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If blended learning is one of the biggest trends in education, it should offer a way for teachers to practice the approach themselves.

Professional development for educational technology has to move away from its historical focus on technical training and toward a broader focus on what educational approaches work best.

In other words, teachers not only need to be proficient at integrating virtual experiences into the classroom, they must also be confident in why they're doing so.

Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely

The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms.

I think that the best of those lecturers are highly adept at reading their audiences. They use practical means to do this — tests and quizzes, papers and evaluations. But they also deploy something tantamount to artistry. They are superb at sensing the mood of a room. They have a sort of pedagogical sixth sense. They feel it when the class is engaged and when it slips off. And they do something about it.

A classroom that has successfully integrated technology into the curriculum would be one where you would not really notice it because it would be so second nature. The teacher would not have to think up ways to use whatever tools were available, but would seamlessly use them to enhance the learning of whatever content was being covered. Technology [would be] used to assist in acquiring content knowledge, and the acquisition of technology skills [would be] secondary. Contrast this depiction with what the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S; ISTE, 2002) say about technology integration: Curriculum integration with the use of technology involves the infusion of technology as a tool to enhance the learning in a content area or multidisciplinary setting….Effective integration of technology is achieved when students are able to select technology tools to help them obtain information in a timely manner, analyze and synthesize the information, and present it professionally. The technology should become an integral part of how the classroom functions—as accessible as all other classroom tools.

his urging to shift the focus from the learning tools to what is being learned and how that learning happens still needs to be heeded—almost 20 years later.

Integration is defined not by the amount or type of technology used, but by how and why it is used.

a collection of Online Resources by Subject Area.  This list is NOT exhaustive, but is a great start for incorporating stimulating (online) exercises into your teaching

Reflective Practitioner

Reflective Practitioner.  

The reflective writing has been valuable but definitely the nearly 4,000 comments have been even more of a learning experience. This is the single best professional development experience I've had.

What we see in these podcasts are some best practices - using social web tools to enhance online language learning and innovative approaches to utilizing podcasting for educational goals.  While language learning has been around as long as human beings have spoken more than one tongue, the model here is uniquely designed for the Web 2.0 world. Static lesson content is transformed into 'lesson events' by focusing student attention around specific content and encouraging student involvement to further enhance the originally designed lesson.  Podcasts, with their conversational nature, rapid publication cycle and modular architecture can further transform learning into an engaging, fresh and personalized experience. This actually takes steps into Learner 2.0 where the learner changes their experiences and behaviors through a collaborative process as they interact with the content, other users, and the instructors.