THINKFINITY - WEBSITE

THINKFINITY.ORG is the cornerstone of Verizon Foundation's literacy, education and technology initiatives. Also Verizon Thinkfinity's goal is to improve student achievement in traditional classroom settings and beyond by providing high-quality content and extensive professional development training. So it is an innovative tool that provides educators with creative, interactive resources to enhance the curriculum and improve student learning.

Thinkfinity offers FREE educational resources that provide:

• On-line portal to over 55,000 free resources developed through research-based best practices in education

• Engaging, standards-based lessons on a variety of different topics

• Content specific to grade levels and learning styles

• New teaching strategies to use inside and outside the classroom

• Interactive games, tools, and activities that make learning fun

• Resources to strengthen problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking skills

• Homework help

• Provide teachers with the tools and materials necessary to locate and use online resources effectively.

• Help educators work with their peers to create useful lesson plans, activities and research exercises.

• Leverage a scalable training model to produce the greatest educational impact.

      Thinkfinity Literacy Network (TLN) is part of Thinkfinity.org, the Verizon Foundation’s signature education and literacy platform.  TLN features content specific to the adult and family literacy communities.  It offers teachers, volunteers, parents, community groups, adult students and program administrators free online courses, best practices, program assessment tools, teaching and learning tools, model programs that demystify technology for parents, and abundant research highlighting the importance of literacy development across the life span.  All TLN content is free and is developed and approved by leading literacy experts like the American Library Association, National Center for Family Literacy and ProLiteracy Worldwide.

    The TranACT Multilingual Library of forms is a collection of state approved letters with their equivalent translation to up to 21 foreign languages helpful for school management communication needs. The library also includes the forms for compliance with the NCLB translated into the six more common languages in Georgia and a roadmap to assist administrators decide the forms and chronological order of the notifications going out to the schools.
    In this website you'll find all the tools you need to organize your resources, network with friends and other teachers, and share ideas, plans and advice with others in the education community. On the other hand Families and kids of all ages will also find excellent resources for practice, play, projects and reports on thinkfinity.org. Search for a specific topic, or choose from recommended activities, maps, games, reading lists and homework help.
   

     Besides it offers to Teachers Tools for Integrating Technology provides technology-rich tools from sites that are frequently used by educators in creating teaching and learning activities. Links to these sites include access to quiz generators, course & lesson authoring tools, flashcards, testing, surveying, web authoring, podcasting, presentation tools and more. Parents will find resources to strengthen problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking skills, and homework help.

• Manipulating photos for specific effect

• Composing with images and with video diaries

• Pairing film and print texts in literature study

• Using storyboards and basic cinematic techniques to visualize literary texts

• Creating video games as a tool for in-depth plot analysis

• Analyzing the music industry through an exercise in artist promotion

• Exploring the use of the video news release in local and national news broadcasts

• Detecting bias in print and broadcast news

  
For more information, visit:
    www.thinkfinity.org
    http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/4-ri-schools-put-on-their-thinkfinity-caps-98423694.html
    http://www.educationtechnologyblog.com/1/post/2010/08/a-second-look-at-thinkfinity.html

COMMENTS

     This website is a powerful tool for teaching and learning any language, since it offers different strategies that help students, teachers and others.  So it is necessary that the users have the opportunity of learning how use it. Owing to every day the technology advance and we need to look for several ways for improving our intellectual. In fact thinkfinity is an amazing way for sharing and getting ideas about education through the web.

FACEBOOK IN EDUCATION

Facebook in education is one way to use technology to our benefit. Facebook offers many applications and room for the imagination to explore. Students can use this Internet technology to perform various tasks and practice their computer skills at the same time. Using Facebook in education is a good way to get the students to interact and work together in an entirely new format. Facebook has become one of the main communication tools used by university students to stay in touch with friends, organize events, and connect with classmates. At the moment we have many social networks communications that we should give them profits; giving them good uses. Nowadays we must profit the technology in a good way as future teachers.  

Blog

What is a Blog?




A blog is a personal website that contains content organized like a journal or a diary. Each entry is dated, and the entries are displayed on the web page in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent entry is posted at the top. Readers catch up with blogs by starting at the top and reading down until they encounter material they’re already read.


Though blogs are typically thought of as personal journals, there is no limit to what may be covered in a blog. It is common for people to write blogs to describe their work, their hobbies, their pets, social and political issues, or news and current events. And while blogs are typically the work of one individual, blogs combining contributions of several people, ‘group blogs’, are also popular.
While the earliest blogs were created by hand, blogging becam widely popular with the advent of blog authoring tools. Among the earliest of these were Userland and LiveJournal. Today, most bloggers use either Google’s popular Blogger service or WordPress. These services allow users to create new blogs and blog posts by means of simple online forms; the writer does not need to know any programming or formatting. As a result, blog aggregation services such as Technorati have reported that tens of millions of blogs have been created.


Blogs are connected to each other to form what is commonly known as the ‘blogosphere’. The most common form of connection is form blogs to link to each to each other. Blog authors may also post a list of blogs they frequently read; this list is known as a ‘blogroll’. Blogs may also be read through special readers, known as ‘RSS readers’, which aggregate blog summaries produced by blog software. Readers use RSS readers to ‘subscribe’ to a blog. Popular web-based RSS readers include Google Reader and Bloglines.


While blogs once dominated the personal publishing landscape, they now form one part in a much more diverse landscape. Many people who formerly write blogs are using social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. Others use ‘microblogging’ services such as Twitter. And blogs, which began as text-based services, have branched into audio blogs (also known as ‘podcasts’) and video blogs (‘vlogs’). Authors typically upload a wide range of multimedia content such as art to sites like Deviantart, videos to hosting services such as YouTube, slide shows and PDFs to SlideShare and photos to sites like Flickr.




Why Use Blogs In Education


Blogs are widely popular in education, as evidenced by the 400 thousand educational blogs hosted by edublogs. Teachers have been using them to support teaching and learning since 2005. Through years of practice, a common understanding has formed around the benefits of the use of blogs in education.
Because blogs are connected, they can foster the development of a learning community. Authors can share opinions with each other and support each other with commentary and answers to questions. For example, the University of Calgary uses blogs to create learning communities.


Additionally, blogs give students ownership over their own learning and an authentic voice, allowing them to articulate their needs and inform their own learning. Blogs have been shown to contribute to identity-formation in students. (Bortree, D.S., 2005).
Further, blogging gives students a genuine and potentially worldwide audience for their work. Having such an audience can result in feedback and and greatly increase student motivation to do their best work. Students also have each other as their potential audience, enabling each of them to take on a leadership role at different times through the course of their learning.


Moreover, blogging helps students see their work in different subjects as interconnected and helps them organize their own learning. Working with the teacher and informed by blogs authored by experts in the field, students can conduct a collective enquiry into a particular topic or subject matter creating their own interpretation of the material.
Blogs teach a variety of skills in addition to the particular subject under discussion. Regular blogging fosters the development of writing and research skills. Blogging also supports digital literacy as the student learns to critically assess and evaluate various online resources.