EDTEC572

ASCD is a membership organization that develops programs, products, and services essential to the way educators learn, teach, and lead.

Backward Thinking or just smart parenting?

Great eLearning blog containing up to date information about eLearning ideas, technology, use in the classroom and techniques. Contains an excellent post about Twitter for Learning for all of us new to Twitter. This post alone contains about 50 links for using Twitter in the classroom, Twitter Guides and tools, and uses for Twitter for elearning. I have been bookmarking a lot of blogs lately and this particular one contains a wealth of information, infinite links and is well organized, simple and the author's writing is straightforward and clear. Look forward to following him and reading more about his ideas.

Converge is a website that gives you strategies for using technology in the K-12 setting. Some highlights from the site cover; digital teaching and professional development, mobile learning and security, campus technology infrastructure to classroom technology uses. One article that caught my interest is "School Districts Integrate Technology into Core-based Curriculum." The article discusses school districts that are working to meet their learning goals with technology with the learning driving the technology instead of the other way around. All of the articles seem to cover successful practical uses of technology in the classroom which are ideas I am always looking for.

If any of you have had the training on foldables, you will love this site about online flip books. Flip books are easy to make foldable books that flip or turn horizontally or vertically. It allows you to create online flip books in four simple steps'; name your pages, pick a printer, add text and print. In the add text section you have a few options for templates and styles and the book can be printed in either color or black and white. These books can be used for vocabulary in any subject, plots, character studies, writing, student bios you name it. Kids can definitely use this website easily as well as the teacher.

For all you math teachers and parents, MathBoard may help your student learn to love math. MathBoard is appropriate for all ages from kindergarten (with simple addition and subtraction problems) to elementary school, where learning multiplication and division can be a challenge. You can control the range of numbers you want to work with, the amount of questions you want to answer and length of time allowed per quiz. Kids will likely love it. Even if this were merely a calculator, students would be lining up to play with it because it's on an iPad. The fact that it comes through on its promise makes it all the more useful. The random problem generator is particularly handy for creating quizzes. Gone are the days of picking through or creating your own problems and pasting them into a quiz. MathBoard does all of this for up to 250 problems per quiz. Can I use it in my classroom? This tool is designed specifically for classroom use. Students can use it to work on new math techniques, and teachers can use it to generate homework and quizzes. It's a perfect match. I'm providing a link to a youtube demo above. Please click on it and judge for yourself.

This is a youth publishing site that provides young writers and illustrators with an online method for sharing their work with others. LaunchPad is different from other publishing sites in that submissions are accepted free of charge, which also means there is no physical book produced. There is also an editorial team that reviews each submission and only accepts those they deem worthy. The submission process is very easy, consisting of filling out a handful of informational boxes and uploading the doc or image file. Students are required to provide a parent's email address as a security method. This is a great site to share with your students, especially for those interested in writing!

Very good information on how to have a teacher-student relationship using any type of social networking tool.

For those of you wanting a online meeting spot other than Adobe Classroom, WizIQ is a great substitute. As Distant Learning students you don't always want to request a classroom, and in this case when you have group projects, this is a great tool. It has many of the same options that Adobe Classroom has, not as pretty, but it does the job. Check it our

I know we have been using the phrase "web 2.0" during the EDTEC program, but I was still having difficulty understanding the full scope of the term. This video is short and simple, explaining both the regular and technical aspects of "web 2.0."

It is always bad when you have too much of something..too much cake, too much tv, I dont think tehnology is to blame for kids bad health, that is the parents job to monitor that.

There are so many online tools out now for teaching how to write. Back in my day (which wasn't that long ago) The only technology we had was turnitin.com, a plagerism website. Now, using writing software (such as an updated version of turnitin.com, students can edit each others papers, teachers can track and edit changes to student papers and more!

I liked this article, yet it is frustrating because these are all the obvious reasons are education system is so bad in the US, yet the chances of them being fixed ANYTIMe soon are slim.

My principal asked me to attend Apple's Summer Semester Session for Language Arts through iTunesU and it was great! I just received an email from them letting those who attended know that the session is now online for everyone to view. Above is the link for Language Arts but you can definitely search around to find the archives for the other subjects as well!

This is a great web-log set up describing 3 ways to use Diigo in the history or Language Arts Classroom. With many schools transferring to online texts, this is a great tool to share with students who still wish to annotate the test as they read!

I was asked to attend Apple's e-learning session over the summer to learn about some of the great teaching apps for the iPad. I learned how to use many for Language Arts and am excited to share! This website highlights a couple of the best apps we went over for all of the subjects! Enjoy!

This is a great place educators can go for a robust discussion topic that pertains to education. This chat links to a Twitter discussion with another person by just adding the hashtag #edchat to the end of your tweets.

This allows teachers to extend their classroom discussions to a structured and private online community.

This widget allows you to create a quiz in Captivate and then track it using a GoogleDoc. 

Wow, this is great! I'm going to try this out. Thanks for sharing. It's an easier alternative to linking up the presentation with an LMS system.