a secure environment where you can create a classroom group for your students. In this virtual group you can :

• Place digital resources on edmodo for students to access or download,
•  Create polls for students to vote online.
• Write short summaries of lessons for students who were absent from class (better yet: get your students to write the summary).
•  Post homework information.

What is it that makes Edmodo class a secure environment ?

Edmodo explicitly deals with school and teacher concerns about social networking for students in the following ways:

• Each edmodo class group is managed and controlled by the teacher
• Students need an access code to join the class. If a student shares the code outside the class, the teacher can change it, without affecting students already joined in the group.
• Students can only communicate to the whole class or to the teacher – private messages between students are not possible.
• Anonymous posting is not possible.
• Teachers can delete posts.
• If schools upgrade (free) to the institutional features, the school can audit all teacher and student activity.
• Parental access to their children’s posts and to the teacher is an optional feature.

Here are some video tutorials to help you learn more about edmodo

1- A quick explanation of why to use Edmodo in the classroom.

2- Edmodo assignments

3- Creating a quiz using edmodo

4- Edmodo homework

5- Using the calendar

6- sharing 20 ideas about how to use Edmodo with students

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5 Good Tools to Create Flip Books for your Class

Below are some of the web tools that will help you and your students create awesome books with flipping pages. I have particularly selected these titles because they are very simple to use and have a user friendly interface that your students will enjoy working on.

1- Pageflip Flap

PageFlip Flap allows you to transform your doc, pdf, word, movie in an interactive flipbook. It's very easy: upload your file and you will receive an email with the url to your creation. You can share this with your friend, family... by email, on your blog, on facebook or twitter.

2- Flip Snack

FlipSnack allows you to turn PDF files into amazing interactive books. It’s an ideal tool for teachers and students to collaborate and share their work with parents and colleagues. Easy to embed on any website or blog, these flipbooks make classes and courses look fun and are also easy to download.

3-Issuu

Issuu is a plublishing platform where you cam upload your documents or pdfs and turn them into a nice flipbook.

4- MixBook

This is a tool that you can use to create photo books with turning pages. Upload images from your computer or from web. You can embed your final work  into any webpage.

5- Bookr

This is another cool web tool to use when creating a photobook for your class. If you have images in Flickr then this is the ideal tool for you.

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Awesome Graphic on Geeks Vs Nerds

One of the few words that have really puzzled my English vocabulary are : nerd and geek. These terms are used differently by different people. They are what linguists call portmanteau words which you can use according your temperament or mood. However, what I learned from a long observation of how native speakers of English use them is that  these words are at odds with each other and sometimes at war.

Dailyinfographic has shared with us this really cool graphic on the difference between geeks and nerds. The facts and stats featured are really amazing and I am pretty sure you will have many "aha" moments going through it. I am not sure if the picture is clear yet for me or not but I definitely learned a lot from this beautiful visualization
Enjoy

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The 7 Important Literacies of The 2st Century Education

 I have been studying literacy for more than a year in my Literacy Education MAEd program and have also written a 12 pages research paper on it but  each time I sit down to write about it I discover a lot  of new insights.

Literacy is a deceptively broad topic  that can be approached from various lenses. Schoolars from Plato to James Paul Gee have extensively written on the topic, each arguing for the validity of the theoretical lens through which they see it. Going through these theories I find myself inclining more to the progressivist camp or the " New Literacies" camp. Obviously,we are not in front of a single literacy but rather multiple literacies. The momentum of this  multiplicity of literacies has tremendously increased with the introduction of technology.

Below is a modest attempt from my part to bring to your attention some of the literacies I singled out from " the buzzing literacy crowd" and which I think are important component of the 21st century education.

Information Literacy
Information literacy is the ability to search for, recognize, access, evaluate, synthesize, organize, apply and use information, from different sources and in different formats, to make enlightened choices in your personal, professional, and academic life.

Information Technology Literacy
ITL is about understanding the technology infrastructure that underpins today's world. More specifically, it is an understanding of the tools technology provides and how these tools interact with the overall infrastructure.

Digital Literacy
This is a portmanteau word which can include all the above mentioned literacies.However for the purposes of this short post I will define it as follows: Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet.

Media literacy
Media literacy is the knowledge and skills necessary to understand and use the codes and conventions of a wide variety of media forms and genres appropriately, effectively and ethically.

Visual Literacy

The ability to recognize, read, interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information and data presented in visual forms such as pictures, graphics, charts...etc

Cultural Literacy

Cultural literacy is about understanding the cultural cues embedded in the wildest sense of language ( verbal, non verbal and visual )

Critical Literacy

As Think Critically puts it , Critical literacy is the ability to actively read text in a manner that promotes a deeper understanding of socially constructed concepts; such as power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. Critical literacy encourages individuals to understand and question the attitudes, values, and beliefs of written texts, visual applications, and spoken words.
The development of critical literacy pushes students to question issues of power; in essence, to become thoughtful, active citizens. Becoming critically literate means that students have developed and mastered the ability to read, analyze, critique, and question the messages inherently present within any form of text.

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10 Commandments for Good Writing from Stephen King

Today while I was checking the books in my library I realized the huge backlog of posts that I have to write in the section " Book Review". As you probably know, Book Review is a page I created here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning  where I share reviews of books I read. I am thinking to create a separate website for book reviews but the idea is still in embryonic stages.

The first book I read last month was of Stephen King " On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft ". Stephen King alone speaks volumes for himself and does not need any introduction from me. Although he exclusively writes fiction this memoir is an exception.

On Writing: : A Memoir of the Craft is a guide, a manual packed full of important tips on the craft of writing. In this work, Stephen exposes to  the world  the secrets of his writing . It is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his memories from childhood through his emergence as a best selling author of all times.

I have personally enjoyed reading every single page of this book and have learned  a great deal from it. Below are 10 quotes I selected for you  :

1-
" It starts with this: put your desk in the corner and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support for art. It's the other way around. "


2-
" You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair, the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act  with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, read to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry or because you want to change the world. Come to it anyway but LIGHTLY. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. "

3-
" One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up your vocabulary, looking for long words because you're may be a little bit ashamed of your short ones...remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word but it probably wont be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean. Why in God's name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use ? "

4-
" Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affection....Writing is refined thinking. "

5-
" If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot. There is no way around these two things that I am aware of, no shortcut...If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time to write.Simple as that. "

6-
" Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books- of course !"

7-
" Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I'd like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing. "

8-
" If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or video games for you to fool around with. If there is a window, draw curtains and pull down the shades unless it looks out at a wall. For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it's wise to eliminate every possible distraction. if you continue to write you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it's best to try and take care of them before you write."

9-
" Constant reading will pull you into a place where you can write eagerly and without self consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't; what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying on the page. "

10-
" The more you read the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor....Read a lot, write a lot is the Great Commandment. "

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15 Tips to Spend A Perfect Summer for Teachers

If you are running short of ideas on how to spend your summer after a busy school year, We Are Teachers have plenty of ideas for you. They have designed this beautiful infographic featuring 15 things you can do to have a perfect summer. The one I like the best is number 7: field trip to African Savanah. Well, in fact I am heading to Africa very soon but not to the Savanah.

 I invite you to have a look at this guide and share with us what you think of it.
You can also download and print this graphic from this LINK.

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5 Smartly Illustrated Quotes for Teachers

Today while I was wading through my Feedly feeds I came across these beautiful quotes posted in  My Modern Net. These quotes jumped out to me as they are paired with some clever illustrations. You might have already come across some of them somewhere else but the illustrations are really unique and probably say more than  what the words themselves communicate.

I am sharing with you some of them here but if you want to print  or re-use them you will have to obtain permission from My Modern Net.

1- " Creativity is intelligence having fun "

2- " It's not what you look at that matters it's what you see "

3- ' Patience is the companion of wisdom "

4- ' Imagination is the beginning of creation "

5- ' A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step "

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10 Twitter Mistakes You Should Avoid

A new digital offspring has recently seen the light in the visualized world. This is called infocomic, a breed of infographics, and is basically a mixture of comics and attractive visuals. This is the first infocomic I am sharing here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.

This infocomic, created by dashburst, features 10 mistakes that we should avoid making when tweeting. Some of these mistakes can also apply to other social networking websites.

1- Over Tweeting
Don't overload your followers with too many tweets. This gets  worse when your tweets are trivial.

2-Follow-Friday Perversion
Recommending lots of usernames in a single tweet without a concrete motivation.

3- Celebrity Insulting
Lavishing praise or insulting somebody who hasn't the faintest idea of who you are.

4- RIP for Someone Famous
Showing your grief in 140 characters towards somebody everyone knows is bad

5- Retweet Every compliment
Bragging so your audience knows that you are loved by a lot of people.

6- Tweet about Food
Explaining what you ate as if  anybody cared including yourself

7- Inspirational Quotes
Delivering motivational and inspirational quotes to keep people's daily life inspired

8- Having too many account
Using more than a single account for different purposes, messing up your communication

9-Spamming by direct messages
Sending direct messages to promote something. That just gives you a negative reputation

10- Giving people klout
Giving +K's to influencer's just for being influential on Klout.

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Awesome Visual on Creative Commons

By definition, Creative Commons is " a nonprofit organization that works to  increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and  scientific content) available in “the commons” — the body of  work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use,  repurposing, and remixing."

Creative Commons Licenses provide a standard way for user-generated content creators to grant someone else permission to use their work, in other words, a Creative Commons license is used when  the authors want to give others the rights to share, use , or build upon the work they have created.

I have already shared a post entitled " what teachers need to know about Creative Commons" which you can check out to learn more about CC. However, today I am sharing this beautiful graphic that smartly sums up the poignant points you and your students need to know to better understand CC.

What is Creative Commons? infographic by adityadipankar.

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An Interesting Google Doodle Celebrating Father's Day

First happy Father's Day to all the fathers reading Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. I hope you are having a great Sunday with your loved ones.

If you have checked Google's homepage today, you might have noticed a nice and beautifully crafted doodle displayed right on top of the search pane. It is Google's way to celebrate Father's Day. The doodle is interactive and  clicking on the letters "G', "O", or "E" in the title activates a three-part slot machine in the "L," which scrolls through different images of fathers being fathers: coaching soccer, building dog houses, hosting barbecues.

I found this doodle really interesting and had to share with you.

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