Discover, Use, and Share Tools, Apps, and Websites with GRAPHITE

Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit organization that provides trustworthy information for kids and families to thrive in the world of media and technology, has produced Graphite, a great website for teachers to discover, use, and share tools, apps, games, website, and digital curricula for their students. All resources are rated and reviewed by their trustworthy community of teachers. As a user, you can also suggest a product for review to get an honest professional advice from Graphite’s teacher community.

Graphite is useful for teachers to explore more in depth the worthiness of a tool or website and possible ways they might be used in the classroom. Graphite is still in its first year of launch but has great potentials to grow its stock of reviews.

Also, do not forget to check out their Common Sense Media for Educators.

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Have You Ever Died of PowerPoint Presentations?

Today I had the privilege to attend a so-called workshop on Teacher Anger Management. The presenter holds a PhD in educational psychology and has been conducting workshops and training sessions for many years. What made the workshop unusually tedious and droning was how the presenter used PowerPoint as a tool to replace him. I mean, here is a PhD holder in educational psychology and an experienced teacher trainer, yet he does not have any clue on effective presentation, regardless of the presence of a visual aid such as the PowerPoint. He clearly didn’t have a clue on the basics of multimedia theories and practices. If he had ever read anything in terms of working memory and long term memory and the effect of the verbal and visual channels on the attendees’ minds, he would’ve definitely revamped his presentation and restructured his workshop. At the end of the workshop, teachers said that they learned one important thing from the workshop: Not to use this type of PowerPoi...

Moodle 2 Interactive Tool Guide for Teachers

Moodle has been at the forefront of online learning for learning institutions. And, since it is open source, and free for all, it is common that the community that benefit from Moodle to give back in various ways. One such help comes in Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers. It was first done by Joyce Seitzinger , and then adapted to Moodle 2 by Sue Harper. I have added the feature of interactivity to the guide however. By adding videos to the tool, anyone who wants to learn how to use any tool can just click on the interactive layer and watch the video. I surely hope this helps teachers learn Moodle tools easily and know how each tool affords different learning outcome. I will hopefully later add more interactivity in terms of instructional design, such as Bloom's taxonomy, assessing learning etc.

Visualizing an LMs Discussion Forum: an insight into Student/teacher behavior

I’ve lately come across SNAPP (Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice). SNAPP is a software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies. The network visualisations of forum interactions provide an opportunity for teachers to rapidly identify patterns of user behaviour – at any stage of course progression. SNAPP has been developed to extract all user interactions from various commercial and open source learning management systems (LMS) such as BlackBoard (including the former WebCT), and Moodle. SNAPP is compatible for both Mac and PC users and operates in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Developed by the University of Wollongong , this sociogram can visualize the discussion forum in an LMS (Blackboard, WEBCT, MOODLE, SAKAI..) and displays the student-student, teacher-student interaction in mind map. Names of students/teacher can be displayed. Also, each node size and link thickness refer to t...

Technology-Enhanced Learning

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