Powerful Ideas from TED Talks

TED is a small nonprofit organisation dedicated to promoting "Ideas Worth Spreading" and brings together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Live events include the annual TED Conference in California, the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, the TEDIndia Conference and the new TEDx community program.

On the TED website, the best talks and performances from TED and their partners are made available for everyone. Currently there are over 450 TED Talks to choose from, with more being added each week.

The talks and presentations are indeed excellent, being both entertaining and thought provoking. Many of the talks relate directly to education as highlighted by the two samples below.

In the first, Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind the open source Connexions online education system, covered in a previous post.

In the second, Arthur Benjamin explains his bold proposal about making math education relevant in the digital age.

It would be well worth adding the TED RSS feed to your reader if you have not already done so!!

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Great Links to Open Textbooks

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a combined effort to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and in particular open textbooks in community college courses. An open textbook is defined as:

a body of educational content that is openly available over the web, by mail, or in a book store with a copyright that allows copying and distribution or, with the most open copyrights, allows modification of the content and even sale.

CCCOER Open Textbooks provides a growing list of links, covering a wide range of subject areas, to "OPEN and free textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses". In some cases, the links also lead to useful podcasts and videos.

This is a great resource. On my first quick look, I found a comprehensive guide to using OpenOffice 3.o!

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Encouraging Teachers to Blog

  by  cambodia4kidsorg 



Several teachers from St Columbas College, Dublin have just produced this very useful podcast about blogging in education.

This podcast is a great CPD resource and would be beneficial for encouraging teachers, especially those new to blogging, to incorporate this technology into their teaching.

The value, purpose and motivation for blogging in schools, and in particular in relation to subject departments, is discussed and concrete examples are explored. Even some practical advice about setting up a new blog is provided.

Not surprisingly, two of the St Columbas College blogs, SCC English and the Frog Blog, have been shortlisted in the Best Blog Category of this year's Eircom Golden Spider Awards. Good luck lads!

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Create Dynamic Classroom Portals

SchoolRack enables you to set up classroom portals for your students and parents to use. There is a reasonable selection of included themes to choose from.

Each student/parent creates their own individual account. They can then search for and join their school as well as joining your class group (either manually or through a generated code).

Not only can you post assignments for students and parents to read and download, but you can also use the inbuilt discussion board, calendar, internal messaging and online assignment collection and assignment grading feature.

It is, also, very easy to include any embeddable content, such as videos and widgets, from other websites. All these  features, help to make SchoolRack a dynamic two-way learning platform, which can be used inside and outside of the classroom.

Your published site, including added files etc, is publicly visible and can be accessed by anyone who knows your website address - in the form of http://schoolrack.com/sitename

This also applies to the topics on the discussion board, which can be read by anyone although only your group members can contribute to the discussions. It is worth noting that 'password protected sites' are available for the paid version but not for the basic free version, being reviewed here.

SchoolRack is very easy to use and for those that have not gone down the Moodle route (or something similar), then SchoolRack has plenty to offer!

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Survey for Edubloggers

Sanjaya Mishra is undertaking a study entitled "Bloggers in Education: their beliefs, motivation, and perceived impact" and is seeking the help of fellow edubloggers.

The purpose of the study is to "understand who are the educational bloggers, and what are their beliefs and motivation to blog".

Sanjaya is asking other edubloggers to fill in an online survey, which should only take 10-15 minutes of you time. If you haven't done so, there is still time to submit your answers!

Should be interesting to see the results of the survey which Sanjaya promises to share.

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Add RSS Feeds with Google Spreadsheet

Using Google Spreadsheet , you can easily import any RSS feed into your blog or website.

Using the attached spreadsheet example, the steps are as follows:

1. Enter the RSS URL in cell A3. 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreeResourcesForEducation
2. Enter the following formula in cell D3.
=importfeed(A3, "Items title", False, 4)
3. Enter the following formula in cell E3.
=importfeed(A3, "Items URL", False, 4)
4. Enter the following formula in cell C3 and replicate it in the next 3 cells.
=D3
5. Enter the following formula in cell B3 and replicate it in the next 3 cells.
=HyperLink(E3, C3)
6. Select Share, Publish as a web page, Start publishing
7. Select HTML to embed in a page
8. Select Sheet1
9. Enter the cell range.
B2:B6
10. Copy the <iframe> code and select Close
11. Paste the <iframe> code into your blog or website

NB: Set widget=false and add gridlines=false to remove extra unwanted features. Adjust the height and width to suit your site.

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Original Spreadsheet:

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Resulting RSS feed:

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