Matthias Heil

One of the benefits of allowing students to bring their cell phones into your classroom is that they can use them to give you anonymous feedback on sensitive questions and questions for which a name isn't necessary. For example, you might just want to take a survey of the average length of time your students spent studying for a quiz or how long it took them to complete an assignment. Here are four alternatives to purchasing clicker systems for your school while still gathering anonymous feedback from students... - Matthias Heil

Viele Medien verbreiten vor der Papstwahl aberwitzige Personalkarusselle. Sinnvoller wäre es, zum Amtsverzicht von Benedikt XVI. und zum Chaos der Römischen Kirche unbequeme Fragen zu stellen... - Matthias Heil

You can search Google using your voice, but once you get to a site then you're back to typing. Oweb Voice Input is a free Chrome extension that enables you to use your voice to search on websites. With Oweb Voice Input installed anytime that you see a search box on a website you can speak your query. On some sites Oweb Voice Input can be used to complete forms too... - Matthias Heil

Das Lied "Post für Gott" soll den Kindern helfen selbst Post zu verschicken, und zwar an Gott. Jedes Gebet ist wie ein Brief an Gott. Im Arbeitsblatt findest du einige kindgerechte Gebete, Ideen und Impulse aus dem Fastenkalender der Katholischen Jungschar Südtirol. Mit Mitsing-Video! Du bist eingeladen, die Materialien zu nützen, die hier eingestellt sind... - Matthias Heil

An American lawmaker has said cycling is bad for the environment. He also said cyclists should pay a tax to ride their bikes on the roads. Ed Orcutt, a representative from Washington State, sent an e-mail to the owner of a local bike shop to outline his thinking. He wrote: "A cyclist has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is…a greenhouse gas…cyclists are actually polluting when they ride." Mr Orcutt said: "You can't just say that there's no pollution as a result of riding a bicycle….You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car."... - Matthias Heil

Just 10 days after trudging through the snow and ice landed an Indianapolis teen a job, the overwhelming response from across the globe has led him to begin paying it forward. - “I describe it as a work of God,” said 18-year-old Jhaqueil Reagan, who admits he didn’t really believe much in God prior to his encounter last week with Art Bouvier, owner of Papa Roux restaurant... - Matthias Heil

TagCrowd offers three ways to create word clouds. You can create a word cloud by copying and pasting text into TagCrowd, you can upload a plain text file, or you can copy and paste a web address into TagCrowd. After using one of those three methods you can specify how many words you want to display, you can select to show the word count in your word cloud, and you specify words to exclude (common words like "the" are automatically ignored. TagCrowd supports fifteen languages... - Matthias Heil

Es ist ja schon eine lieb gewonnene Routine: Nun wenige Tage, nachdem New Media Consortium (NMC) und der EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) den jährlichen Horizon Report publizieren, kommt verläßlich aus dem Multimedia Kontor Hamburg (MMKH) die deutsche Übersetzung. Besten Dank an Helga Bechmann, die sich dieser Arbeit seit 2009 widmet! Und ich möchte gar nicht wissen, in welche Untiefen der Übersetzung ein technisch geprägter Trendreport führt … Hier, auch zur Erinnerung an die diesjährigen Trends, ein kurzer Ausschnitt aus der heutigen Pressemitteilung: “Die sechs Technologietrends, die für den nunmehr zehnten Horizon Report ausgewählt wurden - jeweils zwei pro Zeithorizont -, sind: - Zeithorizont ein Jahr oder weniger: Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs); Tablet Computing - Zeithorizont 2 - 3 Jahre: Learning Analytics; Games und Gamifizierung - Zeithorizont 4 - 5 Jahre: 3D Printing; Wearable Technology. - Besonders bemerkenswert ist, dass... - Matthias Heil

Das Konklave wird übereinstimmenden Medienberichten zufolge schon am 11. März stattfinden. Offiziell bestätigt wurde der Termin bisher allerdings noch nicht. Die Kardinäle trafen sich am Montag zu einer Generalversammlung im Vatikan, um die Wahl des Benedikt-Nachfolgers vorzubereiten... - Matthias Heil

More than 100 Cardinals from around the world started meeting Monday at the Vatican to begin the process of choosing a new pope. This comes after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. The Cardinals are tasked with choosing the man who will lead the Catholic Church into a new era... - Matthias Heil

The prelates are housed within the Vatican, and will travel by bus to and from the Sistine Chapel, where the voting takes place... - Matthias Heil

There are iPads flooding into just about every classroom and school these days. Or so it seems. Judging by the amount of interest from educators, students, and administrators, it’s easy to see that the iPad is a becoming a topic of discussion (at the very least) for many of us. So what are some of the more interesting ways schools use iPads and how are schools currently implementing them? - Below are just a handful of examples but there are boatloads more... - Matthias Heil

Education reforms over 50 years have failed to make a significant improvement to the exam results of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, says a major new report. An estimated one in five school leavers has few or no qualifications and poor skills in basic literacy and numeracy. The Commission on School Reform says many changes had an inadequate impact. Among those are raising the school leaving age, the launch of Standard Grade exams and comprehensive schools... - Matthias Heil

Teaching about U.S. presidents can be tough due to the political leanings of students, teachers, and just about everyone. Here are some resources to help... - Matthias Heil

Here are five tools that you and your students can use to create word clouds. ... Tagul is a free word cloud generator that offers the option to link every word in your word cloud to a Google search. Click on any word in your word cloud to be taken directly to a Google search results page for that word. Tagul creates a word cloud from text you copy into your Tagul account. Tagul will also generate a word cloud from any url you specify. Just as you can with other word cloud generators, Tagul allows you to specify words to ignore in creating your word clouds. Once your word cloud is created Tagul provides you with an embed code to put your cloud on your blog or website. ... Word It Out creates word clouds out of any text that you paste into the word cloud generator. Once the word cloud is created you can customize the size and color scheme of the cloud. You can also customize the font used in your word cloud. The feature of Word It Out that I like the best is that you can choose to have... - Matthias Heil

If you’ve ever tried to learn a second language, you know how outdated much of the learning material can be. Lingle is helping teachers change that. Lingle is an award-winning innovative technology service for both English language teachers and English language learners. It helps motivate learners, facilitates real world language learning and dramatically reduces class preparation time for teachers. - Lingle uses today’s world news and it’s innovative technology to dynamically create learning materials. International news is not only interesting but is a true reflection of language in real use... - Matthias Heil

Cardinals gathering Rome are reportedly considering electing the first ever non-European pope, who could pair up with a Vatican official as his secretary of a state, in a scenario likened to a presidential ticket. - Matthias Heil

Consider what you usually read about the classroom of the future: picture huge, multipurpose spaces that allow for seminar areas, group work using a projector for feeding back to others, private work areas and an area for IT use. How many schools do you know that have classrooms with this amount of space? Perhaps if we were building a school from scratch then this is the type of room you would make, but most of us are not starting over, we’re trying to reinvent with what we’ve already got – small classrooms on long corridors and class sizes we can’t do a huge amount about. - So there’s no magic wand to make the walls we’ve got disappear and the students contained within those walls to diminish to a number that we feel comfortable with, but, by utilizing technology in the right way, the dynamics of the classroom could be radically changed for the better... - Matthias Heil

1. Provide the necessary conditions for optimum learning and engagement: a safe and supportive environment in which students can do what you want them to so that they learn within a meaningful, authentic context. - 2. Establish and communicate clear, specific learning objectives aligned with established state and national academic and career standards. - 3. Make explicit connections between present and past lessons, students' lives, other texts or subjects, the real world, and the Big Ideas around which lessons are organized. - 4. Prepare students by teaching relevant background knowledge, skills, and academic language and literacies. - 5. Integrate assessment throughout the instructional process, using the data to establish... - Matthias Heil

Rachel Martin talks with Sister Pat Farrell, immediate past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, about the role and status of women in the Catholic Church. The two also talk about the church's handling of revelations of child sexual abuse by priests... - Matthias Heil

Der Zufall wie auch die Voraussicht von Benedikt XVI. haben dafür gesorgt, dass die beiden nun in der Sedisvakanz gemeinsam die Kirche leiten müssen: der behäbige und großgewachsene Sodano als Kardinaldekan, der die Kardinalsversammlungen einberuft und eine repräsentative Leitungsfunktion innehat. Und der schlanke Fußballfan Bertone als von Benedikt XVI. ernannter Camerlengo, der bis zur Papstwahl besonders für organisatorische Belange zuständig ist... - Matthias Heil

Wenn die Kardinäle aus aller Welt in den kommenden Tagen zum Konklave in Rom zusammenkommen, wird die Ewige Stadt wieder zur großen Bühne der katholischen Welt. Nur ja keine Machtspiele, Fraktionsbildungen und Parteikämpfe, heißt es im Vorfeld beschwörend bei manchen Papstwählern. Fest steht, dass frühere Papstwahlen mit ganz anderen Bandagen ausgefochten wurden. Darauf weist jedenfalls ein umfangreiches Forschungsprojekt hin, das seit 2001 von Historikern und Kunsthistorikern der Humboldt-Universität in Berlin geleitet wird... - Matthias Heil

Empirische Bildungsforschung boomt - wenn wir über Pädagogik reden, reden wir über Zahlen. Dabei ist schwer zu bestimmen, wie sehr empirische Studien die Realität abbilden, denn: "Statistiken sind wie ein Bikini: Sie enthüllen eine ganze Menge, verbergen aber das Wichtigste." (Aaron Levenstein) - Matthias Heil

A U.S. company has created a blueprint to create gun parts using a 3D printer. Julie Noce reports. - TRANSCRIPT: As the gun debate continues in the U.S., one American company has created a blueprint to create gun parts using a 3D printer. A group called Defense Distributed has released instructions that anyone can download that explains how to use a 3D printer to make an AR-15... the part of a semi-automatic rifle that ordinarily requires legal permission to own. 3D printers use a process called additive manufacturing to make objects from a digital model by laying down layers of material. Today's affordable 3D printers are used to make simple items like keychains and Legos. In the wake of the Newtown Connecticut elementary shooting in which 20 children were gunned down, anti-gun violence advocates say the prospect of duplicating a lethal weapon is alarming. The AR-15 information has already been downloaded more than 10,000 times since it was made available on February 25. The founder... - Matthias Heil

Das Konklave trägt auch dem religiösen Charakter einer Papstwahl Rechnung, betonte der Kirchenhistoriker Hubert Wolf. Das Münchner Kirchenradio sendet bis zum Konklave-Beginn täglich Statements des Experten über Geschichte und Funktionsweise der Wahlversammlung. - Das Konklave in seiner heutigen Form habe sich als Organisationsform für die Papstwahl bewährt, daran könne man festhalten, findet der Kirchenhistoriker Hubert Wolf. Die Vorgabe einer... - Matthias Heil

Reform der Kurie: Bischöfe, Kardinäle und katholische Politiker fordern eine Modernisierung der Kurie. Die wichtigsten Mitarbeiter des Papstes sollten ähnlich wie nationale Regierungen regelmäßig zusammentreffen und über wichtige Probleme beraten. Stärker Dienstleister und weniger Weisungsstelle für die Weltkirche, so ein weiterer Wunsch an die Kurie. Nach dem Rücktritt von Benedikt XVI.... - Matthias Heil

A big happy birthday to Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel.  Dr. Seuss was an inspiration to many, and on his birthday, I thought it would be fitting to reflect upon lessons we can learn from Dr. Seuss' books*.  In so many ways, he was insightful and ahead of his time; his simple messages permeate education still today.  Ten lessons for education from Dr. Seuss' books: 1. Schools should help students take ownership and responsibility of their learning process, to help them become lifelong learners and discover their own passions... - Matthias Heil

One of the reasons that some teachers like to create their custom search engines is so that they can control which websites appear when their students search. You can also control how many sites appear in a search result by building a custom search engine. This can be useful with young students who are just learning to search and can be overwhelmed by the number of results or confused by content that is far above their reading levels... - Matthias Heil

Google today updated its Inside Search site, its homepage for all things search, with a handful of educational and interactive features that explain in layman’s terms how Google’s Search works. Did you know the web had over 30 trillion pages, by the way? Or that Google supports over 100 billion searches every month? Or that Google’s index is over 100 million gigabytes? If you find factoids like that interesting, you’ll probably enjoying a scroll through the new “How Search Works” live infographic, which also contains a few clickable links to charts and graphs showing things like the rise of spam, and milestones in Google’s spam-fighting techniques, among other things... - Matthias Heil