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Buffalo City School District (BSCD) TIS Kathleen Emhof's teacher web page. The site is clean, efficient and provides or links to many staff resources. Three features really stand out . First the subpages under the section My Home Page are written in a conversational tone. I think that has an inviting appeal. Second is the use of the Calendar feature of the home page. This moves the lab scheduling off her shoulders and encourages the staff to plan and communicate with each other. Third and lastly, making all relevant itech forms available to the staff. I have just a few suggestions: - consider password protecting the teacher resources page - create separate student/parent resource section

You can have the ultimate webpage, but the true end goal is getting teachers and others to use it. That takes a great deal of diplomacy. Hillary, are you listening?

Ken, thank you for highlighting one of our colleagues pages. One of the areas I believe we must focus more on is improving teacher pages among the teachers (or just get them to start one!).

This one is an oldie but a goodie. I use it whenever I work a new group of learners or learners that are new to educational technology. It's an easy read and can be modified to reflect the rapid changes in technology.

Yes, I agree with much of the article and the skills mentioned, but at first glance, it's quite daunting. You're talking about skills that, for the average educator, takes years to acquire and with which to become comfortable. That is something we ,as integration specialists,s need to keep in mind.

Absolutely Sui! I think TISs face the same challenge as classroom teachers. How do we hook them? For people like you and I it's an intrinsic motivation to grow our knowledge base and fine tune our craft. Once a teacher told me, "there are three kinds of teachers, those that were born to do it, those that can be taught to do it and those that will never get it." I want to believe that the overwhelming majority of teachers fall into that second category. So, back to how do we hook them. I agree with Bill that Atomic Learning is woefully underutilized. One way to get the teachers hooked and increase the likelihood that AL is used is to adopt AL as our launching point for developing all PLOs. Take a look at the AL Toolkit http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/atomictoolkit. Assuming that we have done our due diligence and prepared our teachers to register for AL and view relevant tutorials prior to the PLO. Use the toolkit materials to "promote" our PLOs. Encourage teachers to subscribe to the AL newsletter and our web site blog feeds. Design PLOs with their work in mind - flipcharts using upcoming unit actiities, etc. I think it was Kathy Shrock that said something like, when teaching an unfamiliar application use a familiar task and when teaching an unfamiliar task use a familiar application. We also need to change the mindset so that the "learning" is their bag of bricks to carry and that we are here to coach, and support them to that end.

The Online Activities area contains an excellent array of resources, and interactive activities for educators, and fans of the MoMA. Be sure to visit the Modern Teachers Area designed to connect K-12 teachers to resources and the MoMA's collection.