Top 10 Free iPhone Apps of 2010

Personally, I'm finding myself more and more attached to my iPhone. I attribute this to "backseat" time (This is the term I have given the time kids spend in the backseat playing with digital tools while we parents wrestle with traffic driving them hither and thither).

I accumulated this "backseat time" when my husband was doing most of the driving earlier this year as we commuted back and forth on weekends between one daughter in the Bay Area and the other in Portland. Finally I had time to download weird little apps and play with them.

While not all of the apps in the post below are useful in a school setting, some are useful in terms of personal productivity (e.g. Meebo).


Probably the most useful in the list is AppMiner, which helps you find MORE apps!

Here's the list--happy tapping!

http://techchunks.com/technology/ultimate-collection-of-top-10-free-iphone-apps-of-2010/

New Copyright Ruling Provides No Benefit for K-12

What were they thinking? According to an article in eSchool News, a recent interpretation by the U.S. Copyright Office of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act affords expanded use of video clips ONLY to higher education, "because K-12 education doesn’t need access to visually high-quality clips."

With criticism of the state of U.S. education rampant, one would think that ANY advantage we can give to K-12 educators and students would be valuable.

It's important to keep in mind that today's students are the citizens, business owners, leaders, voters --and taxpayers--of tomorrow!

What have you done for the world today?

I just ran across an interesting website called We Are What We Do. This website promotes grassroots-level methods of improving life on Planet Earth--one "action" at a time. There are a list of 131 simple things people can do such as using a mug instead of a paper cup, carrying your own shopping bags instead of using plastic, and recycling--simple actions that, if everyone does them, can have a significant effect on the world.

Take a look at the list of 131 actions and ask yourself, What have I done for the world today?

Why Not Wikipedia?

A recent article in Education Week, Embracing Wikipedia, by Matthew Shapiro, reports that in 2010, a University of Washington study "found that 82 percent of students use Wikipedia in their course-related research." Yet many teachers and media specialists I have spoken with ban Wikipedia completely, citing concerns over accuracy.

What if, as the Education Week article suggests, we teach students HOW to use Wikipedia rather than just banning it? What if we use it to teach them to become critical consumers of information and to evaluate content for such issues as "authorial bias"?

As Shapiro states in the article, when many of us went to school, our research revolved around the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, which had limited citations, the sources of which may or may not have been available in our print-based libraries. In 2010, our students are constantly inundated by information from multiple sources both print and digital, many only moments away from being live, including 24-hour news networks, blogs, ezines, YouTube, Twitter, and MMS messages that include images and video, as well as text.

Is it our job as teachers to hold back the tide, or to help our students develop the skills necessary to navigate the information technologies of their futures?

Teach Your Children Well

How do we prepare our children for a future that doesn't yet exist? Scott McLeod's presentation to the NEA in December gives some answers.

Howie DiBlasi, in a response to Will Richardson's blog post, "What to do with the Web," states, "PD is the lifeline to reform and change."

Amen.

Overwhelmed Opportunity

In a response to Andy V's blog post, Jeff Utecht uses the term "overwhelmed opportunity" to describe our inability to know how to use every digital tool that exists. I think this is a great metaphor for the condition of our Digital Natives, and IMO one of the reasons that they often struggle through their last few years of school. Not just the technology part, but the whole overwhelming issue of being constantly bombarded with mega-media's version of life, with perfect teeth, perfect relationships, and perfect endings at the end of every 30-minute show--contrasted with the violence and gore of video games--contrasted with the often less-than-perfect reality of their own families and lives.

How can we help them make sense of it all?

Missing the point...

From Wired magazine: "How the iPhone could reboot education":

"The traditional classroom, where an instructor assigns a textbook, is heading toward obsolescence. Why listen to a single source talk about a printed textbook that will inevitably be outdated in a few years? That setting seems stale and hopelessly limited when pitted against the internet, which opens a portal to a live stream of information provided by billions of minds.“About five years ago my students stopped taking notes,” Rankin said. “I asked, ‘Why are you not taking notes?’ And they said, ‘Why would we take notes on that?…. I can go to Wikipedia or go to Google, and I can get all the information I need.”

I can't decide if this makes me want to laugh or cry...schools are SO far behind...we endlessly debate the value, the research, the outcomes...and the students just tune us out and keep on living in their parallel universe...I sat next to an educator at the ITSC conference who studiously took notes on his dead tree notepad...no laptop or cellphone in sight...totally missing the point...How many of our schools resemble this remark?