carlatech

Matt has a lot of great tech ideas - and he's a Spanish teacher, so many are specific to language teaching and learning. If you don't know his blog, you may want to take a look around.

As we put more and more videos online, we need to be aware of accessibility guidelines - and subtitles or closed captions are one of them.

"Test scores should never be a surprise." And the way to know that your students are understanding as you go is to do formative assessments. Here are some tools to help you do that.

Notes and links to materials Brown University uses to prepare faculty to teach online.

There are many more, of course, but this is a good start.

There are a lot of questions that are pretty obvious that teachers new to online teaching will ask. and then there are all the questions that they don't even know they should ask - until they get into things!

An account of how a elementary level language teacher uses Wikipedia in his courses. Describes his end-of-course creation project.

Teacher reviewed apps that work on any device

The Babson Survey Research Group has done yearly reports of online learning.

Keeping Pace is a series of reports from iNACOL about K-12 online learning

If you don't watch this blog, you should! He has a lot of interesting posts - not all are on tech, but many are.

Discussion on how technology is being used and why we're still struggling to give more control of learning to students. A good read!

"A 2014 paper by researchers at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, provides a tangible example: Teachers and students in the small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being realized. Teachers were not encouraging group-writing assignments and their feedback focused overwhelmingly on issues such as spelling and grammar, rather than content and organization." This really gets to the heart of the idea of combining education and technology: the technology has to serve the goal and it doesn't sound like the teachers' goals were the same as the stated goals of the assignment. So obviously Google Docs is a fantastic tool, but it has to be utilized appropriately for it to be effective.

I must say I have sat through many workshops in my tenure at my university that included the modification of some practices and even included, to my frustration, the basic structure of a lesson from stating outcomes to assessment. The problem with our particular situation is that usually it is directed to a "one-size-fits-all" use of a given technology that may not apply to many disciplines. I have found them somewhat useful for upper-level courses at times, but the language classes often pose the need for a kind of collaboration and interpersonal technology that isn't presented. Hence my desire to take this course. Another difficulty is the overwhelming number of technological applications presented--I can't tell you how many--and the students really become overwhelmed, since they often have to learn new technologies in almost many courses. Some work and some don't, and since they are the guinea pigs and there are no guarantees that everything will work as planned, and given the astounding changes in tech, the newness never seems to end, neither for the student nor the teacher. So focusing on just 1 or 2 to begin with seems like the only way to deal with it. Finally, I think that, at least in our university, the huge courses found often in the sciences reflect the slowness to adopt meaningful change. Many in these disciplines have simply used the tech to deliver more lectures on topics students must memorize, perhaps adding clickers for comprehension checks. There seems to be a great disconnect between what happens in the classroom and the amazing advances in tech they have made for their hands-on work--labs, collaborative work, etc.

Is this only for English? Does this exist in other languages????

Experiences of a Spanish teacher.

A little overwhelming in terms of the number of resources, but really great resources nonetheless!

A lot of great ideas and resources all gathered in this one resource. I look forward to having an afternoon to read through this more carefully.

I like Edutopia because it provides great information and ideas about teaching in the 21st century.

A good reminder to allow time for processing during PD presentations -

Of all the blogs I've seen, Edutopia consistently has the most useful advice to give. I may not be in total agreement with all of it, but it is reliable and grounded.

I have been following Shapiro for a little over a year now. I first became interested in him because as a former video-game player I was always interested in game based learning. Jordan covers the gamification of learning but also how ed-tech is changing the culture of learning in the U.S. and around the world.

"Learn Chinese with Tasks: Implementing a Task Chain to Improve Integrated Language Skills - Part One"