C4T #2

Comments 4 Teachers

The teacher I was assigned to read was Jeff Utecht. His blog is titled the "The thinking Stick." He is an international educator. I found a video on YouTube; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8djV8slDN0, that is a speech Jeff did. It was very interesting and I recommend anyone who reads this to watch it.
The first blog post I read on Jeff's blog was titled, "Learning through Presentations." The post begins by talking about how sometimes, right before class, teachers will go online, copy and paste information onto power point slides, and then stand in front of the classroom and read off of the screen. It also points out that how much learning can there be by a student writing down the notes exactly how you have them written on your presentation. The students are focused on copying down what you have written, chances of them listening are very slim. The blog goes onto to talk about how Jeff has partnered up with a 9th grade teacher to come up with a program that will allow for the presentation to become a story, journey, or an in-depth look into some aspect of a book. This can be achieved by using a modified Pecha-Kucha format. Because of timing instead of 20 slides 20 seconds a slide go with 15 slides x 20 seconds for an even 5 minute presentation. For a more in depth look at this article, go to Jeffs blog;http://www.thethinkingstick.com/.


The second article I read about was entitled, Wikispaces Extends Free Education Wikis to Higher-Ed. This article is about how Wikispaces who has always been a great supporter of wikis in K-12 Education giving away some 980,000 free ad-free wikis for classroom use over the years will announce next week that not only will it continue to support K-12 Education, but will also be opening up it's free service to higher education as well. The features in these free educational wikis normally cost $50 per year, but are completely free for educational use.