Clif's Notes on EdTech

Sites for Teachers

The United States Department of Education reported recently that it's found some evidence to support the notion that blended learning is more effective than either face to face or online learning by themselves. Further, between online and face to face instruction, online is at least as good and may even have the advantage in terms of improving student achievement and potentially expanding the amount of time (and quality time) students spend learning.

The PBS Digital Learning Library is a public media system-wide repository of digital media learning objects, including videos, images, interactives, audios and documents. The PBS Digital Learning Library content will be easily searchable, tagged and correlated to state education standards. The content from the PBS Digital Learning Library will be accessible through digital services offered by local PBS stations.

Diigo  Need help in organizing your favorite websites? Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows users to save websites, as well as tag them, add sticky notes and annotations, and share them with other users in various groups. Tip: Sticky notes are an effective way to start a virtual conversation among teams of students on the merits of a website.

Our Story  Create your story! Our Story permits users to develop and save collaborative timelines that can be personalized with annotations, photos, and videos. Stories (timelines) can be printed in book format, archived on DVD, or even sent as postcards. Tip: Teach your students to develop content-specific timelines that are linked to the teaching of research and information literacy skills.

Primary Access  Capture your students' imagination with movie narratives based on primary sources. Primary Access is an online tool that allows students and teachers to combine text, visual, and sound elements, which are then combined to convey information about their chosen historical event or time frame. A library of Primary Access movies is available through a catalog by historical time period. Tip: Encourage active learning: have students choose a historical event or time frame to research and synthesize their information through a Primary Access movie.

What’s Web 2.0? Who cares!? You don’t need to know what that means to use all of the incredible FREE Web 2.0 tools available. Come learn about FREE tools for educators that can enhance your teaching as well as your professional productivity. Most importantly, plan to have fun! (Appropriate for all grade levels.)

A place for your team. Share messages, tasks and pages. Collaborate freely. For free.