Tag: crowd-sourcing

74 Interesting Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

Crowdsourcing, Google Docs, Interesting WaysPublished on22 Comments on 74 Interesting Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

The Interesting Ways series of resources continue to grow as the community add ideas from the classroom. Below is one of the most popular with over 70 ideas shared by teachers for using Google Forms in a range of different ways.

Make sure that you explore nearly 40 other crowdsourced resource like the one above – you can see the full series of resources on the Interesting Ways page

#CESIdeas – We Made a Mosaic!

Google Docs, WISEPublished on10 Comments on #CESIdeas – We Made a Mosaic!

Last Friday I flew to Dublin, Ireland to attend the CESI 2011 Conference in Portlaoise. I was delighted to have been asked to open the conference with the keynote presentation.

I spoke broadly about the idea of crowdsourcing content with teachers and asked each teacher to use a Post-It note they had been given to write one idea, one simple bit of advice or tip that could be shared. It could be about technology, after all it was a technology conference, but could have been about anything.

The response was fantastic and the stage was awash with ideas. I cradled these all the way home to England and have now written them up as a Google Doc to share with the world.

We hope you enjoy the mosaic we made together in the last 10 minutes of my keynote. It always amazes me what we can create if we make one small contribution.

Shared Search – Sign Up to Help Out

Google, Shared SearchPublished onUpdated on8 Comments on Shared Search – Sign Up to Help Out

I have a new crowd-sourcing idea up my sleeve that needs your help and input. It is all based around the idea of a collaborative search engine that can be constructed together – Shared Search.

Elevator Pitch

  • A community of educators work together on a Google custom search engine (CSE).
  • The CSE can be for any specific topic taught in the classroom.
  • A new CSE is created and collaborators are invited (like Google Docs) to add suitable sites.
  • Labels are added to the sites to filter their relevance, this can be used in the search results too – which means it can be relevant to different age groups.
  • Up to 100 collaborators can be invited to any one CSE.
  • The broader the pool of contributions the richer the search experience for the pupil.
  • The code will be shared to educators who want to embed it in their schools sites and blogs.
  • The community generate a growing library of relevant search engines for different curriculum topics.

So what do you think? Are you interested in helping with the first one. I have set up a search engine about SEALIFE, as this is a common topic and one that has a huge amount of content.

The idea of a Shared Search is that we act as first filter to the children’s own experience of searching online content.

If you have some underwater web gems to share please sign up in the form below and look out for the email invite into the Custom Search Engine. I look forward to seeing your response and I hope that we can once again help create something valuable together.

Why not try out the “SEALIFE” Shared Search below. Remember as more people contribute sites the more useful it will become.

Loading


Tech-Neutral Interesting Ways: IDEAS WANTED!

Curriculum, Interesting WaysPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on Tech-Neutral Interesting Ways: IDEAS WANTED!

The presentations below, from the Interesting Ways series, are deliberately tech-neutral and much more broad than their counterparts.

It would be great to build some new momentum with them again and gather together some further ideas from the community. Of course these ideas may well include the use of technology but there is no expectation for it to be included, anything that is a good idea gets in.

Remember One Idea, One Image, One Slide always works best. I have opened them up to be edited so you should be able to go ahead and do so without needing an invite. Look for the Edit option from the Actions menu. Any problems with this though just drop me an email or Tweet.

As always I look forward to your ideas and contributions to the shared presentations.

CASTLES – a new Curriculum Catalyst Document

CurriculumPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on CASTLES – a new Curriculum Catalyst Document

3243728543 3e6c69917d.jpg&s=ClaudioThe Curriculum Catalyst is about sharing ideas for curriculum content. It provides people the opportunity to contribute to a pool of ideas. Castles is the latest topic.

(1)Topic ideas are added into Google Moderator, (2) voted on for interestingness (3) an open Google Doc is created for the top topics and (4) teachers and educators add ideas and resources for the classroom about that topic.

Here are some highlights from the new topic document:

  • Turn your classroom into a castle, giving the children specific roles from servants to sovereigns. You could even dress up.
  • Castle design – think about the reasons behind the design of castles, focusing on defence and security etc.
  • Top Trumps – students research, plan and design ‘Top Trumps’ cards for Castles.

Make sure you explore the document to see the other ideas for using CASTLES as a topic in your classroom.

If you have ideas to contribute you can go ahead and add it to the document, no need to sign in.

Here are the other documents that have been created by the education community:

If you would like to add topic ideas, see what is in the Catalyst and vote on them take a look at the Curriculum Catalyst page for info. (Currently SPACE is the top ranked topic to be crowd-sourced next)