March rundown of the best posts + Frozen

Porto | Atlantic Ocean, Portugal

photo: Jorge Coelho

www.facebook.com

Hello again from Porto, where after some Spring beautiful days, the rain is back. The weather outside is so disagreeable ! We are not happy. 

The best idea for a Saturday afternoon? Go to the movies. Captain America by Marvel's comic  or Frozen, Disney's new animation. I decided Frozen.

Frozen 2013 | Disney Animated Movies

http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/

I was very curious about Frozen. Based on the Hans Christian Andersen story The Snow Queen, which combines a jumble of various heroines and heroes and a late-arriving villain, into a story that’s serviceable rather than inspired. Of course you know Andersen. 

Disney's new animation turns Snow Queen into a funny, touching adventure that could rescue the princess film - with not a prince in sight.

Frozen features two princesses... Oh ! Yes, speaking about princesses, I read an interesting article about the success of Frozen, the top-grossing animated film in box office history.

Did you know why Disney's Frozen is a film that conforms to "rules" established by US cartoonist Alison Bechdel?

Frozen 2013 | Disney Animated Movies

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/

The film have at last two female characters (Anna and Elsa) and a scene in which they converse on a subject that does not involve a male character or men in general. Yes, Anna and Elsa who have conversations about a range of topics, among them political matters in the fictional kingdom of Arendelle.

Films in which named female characters have conversations that do not revolve around men are likely to enjoy more box office success than films which do not, according to an influential US website.

Women do matter ! Read on Time magazine, and L'Express, two interesting articles . Oh ! That's nice. Because March is the women's month. 

Education:

I hope you don't miss to introduce Frozen in your lessons to explore the pedagogical insight about girls in the 21st century even we are talking about fairy tales.

Here are March's most popular posts:

Let's play the flute: Apps for Education 

Education : Earth Hour 2014 

Le Printemps des Poètes en classe 

Spring Equinoxin school 

Europeana? Competition Educational Apps : Get involved 

Education: Talking about International Women's Day 

Coding Education? Oppa, the Google learning tool 

Estudantes Lusófonos : Concurso Universitário International Design & Multimedia 

Education : World Poetry Day 2014 

Hope you could catch some interesting ideas to your own lessons. My usual readers know I write in English, French, and Portuguese. So on March, I wrote in those three languages.

By the way. Thank you friends ! My blog has reached 4,350 pageviews on March ! I am grateful to all of you coming from all around the world.

"Education has to connect with the real lives of young people and not stifle their talents and dreams."

Ken Robinson

Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that the spring weather is treating you better than me !

G-Souto

05.04.2014

Copyright © 2014G-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com®

March rundown of the best posts + Frozen by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Coding Education? Oppia, the Google learning tool

https://www.oppia.org/

Google developed an interactive educational tool to make learning on the internet easier. The project is called Oppia and it aims to make it easier for teachers or not to create interactive learning activities. 

Oppia is a versatile tool that enables non-technical teachers/users to create interactive online educational activities - the 'explorations'- that give immediate and personalized feedback to learners. 

These explorations are incrementally improvable by the community, and embeddable in any webpage.

http://stech3.firstpost.com/

Oppia is an online and interactive tool which will help students and teachers teach and learn using the drag and drop objects, mapping, presentations and web based GUI control with no coding. 

Teachers and students will easily communicate with interaction dialogues over Oppia to perform the learning activities.

The main units of learning in Oppia are called 'explorations'. These are multi-stage interactive activities that attempt to engage readers in a learning conversation and provide formative feedback along the way.

Teachers can create 'the explorations' online, no programming required. Multiple collaborators can work together on one activity. The data from learners can then be used to improve and refine the answer and learning paths.

Any user of Oppia, logged-in or otherwise, can play through, browse, and search for any public explorations. 

To create or edit explorations, a teacher/user will need to be logged-in and to author his/her work under a stable username.

http://wiki.oppia.googlecode.com/

How Oppia works:

• Oppia does this by modeling a mentor who poses questions for the learner to answer.
• Based on learner's responses, the mentor decides what question to ask next, what feedback to give, whether to go deeper, or whether to proceed to something new.
• Among the many alluring features, Oppia can let students and teachers get the best, personalized feedback after submitting answers.
• The activities for the learning will be embedded in the webpage so the learning experience will be smooth and without any problem.
• Oppia also have an online interactive dashboard which provides best learning experience. A full online editor GUI will help people change the flow and directions of slides, papers, questions etc.

Community guidelines can be read here

http://wiki.oppia.googlecode.com/

All of the explorations and the software itself are openly licensed, so they are free to copy, modify and re-use. Oppia is built by a small group of volunteers. They welcome suggestions on their issue tracker anddevelopers discussion group, and they are also looking for new contributors to the project. 

Features:

• Learners receive personalized, customizable feedback after submitting answers
• Explorations are embeddable in any webpage
• An online analytics dashboard that allows explorations to be improved easily over time
• A full online editor GUI
• A comprehensive extension framework allowing straightforward integration of new interactions and classification rules
• Parameters can be associated with a learner in order to create a richer interactive experience
• Collaborative creation and editing of explorations with version control
• (in progress) Responsive UI for mobile devices

For further information visit Oppiawiki

Browse the explorations gallery here

You can try a hosted version at https://www.oppia.org/

Now, watch the tutorial video for a demonstration of how Oppia works. 

Credits: https://code.google.com/p/oppia/

Some thoughts :

Oppia is a tool for creating interactive online activities that enable students to learn by doing. 

Its creators believe and I do believe because I practiced that this is a more effective and efficient way of learning. Better than only watching videos or reading texts, since it allows the student to engage more deeply with the activity in a way that videos or books (traditional) often do not.

When we are talking so much about coding in School Education, this tool will be a fantastic learning tool to be used for teacher and students.

G-S

18.03.2014

Copyright © 2014G-Souto'sBlog, gsouto-digitalteacher.blogspot.com®

Coding Education? Oppa the Google learning tool by G-Souto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.