Learn By Doing

A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education

  • I am starting to use my Google Voice number for students to Text me questions during the school day.  I am working with the theory that it may be more routine for them to Text me than ask a question.  How does that work on my end? Watch this video to find out.

     

  • I was in the middle of writing the other day and I wanted clarification on a particular grammar rule and this book came to my attention.  But, to boldly go where no man has gone before, and to start a sentence this way, simply became too much fun.  Check the rules and see where you fall in understanding.  My grammar checker just choked on these examples.  Which means, I either have to succumb to the rules, or not.

    Non-Errors

    (Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.)

    Split infinitives

    For the hyper-critical, “to boldly go where no man has gone before” should be “to go boldly. . . .” It is good to be aware that inserting one or more words between “to” and a verb is not strictly speaking an error, and is often more expressive and graceful than moving the intervening words elsewhere; but so many people are offended by split infinitives that it is better to avoid them except when the alternatives sound strained and awkward.

    (more…)

  • From my friends over there, I was sent this from “some random thoughts” blog:

    Every year there is a crowd sourced list of the Top 100 Tools for learning curated by Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT), and this week the 2011 list was finalised. 531 learning professionals worldwide submitted their top 10 tools and hence the top 100 list was created.

    Moodle finished at number 8 with its best showing for the last 5 years where it was 10th, 14th, 9th, 12th and now 8th. Two other Course Management Systems appear further down in the top 100, at 58th and 89th respectively.

    So what tops the list?

    The top 10 tools in 2011 are:

    1. Twitter
    2. YouTube
    3. GoogleDocs
    4. Skype
    5. WordPress
    6. Dropbox
    7. Prezi
    8. Moodle
    9. Slideshare
    10. EDU Glogster

    Take a look at the article and see how many of these tools integrate with Moodle.  Then determine how many of these you use.

  • improve dropbox
    Are you lucky enough to be a student, faculty member, or more with an .edu email address? If so, Dropbox would like to make your educational experience even easier. While Dropbox lets you refer people to the service for a gift of 256MB of free space per referral up to a maximum of 8GB of extra space (10GB total for a free account), those who verify that they have an .edu email address can refer people to the service for a gift of 512MB of free space per referral up to a maximum of 16GB of extra space (18GB total for a free account).

    If you have already referred people in the past before you verify your .edu email address, the previous referrals will be upgraded to the 512MB size.

    You can verify your .edu email address by going to this page, entering in your email address, and clicking on the verification link that will be sent to that address.