New book!
I’ve just finished compiling and uploading the new student-book on “Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Learning”, full of papers written by my bachelor students.
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/auf-den-spuren-lew-wygotskis/7436116
Keep IT Simple!
Bob Reuter's Web
Google Tech Talk by Mitchel Resnick: Sowing the Seeds for a more Creative Society
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qWF1SJ4LGI
I love the first slide, where Mitchel Resnick presents three words and asks his audience to play the “odd one out” game with him.
The words are:
Television, Computer, Paintbrush.
Which word would you choose? This is a pretty simple, but very effective tool to make a quick diagnosis of your perspective on technology in education.
Wow, I didn't know that a German guy named Froebel INVENTED Kindergarten... For more information: http://www.froebelweb.org/
http://www.computerclubhouse.org/
@Google Talks
Hey, check this out, if you don’t already know it… I’m eager to watch some of these talks:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks
TPACK: Using technology for enriched experiences of content
I’ve discovered, more by chance, the DEVOLVE website (http://www.open.ac.uk/darwin/devolve-me.php), which allows you to make a “[…] journey back in time [and] to see yourself as you would have looked as an early human”. To me, this is a nice example of a digital technology tool that allows you to have enriched and personally connected experiences of a content knowledge domain (here: biology, anthropology or paleontology). Such a technological tool can easily be used as a learning/teaching tool when you add pedagogical principles like discovery based learning, for instance.
more over, the fact that kids could use their own pictures and DE-volve themselves would make the exploration of evolutionary…
“Free: the past and future of a radical price” – a book by Chris Anderson
This book is about the 21st century meaning of “free”, which really means you don’t have to pay anything… as opposed to the 20th century meaning of free, which meant that there’s a hidden cost somewhere.
The book is available as a book (for instance on www.amazon.de, www.amazon.com), with a small cost, or as an audiobook for FREE (the abridged version actually costs something… well time is money!)
http://www.hyperionbooks.com/free/free_downloads.htm
http://www.wired.com/images/multimedia/free/FREE_Audiobook_unabridged.zip
Educational Origami: Integration of ICT into the classroom
Educational Origami is a blog, and a wiki, about the integration of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) into the classroom, this is one of the largest challenges that we face as teachers. It’s about 21st Century Learning and 21st Century Teaching.
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/
interestingly this website offers quite some resources on the links between learning & teaching with ICT and Blooms Taxonomy of…
Chronological order and disorder
By cross-posting some entries from my posterous.com blog onto my wordpress blog, there are now some ana-chronisms… Please refer to my original posterous.com blog (http://bobreuter.posterous.com/) to see things in their correct time-frame… 🙂
Learning to dance – episode 4
Yesterday, we repeated several dance steps and were introduced to the “valse viennoise”.
The “cha-cha-cha” works pretty good for us, maybe the turning move needs some minor improvements and the re-connection after the turn is not perfect yet… but it’s fun!
The “tango” is starting to be really good… one lady even complemented us on it… I feel we are nicely connected, mentally, when we dance it… This lady asked us, whether we were hypnotizing each other… Well, not really, but well we synchronize quite nicely, I think.
The “fox trot” is still quite heavy for me, because I find it rather physical if you got for the rhythm like it should be… still quite difficult to avoid other couples, when they are “slower” or to go around them… 🙂
The “valse viennoise”, well well that’s quite some story… I really love this dance, but I wasn’t aware how difficult it can be for a beginner… and I’m getting quite nervous and, well, angry when it doesn’t work out like it should… especially when space is so tight and when the turning around is not fluent… I’ll have to be more patient and stop worrying… there will be the Aha-Effect! and everything will just sync, “by itself”… if we train enough…
maybe this video can help: http://dansedansedanse.free.fr/Valse/V04_CarreCoupleMac.mov
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Learning to dance – episode 3
Yesterday, we’ve been to our third dance class and we repeated the “valse lente”, extended the “cha-cha-cha” (with the so-called “New York” steps) and learned the basic steps of the “tango”. I still find the “tango” quite difficult, because it’s a longer sequence of steps that I tend to confuse, after a while, with other dances, like the “valse”… Moreover, I’m kind of lost, when it comes to making a pause or trying to get around obstacles, like other people or poles… Nathalie, tends to keep going and “stay-in-the-rhythm”… which is probably the best way to be sure that we stay in sync with the other dancers… but I’m getting confused when this makes her the “leader” of the dance, which is normally supposed to be the man… quite a machistic approach to dancing, by the way…
Maybe, she’s right when she thinks and says that I’m a bit pretentious and that I like to “show off”… I guess I’ve been like that since I was a little kid… not that I’m saying that this would be a “good excuse” for not doing anything about it, but I also think that this is a tell-tale of what gives me “the kicks” and what motivates me to learn things. I nevertheless think I should be more into trying to better dance TOGETHER instead of “standing out from the crowd, myself”. We’re doing this as a couple; this is not about me, this is about us!
Learning to dance can be quite an enlightening experience, if you think about it…
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Learning to dance – episode 2
I just realize that I’ve skipped the documentation of our second dance class…
Can’t tell you why… maybe I’ve been too busy reading and evaluating my students’ exams, reports and essays…
Well, this teaches me something, at least… when I don’t write down my thoughts and experiences shortly after I’ve had them, then they are somewhat gone, or don’t feel like “real memories” anymore… they feel like incomplete “re-constructions”…
All I can remember clearly is that we were introduced to the Fox Trot dance steps… and it all went well…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxtrot_(dance)
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