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Use this site to enhance lessons about US History.  Facts, multimedia, and objects are provide to help bring history alive.

In the book, "Literacy is Not Enough," the authors talk about media fluency and the fact that students need to be able to communicate with multimedia as well as they do with text. We are seeing this trend in so many places, and this site offers some great examples in "visual resumes." Sample projects like this take the digital portfolio so many schools have developed to the next level.

Professional Development is a life-long  learning process that  involves different activities including individual progress, continuing education, inservice education, peer collaboration, study groups, and peer coaching or mentoring. The importance of professional development lays in the fact that it is closely related to the overall quality of education and students achievements. Teachers who stop learning and suffice themselves with the curriculum content soon turn into hard working students only a step above their actual students.

A thoughtful commentary on the need to help students value deliberation and "brain pacing" rather than just "internet retrieval speed."

This report seems short on research and long on guesses that seems to be trying to link sensational but unrelated facts. I see little attempt made to define the terms. The teachers I know who use facebook to communicate with students do so to keep students thinking about their classwork and deadlines. The "cyberbaiting" which the reporter tries to link to facebook friending with a "perhaps"...would rarely be related. From what I've seen, kids cyberbait the teachers who are least likely to use or understand social media at all. I would imagine that a teacher who is online with students would be least likely to be a target. All this is unoffical guess, but the article does little to provide me with facts or information to contradict this.

Why I Like Prezi In my life, I have given a *lot* of presentations. In high school, they were presentations on group projects. In university, they were presentations on research projects. At Google, they're presentations on how to use our APIs. When I first started giving presentations, I used Powerpoint, like everyone else. But I kept thinking there must be a better way, and I experimented with other options - flash interfaces, interactive Javascript apps. Then I discovered Prezi, and it has become my presentation tool of choice. Prezi is an online tool for creating presentations - but it's not just a Powerpoint clone, like the Zoho or Google offering. When you first create a Prezi, you're greeted with a blank canvas and a small toolbox. You can write text, insert images, and draw arrows. You can draw frames (visible or hidden) around bits of content, and then you can define a path from one frame to the next frame. That path is your presentation. It's like being able to draw your thoughts on a whiteboard, and then instructing a camera where to go and what to zoom into. It's a simple idea, but I love it. Here's why: It forces me to "shape" my presentation. A slide deck is always linear in form, with no obvious structure of ideas inside of it. Each of my Prezis has a structure, and each structure is different. The structure is visual, but it supports a conceptual structure. One structure might be 3 main ideas, with rows of ideas for each one. Another might be 1 main idea, with a circular branching of subideas. Having a structure helps me to have more of a point to my presentations, and to realize the core ideas of them. It makes it easy to go from brainstorming stage to presentation stage, all in the same tool. I can write a bunch of thoughts, insert some images, and easily move them around, cluster them, re-order them, etc. I can figure out the structure of my presentation by looking at what I have laid out, and seeing how they fit together. Some people do this

"An important new study  by Professors Adam Maltese of Indiana University and Craig Hochbein of the University of Louisville sheds new light on the validity of state scores. This study found that rising scores on the state tests did not correlate with improved performance on the ACT. In fact, students at "declining" schools did just as well and sometimes better than students where the scores were going up."

"The debates about schools and social media are a subject of great public and policy interests.  In reality, the debate has been shaped by one key fact: the almost universal decision by school administrators to block social media."

All advances of a science and technology flavour! Many many fact sheets to support learning in the areas of ethics and science and new advancing technlogies and their implications.

"The will to learn is an intrinsic motive, one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise. The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in the fact that what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning (Bruner, 1966, p. 127)."

A superb science site, perfect for a nature project. View and upload geo-tagged photos of animals and plants as you find them in your surroundings. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

Record your nature findings on an interactive map or explore others observations.  Learn some facts about nature and wildlife in the resources section. 

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

I created Stuff Survey and Film Discussion Questions for use in my classroom. Enjoy!

I showed this video to my 7th grade tech class; it led to a great discussion. I posted screen shots from the film on Voice Thread and asked the class to comment.

"Imagine an unconference. No keynote speaker. No proposal deadlines 6 months before a conference takes place. In fact, take it a step further and think of a conference where there is no need to pay a fee. This type of unconference is called an Edcamp and it's a trending idea in education around the world."

"Over the course of two years, I, along with the Burlington Public Schools tech team, had the opportunity to meet and connect with over one hundred schools. These discussions would usually involve what device works best in the classroom and how the iPad is affecting teaching and learning outcomes. Frequently this conversation focuses on the most effective hardware for teaching and learning. While this is an important decision to make, it should not be the focus. In fact, the best devices a school can employ are great teachers."

Basic Item Analysis for Multiple-Choice Tests. Jerard Kehoe, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University This article offers some suggestions for the improvement of multiple-choice tests using "item analysis" statistics. These statistics are typically provided by a measurement services, where tests are machine-scored, as well as by testing software packages. The basic idea that we can capitalize on is that the statistical behavior of "bad" items is fundamentally different from that of "good" items. Of course, the items have to be administered to students in order to obtain the needed statistics. This fact underscores our point of view that tests can be improved by maintaining and developing a pool of "good" items from which future tests will be drawn in part or in whole. This is particularly true for instructors who teach the same course more than once.

"The first blog entries posted by my grade one students are rarely readable. Like pre-writers everywhere, my students type random letters, their name, or text they can see on the walls of the room around them. Despite the fact that they cannot yet write anything that is readable to the general public, I have them post because I want them to begin to define themselves as writers. "

"Alliance for Excellent Education's report on Culture Shift provides facts that point to learner-centered instruction and the use of technology to "guide students toward greater ownership of their learning." "

How many of us have that heart-sinking experience when a presenter talks at us older people as immigrants and the younger as natives, when in fact, we are all in this together.