Top 10 Tools for Learners

The current Top 10 list of tools for learners, based on contribution of 47 Learners AS AT 4 APRIL is:

1. Google Search
2. YouTube
3. Firefox
4. Twitter
   Wikipedia
5. Delicious
6. Facebook
   Gmail
   Google Reader
   Skype

Top 10 Tools for Learning Professionals

The current top 10 tools for learning professionals to use in their own professional practice for creating learning “solutions” for others and their own productivity is AS AT 4 APRIL as follows, based on the contributions of 21 learning professionals

1. Delicious
2. Twitter
3. Skype
4. Slideshare
5. Google Reader
6. Google Docs
7. Audacity
   Google Search
   Moodle
   Ning
   PowerPoint
   SnagIt

I’m currently using almost all of these tools, and I’m slowly introducing more of them to my students. Many of the tools have had a profound impact on the way I teach and keep up to date in education, and on the way my students learn and produce. 

I might also add Digg to the list as I use it often to find top articles on topics of interest.

It can be a good alternative for students who need help and can’t get help from a parent or tutor with their homework.

…

One drawback to to community answer sites like Yahoo Answers is that anyone can answer your question, resulting in an inconsistent quality of answers. However the point system can indicate the authority level of the user who answers the question since providing the best answer to a question earns the answerer 10 points.

Yet another good resource for students who may be too shy to raise a hand or, sadly, too nervous about bothering a busy parent.

To illustrate the point, a couple of years ago my son had walking pneumonia, which was properly diagnosed via a blood test. My three-year-old was prescribed a medication which is ineffective against this type of pneumonia. I got online and investigated many sources indicating that he should be on Azithromax. I went back the hospital and told them they had misprescribed the medication, and they consented to put my son on Azithromax; however, they insisted that he take the medication in three courses. ALL of the literature on Azithromax says it should be taken in one course over five days…period. I kept my son on one course of the medication, and he was fine by the end of the week. Scary! This type of treatment has been repeated on several occasions. (Doctors here could not even read an x-ray which clearly indicated that my wife’s foot was broken. We got confirmation in the Philippines, of all places.)

One of our teachers  recently had to have an emergency appendectomy, and the doctors almost killed him. He was evacuated to Australia and his doctors there were absolutely astonished at the incompetent care he had received.

As poor as the care is for patients not having life threatening illnesses, the chances of getting proper care if you have AIDS or hepatitis are close to nil, as is evident here.

Lingling had a long history of being ill. From infancy, she suffered colds and fevers, but when her mother took her to the county hospital, doctors would invariably prescribe some medicine and then shoo mother and daughter away, insisting there was nothing wrong with her.

But when Lingling contracted a fever two years ago, Wang Yuehong decided something had to be done and took her daughter to a larger hospital in Xi’an, in nearby Shaanxi province. Tests immediately confirmed the doctor’s suspicion: Lingling was HIV-positive. Ms Wang said she had never heard the word Aids before.

Doctors determined that Lingling had been infected from a contaminated blood transfusion given to her at her county hospital when she was 18 months old, the same hospital that insisted there was nothing seriously wrong with her. 

My family has decided that any serious illness will not be treated here in China, unless stabilization is needed before being evacuated to Hong Kong. In the meantime the government has vowed to make healthcare a priority, though I’m not holding my breath.

 We all can take advantage of the current economic uncertainty by contacting our most important stakeholders and looking for opportunities to grow our trust account with them. Many people are frozen and afraid to call their customers and other key stakeholders for fear of hearing bad news.  Guess what? The bad news is there whether or not you hear it. Much better to confront reality and give your customer a listening outlet to discuss challenges and feel understood than to abandon the relationship during difficult times. Now is the time to over-communicate with your customers and other key stakeholders. Give them someone they can trust by behaving in ways that inspire trust. 

Read more here.

First of all, any school curriculum that does not adequately include teaching learners about the past is no curriculum, in my mind. Moreover, as I’ve been pushing since day one on this blog here and here, it shouldn’t be an either/or proposition. History and the other core subjects are essential; and so is teaching students the skills they need in today’s world. There is time enough for a skilled teacher to fit them both in.

Julie Lindsay addresses this topic in her e-Learning Journeys blog. An excerpt:

I tried to explain that my class does not end when the students work out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. My students interact with each other, they interact with me, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of ‘social networking’. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, folksonomy, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else I can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning. I do not apologise for this. I do not essentially see anything wrong with this in 21st century learning. In fact this approach has changed my whole teaching style and changed the way I interact with the students. The development of PLEs (personal learning environments) and ubiquitous and mobile computing means I now start my classes with ‘…open your blogs, refer to the class wiki…etc’ rather than ‘..take out your books and copy from the board’.

Read more.

Photo by San Diego Shooter

Our school just went on a field trip to a business area here in Xi’an called Xiao Zhai. Our teachers divided students into teams which had to use their Chinese-as-a-2nd-language abilities to get local cooperation with scavenger hunt style photographs they were assigned to collect. Upon returning to school, students were asked to put their photos into a powerpoint and make a presentation to the other students. The team with the best overall photos would be the winner. 

I thought this was an effective field trip for the students involved, and it got me to wondering about other ways to create rewarding and stimulating field trips for the future. I stumbled across this post from Langwitches that details ideas for creating effective learning environments outside of the classroom:

What is in a Field Trip? The answer should be LEARNING! The reasons  should include:

• an integral part of the broader curriculum
• extending learning beyond the classroom
• learning through hands on activities
• taking learning off the page
• building a learning community
• connecting it back to learning in the classroom.

Ask yourself, if every field trip you are taking your students on is a learning opportunity that connects back to past/future lessons in the classroom in some way?

Field Trip 2.0 serves up additional technological pointers for enhancing education outside the classroom:

Pre-Activitites

• Google Earth
• Google Maps
• K-W-L
• Video Conferencing

During Trip

• Geocaching
• Digital and/or Video Photography
• Scavenger Hunt
• Audio Recordings

Post Activities

• Create Digital Field Guides
• Analyze Photos for Details
• Create Narrated Slideshows, Movies, or Podcasts
• Comic Strips