Open Education

Doing research on and getting exposure to the alternative learning system made me appreciate flexible and open learning. I love learning and I believe in the power of education. Through technology, learning not only becomes flexible but easily accessible. Premiere universities of the world have made available their educational resources online, for free! These universities are part of the Open Courseware Consortium.

Here are some of my favorite open courseware (OCW) websites:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology OCW
2. Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative
3. University of California Berkeley Webcasts
4. Utah State OpenCourseWare
5. Annenberg Media - contains teacher resources for basic education

More open courseware websites can be found at the websites of Open Courseware Consortium and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

St. Isidore and Free Rice

St. Isidore was born in the year 1070 at Madrid, Spain. He spent his earthly life as a farmer. His was a remarkable life for he cared for the gifts that he had and shared them to the most needy. He is the patron saint of farm workers.

In the country such as mine, the Philippines, a lot of people live through agriculture. Just recently when we started to feel the rice crisis, I particularly remember today the rice farmers who have toiled our lands long and hard every day so that we'll have something to eat for our meals. Filipinos are rice eaters. The rice crisis tells us that our food resources are not keeping up with the growing population, which will in turn result to more people going hungry. The environment likewise affects rice production for it is becoming harder to plant and harvest food because of the environmental changes. Moreover, agricultural lands are becoming less and less because these lands are being used either as residential or commercial areas. I pray that like St. Isidore, we will value our resources and be more concerned of our people and our environment.

And it is fitting that on St. Isidore's day that I found this game called Free Rice. It is a vocabulary game that promises donation of 20 grains of rice for each word that you get right to the United Nation's World Food Program. I played it myself, and I was able to donate 500 grains of rice. Maybe I should play this game more often!

Web Search Tool

Another way to search for Wikipedia articles is through this website:

http://www.powerset.com/

You can even type your inquiry in question form :)

How to use ICT for education

"The problem with all of what we currently do in the general scope of education is that we, the educators, hold on to how we learned and how we process information and knowledge rather than thinking through the realties of how new students and future students think and process and the challenges they will bring to our courses. Even those most innovative 'early adopters' among us struggle to discover effective uses of technology in education but do not really understand how our students perceive what we do or how they process the content we give them. All of this is further challenged in the delivery and distribution of learning. At present enough is not known to establish conclusions about which is better, but we know enough through our own experience to realize that things are different. New technology has challenged the way in which education is delivered, but newer technologies are now challenging how people process information and what they expect to be able to do with that information."

- Ruth Reynard, Ph.D.

Encyclopedia Britannica now free for bloggers

Encyclopedia Britannica is now trying to catch up with Wikipedia. Admittedly, Wikipedia has been a choice for many people doing research online. For more details, click on this article.

Anyways, if you are a blogger and are interested to free access of Encyclopedia Britannica online, click on this link.

Can you live a day without using your PC/going online?

Shutdown Day is a global experiment to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate. This will happen on May 3, 2008.

If you check out the website you will see some interesting answers on what they'll do on Shutdown day.

As for me, I'd probably bike, or eat! How about you?

Sign up na!

ICT integration in Classroom teaching

This photo is from a class in an ICT High School in the Philippines. This school is under the Department of Education, a public high school.

It prides to have a special ICT curriculum for teaching and learning, and has the necessary facilities for implementing its curriculum. In fact, in this particular class, they are using a laptop and an LCD projector to present lessons.

Wow! This school seems to be special.

I particularly enjoyed observing this class because the students are very active (I hope they are consistently active in their classes and not just because there are observers), and that the teacher is very skilled in facilitating classroom discussion. But I was sad because the projection of the lessons through an LCD projector seemed like a 'glorified blackboard.' Which means, the lessons can actually be written on the blackboard and would have the same impact on the students.

Through this incident I have become more curious on what ICT integration in teaching and learning in the classroom is all about. What are teachers' ideas on ICT integration? How can we say that a class that utilizes ICT is really able to integrate ICT in teaching and learning? Was this class that I have observed practiced ICT integration?