Create free polls to place on your blog, website or social network. Create surveys and collect up to 100 survey responses per month.

Several hundred teachers, administrators, and educational technology specialists from around the country recently joined researchers and national experts in Washington to highlight effective ways to use tech-based resources, including television programs and computer games, to support literacy instruction.

Presentations are important. They are a gifted opportunity, given to you by someone who hopes that you will educate and equip (and entertain!) the people who have gathered to participate. As such, I treat them as important opportunities, and I invite you to do the same, should you find yourself invited to speak in some form or another with people. I want you to succeed. It's my hope that some of what I share with you is useful, that you can pick it up, that you can take some of what I come up with here and run with it yourselves. I call this "giving your ideas handles." We'll do three things with this post: talk about the audience, share with you my most concise advice about presenting, and give you some further resources.

"I'm currently teaching first year university students and require them to blog. There are many benefits for having them blog but I've found it to be one of the greatest ways I've been able to get into the thinking and process of my their learning. Asking them to describe their learning and thought process provides me with insight not only to appreciate their efforts but to inform my instruction and decide on what further supports I can provide to take them to the next level. This technology remains a powerful way for learners to reflect and share their thinking on a variety of endeavors. As much as teachers and schools say that process is as important as product, this often is more lip service than practice. Process takes time and talking about learning can be tiresome. The transparency of blogs make this a shared experience that no doubt can provide all students a greater opportunity to learn from each other. The advent of blogs in schools often is deployed as a way to bring technology into schools. That's the wrong reason. I recently read this quote on Doug Johnson's blog: At a conference last week, Mark Weston from Dell computing stated that asking the question, "Does technology improve student learning?" is the wrong question. The question should be, "Does technology support the practices that improve student learning?"

The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use provides research and outreach services to address issues of the safe and responsible use of the Internet. We provide guidance to parents, educators, librarians, policy-makers, and others regarding effective strategies to assist young people in gaining the knowledge, skills, motivation, and self-control to use the Internet and other information technologies in a safe and responsible manner.

The biggest question about technology and schools in the 21st century is not so much "What can it do?" but, rather, "When will it get to do it?" We all know life will be much different by 2100. Will school? How close will we be to Edutopia?

WEMTA - PLN Workshop - Lucy Gray 2009

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving

I was taking a look at all the resources that I had collected during 2008 in my LearnTech Library as well as those that I had posted in the LearnTech News, to identify those that I particularly enjoyed, that inspired me, made me think and/or I just found useful. There were many, but I finally narrowed my list down to 100 (see below).  I then fed all the titles into Wordle to generate a word cloud and identify trends in this collection of my favourite resources.  Here it is -my review of 2008 - click on the image for the full-size image.

Interactive, animated maths dictionary for kids with over 600 common math terms explained in simple language. Math glossary with math definitions, examples, math practice interactives, mathematics activities and math calculators. © Jenny Eather 2007.

Quick answers to real classroom technology questions. An online service of the Educational Technology Clearinghouse.

OpenOffice.org 2 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.