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The online publication He Kupu reflects the increasing symmetry between online learning and teacher education. The bi-annual journal invites scholarship, commentary and reflection upon teacher education, online learning and the growth of online teacher ed

Blogger.com is a website where individuals can create blogs that are available to the public to read. These blogs can also be made private so that only the blogger and his/her invited friends can view the blog. This site is helpful for making others aware of what the blogger is interested in or what the blogger would like to inform people of.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

Blog on early education policy by the New America Foundation. According to their website, Early Education Watch "provides analysis, reporting, and commentary on early education, with a focus on policies that affect children's access to high-quality, aligned educational programs from ages 3 through 8. I haven't explored the blog well enough yet to see whether it contains information about technology and young children, but it's a good example of using technology to connect early childhood educators with public policy.

Twitter is an easy way to communicate with friends, co-workers, and other people. For us, as teachers, it is a great way to communicate with parents what is happening in the classroom!

Twitter has become a very popular site over the last 2 years. This site would be more appropriate for teachers and parents. Teachers could follow someone in the public eye that has importance to education, and parents can follow teachers. By "follow", I mean that if you "follow" someone, you receive updates from them to your phone and/or web. It is a great way to stay connected! Many times parents are curious as to what their children are doing/learning that moment, and teachers can express this through using Twitter.

After evaluating this site even more, there is not always a guarantee that a website that is posted to someone's update would work or be available. This could cause concern and frustration for a parent or student trying to stay in communication with a teacher through Twitter.

Dabbleboard is an online whiteboard that allows users to visualize, explore, communicate, create, and share their work. Users can chose from two ways of drawing: freehand or computer-recognized shapes. Either way, users can create a multitude of pieces. Dabbleboard can be especially helpful for students. They can create flow charts, organizational charts, or mind maps to process school topics. As well, they can create comic strips, mark on uploaded pictures, or freehand drawings to accompany an original story. There is also a collaborative feature, that allows users to voice and video chate, share with or browse the public library, or send the link of their creation via the web. There are endless possibilities for students to express their creativity using Dabbleboard.

This can be a great graphic organizer to help students study for tests and communicate while doing projects.

A friend of mine's three-year-old son can turn on a computer, direct the internet browser to YouTube and search for funny video clips. When I learned this I thought, "there's no way." But it's amazing what kids are capable of. These so-called digital natives never knew of a world without computers, cell phones, or the internet. I read about a couple who develop iPhone games for kids, and use their three-year-old as the guinea pig. Parents often rely on their kids to show them how this stuff works, leaving them wondering how they're supposed to, well, be the parents here. We wanted to find out how parents can encourage their kids' use of technology without losing control. So we called up two experts in the field. First, Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review, and author of a recent study on young children's tech habits, and Lisa Guernsey, senior policy analyst at New America Foundation, and author of the 2007 book Into the Minds of Babes.

Blog of NACCRRA, with a wide variety of information. Interesting way to use a blog to get information to the early childhhood field.

This site contains a lot of information that would be useful for early childhood educators. The blog highlights current issues with education of young children throughout the country. The different entries can be sorted by topic or by state. All of the entries provide the link to the actual publication. Also if an entry is opinionated, it is sometimes labeled that way.

dustormagic

Robotic Pets & Preschoolers [pdf] [top] This study examined preschool children's reasoning about and behavioral interactions with one of the most advanced robotic pets currently on the retail market, Sony's robotic dog AIBO. Eighty children, equally divided between two age groups, 34-50 months and 58-74 months, participated in individual sessions with two artifacts: AIBO and a stuffed dog. Evaluation and justification results showed similarities in children's reasoning across artifacts. In contrast, children engaged more often in apprehensive behavior and attempts at reciprocity with AIBO, and more often mistreated the stuffed dog and endowed it with animation. Discussion focuses on how robotic pets, as representative of an emerging technological genre, may be (a) blurring foundational ontological categories, and (b) impacting children's social and moral development.