EDCT203

This is sort of like a "learning" Second Life. Here's a little blurb about the "River City Project": As visitors to River City, students travel back in time, bringing their 21st century skills and technology to address 19th century problems. Based on authentic historical, sociological, and geographical conditions, River City is a town besieged with health problems. Students work together in small research teams to help the town understand why residents are becoming ill. Students use technology to keep track of clues that hint at causes of illnesses, form and test hypotheses, develop controlled experiments to test their hypotheses, and make recommendations based on the data they collect, all in an online environment. Isn't this a great tool for higher order thinking?

While I have never twittered, I think it is important to use the technology that students are already using to incorporate technology into the classroom. For me, this is a "whole package" approach, so learning (celebrating an author's birthday, etc.) just becomes part of a daily Twitter routine, instead of something done inside the classroom only.

The federal government may intervene as to which text books the state of Texas should purchase for their students.

Create great looking avatars for your website or social network. This website is great for middle childhood students. It allows the students to make little avatars. It can be used for books or just for fun. If using it for a book one can take a character out of his or her own book and create an Avatar for that character.

There is a lot of resources on this webpage that pertain to using Smart Boards in your classroom

I would like to see all classrooms have SMART Boards. The Catholic School that my children attend has them in almost every room. The kindergarten students even use them for graphing their morning lunch count, and then they create questions pertaining to the information on the graph. There are just so many possibilities!

This is a kind of overview of how technology plays out in special needs classrooms

This article is about rural and/or small schools using online courses to satify student's educational needs.

I don't think that computers are going to drop that much, but I sort of agree with you John. If the price of computers drops enough, there just might be more wiggle room in the overall school budget.

I don't know how much a computer will drop in price anymore, but what is truly remarkable is how much the price of a personal computer has dropped in last 10 years. I remember purchasing a computer 10 years ago for $2000. Now I can purchase a computer for $500. That to me is a remarkable drop in price.

The state of Colo. is deciding whether or not to change teacher tenure.

This is going to sound stupid but what is teacher tenure? Is teacher tenure like when a teacher has been teaching at the same school for like 20 years and has a lower chance of getting laid off verses someone that has only been teaching like a year?

Teacher tenure is basically job protection.

Kristy shared this with our 203 group. Students can make a "virtual" poster for a class project and incorporate you tube videos, pictures, sounds, etc. Very creative and unique! I will definitely use this website. I think it would work well with groups or individuals.

How do you attach the stuff? I would like to maybe use this in the future, but not too much. Posters probably get old after a while.

I have met some of the best and worst people through pen pal writing, so guess what I hope for my future students to do (especially when we get to the Jane Austen stuff)? I love it when I hear of English teachers that incorporate pen pal writing into their lesson plans, especially if the recievers of the pen pal writing are from foriegn lands. Not only are they taking a stab at their English skills, but dealing with different kinds of people of different cultures. The different kinds of people that were talked about in this article were eighth grades becoming pen pals with senior citizens. Some just did the homework, other ended up making long lasting friendships.

I checked this out just to see what potentials for novels and plays for seventh graders to study. Just a thought, why do English teachers keep teaching the same old books? Some of the stuff that I found was stuff that I was taught back when I was all three levels of school. Isn't time to update the reading list to stuff that has be written in last 20 years or even more recent instead of stuff that is outdated by like 50 or 100 years ago. I can't complain about Mark Twain though. I do like his writing. But Julie and the Wolves, The Outsiders, The Giver?

I am a big fan of organized chaos teaching. The best teachers that I ever had in school taught with aspects of this ability.

The Oregon Department of Education approved Google Apps for Education. This will save the state 1.5 million per year.

This is an intersting article about researchers in Japan working on future cell phones that will contain DNA chips to keep a regular watch on their owners' health.

This article talks about the "Gender Gap" in technology and some reasons to why there may be a gap.

This article looks on both sides of the issue of having technology in the classrooms.

A little light reading for everyone...(the "Learning Powered By Technology" draft is 114 pages)

This website had tips on how to deal with cyberbullies. One of the suggestions that I never thought about was contacting their phone or internet provider and file a complaint- they may be in violation of their "terms and conditions". There were also tips for teachers.

I liked the fact that one of the teachers in this article is using Wikipedia as a learning tool by having her class edit their hometown page.

Great videos that demo augmented reality, Chris Dede (Harvard), one of the leaders in the field, talks about what he envisions as the future of this technology.  Overall, a page of great info to introduce you to the educational potential of this tool.