Friday Four 1/20

 

 Friday Four, Jan 20, 2012

For those of you who may have missed last week’s Friday Four, I apologize. I was in the middle of a 12 day bout with a fever and was off the grid for a few days. I contemplated posting a mid-week Friday Four, but decided that I would would wait until Friday to get back on the horse. So, here are a few items I have run across that you might find interesting/intriguing. Enjoy!

  1. This week, Apple announced its release of iBooks 2 and a textbooks section of the store where you can purchase entire digital textbooks for $14.99. They already have a few of the major publishers on board and are looking to add others. I downloaded the biology book and have started playing with it; it is pretty cool. Who knows whether this will take off or not and be a game changer, but I would love to see the ability to have all of my textbooks on my iPad for a FRACTION of the cost of traditional textbooks. Here is an article about the release from the Washington Post. A quick search will pull up plenty of commentary on the announcement.
  2. Continuing the Apple/iPad theme, here is a blog post from one of the techie types I follow with his recommendation for the very first app you should download if you are a new iPad owner/user.
  3. Here is a great series of programs that appeared on American Radio Works that addressed the issue of lectures and how incredibly inefficient and pedagogically bad they are. While the addresses deal with the college level, the issues are certainly germane to the high school level. Worth a listen.
  4. Here is a link to part 1 of a series of blog posts by Grant Wiggins on the concept of “transfer” and how we can do a better job of helping students be able to transfer knowledge and skills better. This has been a part of many of the conversations we have been having recently about homework so I though it might be of interest to a few of you.
Bonus: Jan 30 is World Flipped Class Open House day. A colleague and I will be opening up our classroom for visitors and welcome anybody who would like to come by and see what we are doing.

 

 

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