Diigo - Research and collaborative research with knowledge - sharing community and social content

I’ve had a look at Diigo before and thought it look really good but never actually used it myself but it may be about to change. I don’t know how new this is but looking again at the Diigo site they are now offering Educator Accounts – a free premium account especially designed for educators. These are special premium accounts provided specifically to K-12 & higher-ed educators. Once your Diigo Educator application is approved, your account will be upgraded to have these additional features:

• You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
• Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

If you’ve never heard of Diigo before have a look a following video for an explanation of some of the features.

ISTE 2010 Blog Roll

I've just added myself to the ISTE 2010 Blog Roll "is a great way to share your blog and see what other ed tech enthusiasts are writing about in theirs. It's just another way you can get familiar with the upcoming conference, check-in onsite, and stay connected with your new colleagues when you return home. Last year we had more than 100 bloggers submit their info to our list!"

I have to agree I've just had a look at about 10 of the Blogs on there and there is some good stuff.

Researchers Without Borders

I don’t know if you’ve seen this before but I thought it looked interesting.

http://www.researcherswithoutborders.org

“Researchers Without Borders (RWB) is a home for open research in education. It is a collaborative working environment in which individuals across academic institutions, disciplines, sectors, and levels of organizational structure can direct their efforts to solve shared problems, do collaborative research and development, and build productive working relationships and collaborations.”

Call for papers

UAE Journal of Education Technology and eLearning - http://www.ejournal.ae/ is accepting articles for the next edition of the journal, planned for Sep 2010. The articles can be sent on elearningjournal@hct.ac.ae. I would appreciate if you could also send the website address to your friends who are engaged in Ed Tech and eLearning in other institutes.

Regards,

Michael

Demonstration on E-podium Technology

http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/itunes/AfterVideoClick.aspx?AssetId=0b92e167-4584-452e-b998-40a8edf5b191

SMS (texting) Students Pilot Project

The College has started a pilot project SMS (texting) students study tips to 620 first year general education students. They are linked by a weekly theme and related to a twenty week semester. As they had to be generic and non-subject specific, for the pilot project students we have gone for the following subject:

1. Course-start review
2. Planning and prioritizing
3. Organizing notes
4. Active Learning
5. Motivation
6. Using technology
7. Study Goals
8. Critical Thinking
9. Feedback
10. Mid-course review
11. Critical Thinking
12. General
13. Time management
14. Educational Technology
15. Managing stress
16. Revision planning
17. Finding out about the exam
18. Revision techniques
19. End-of-course
20. Feedback

Any example of the messages:

Using technology
Try using RSS feeds to keep you up to date with news in your subject area. Google, Yahoo and MSN have tools to help.

Using technology
Photo or video a whiteboard diagram, instead of copying it down. You can easily add these to OneNote why not have a go.

Using technology
Record audio notes to summarise key points. These will become very useful when revising for exams.

Using technology
Look at what apps there are for your mobile phone to help your studies. You will find useful apps for English, Maths, Science and more.

I hope the English is accessible to the majority of readers English been their second language. There has been no official feedback yet but of the 620 students very few have chosen to unsubscribe from the service. I will be blogging any feedback I get but if you would like to know more please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Regards,

Michael

Educational video for streaming

Some good resources on here of you’d like to have a look. HCT on iTunes aims to support learning by providing high quality educational video for streaming and downloading. All videos are optimized for playback on a variety of media players as well as mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPod Touch.

http://podcast.admc.hct.ac.ae

Or

http://www.youtube.com/user/ADMCVideos