This is a website by Kathy Schrock who provides an enormous amount of resources for educators. The interactive whiteboard link at the bottom of the page provides lesson plans and additional ideas to scaffold learning.
This website is another mind map interactive tool. It offers many design features that allows the user the freedom to design a mind map. It is an awesome brainstorming tool that I will use in my workshop as a pre-training activity. I think this website is easy to use, and I love that fact that it creates an outline as you make the mind map.
A great tool to show video demonstrations before professional development. In this video students in London do an interactive activity with students in China using the IWB with audio and video features. The students basically demonstrate the interactive capabilities of the IWB.
I like this graphic organizer website because it is loaded with a collection of pre-formatted graphic organizers that you can integrate into activities and lesson plans or use by themselves in different format: html, PDF and Word.
This is a great website where multiple opportunities are given in different formats to review and practice computer terms in the format of flashcards, matching, concentration and word search. The participant has an option of clicking on the link on the page and view or print out computer terms and definitions.
Quia is a site that allows users to create quizzes, surveys, web pages, and more. Quia is available for purchase and I have found Quia user-friendly and very useful for teachers and students.
* Name of the site: Authentic Assessment Toolbox
* URL: http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/tasks.htm
* Brief description of what it allows you to do and how it can be used for essential or generative learning: This is a great site to help teachers develop an authentic assessment for their students. It will be good in the workshop I am developing on Web. 2.0 from the later days when the participants are thinking on what they will develop.
* Brief explanation of why you found this site to be better than others you found (e.g., more effective, creates better products, easier to use, and so on). This comes from a knowledgeable source and cites Grant Wiggins.
On this site, users are able to create customizable mind maps. Multiple formats are available to save the product. Additionally, other users are able to modify the created the mind map. I chose this site because of the control the user has with the product and the collaboration possibilities.
Bubbl.us is a graphic organizer builder that I use not only for Walden activities but also in my own classroom. Bubbl.us is effective because it is a quick way to create a graphic organizer for any topic. Also, it can be used to create a mind map for students to demonstrate their understanding of a topic.
Bubble.us is the best web brainstorming application. It is somewhat limited in that it can not do a lot of different types of graphic organizers but it is absolutely free, and easily sharable to others. The menu button allows the information to be exported as an image, html, or xml that can be shared on a blog or printed. Many other brainstorming applications do not allow for exporting into different formats.
This website provides a way to create creative graphic organizers to make connections with prior and new learning. Students are then able to "see" connections with the color coding of information. The organizer can be completed prior to the lesson and broken down into pieces and archived into the slides using Interwrite. Bubbl.us is technology centered because content is entered into the text boxed. Then the students print out their mind map. The mind map helps students to choose what is important to remember because of the limited capacity of working memory. (Mayer, 2008)
Bubbl.us is a free web application that allows users to create an interactive web based graphic organizer. As with other graphic organizers, Bubbl.us will aid the generative process and allow users to organize and categorize what is being learned at a given time.
This site is a great resource to post presentations (PowerPoints, Word documents, PDF...) which may be too large to share on a blog or in an email. I n my workshop, participants may access videos, presentations and files with ease, as well as create their own log in to post their own findings and creations.
Upload a powerpoint presentation to view online. Links remain active. You can even view Scribd as a book. Scribd can also be uploaded to YouTube. Easy to use. Provides the text from the presentation in an outline format. Easy to use.
This site allows users to simply enter a word to find the meaning and related associations. The site provides a visual definition that can be accessed by teachers ad students. The site is free and does not require membership, making it an asset to the public education environment. I selected this site to use as a pre-training activity to have participants enter a word related to collaboration within the classroom and then share with the group the results. The participants will share (collaborate) the similarities and differences and how these relate to the classroom environment currently being reinforced and how this may change after the workshop.
This online bookmarking site is an excellent method to organize and access online resources with ease. As an assignment, participants will be cataloging resources and references to be on hand in the classroom as needed following the workshop. For many years I have utilized this tool, where I can access my bookmarks from any computer. In this day and age of searching online and linking from site to site, often we forget where we started, and what the initial subject of our search was. As individuals are actively searching online, they can simply tag their resources to locate later.
