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Personal Learning Network for educators in action. Interesting example of a living, breathing learning network in use today by teachers from the United States to Sri Lanka and Greece, 13,576 members strong.

A great collection of blogs, videos, resource (including an alphabetical list of Twitter Hashtags) for education.

This is a great PLN for educators. I found videos and blog postings that were extremely interesting. What a cool resource!

Summary: This is a site that provides a community of practice startup kit. This site walks through with detail the process of starting a community of practice. The visuals are great, and there is a ton of valuable resources provided. The page is a bit old, "2000" but much of the information is still pertinent today.

Todd - What an AWESOME find. I am just not sure just how current all the information is. Many times the article references the "Winding Down" of CoPs, mainly because this seems to be more of a corporate-type CoP model. As educators come and go from a CoP, I am not convinced it would wind down. Also, this article references the value of the telephone and Convergence since 2000 has increased the values of Podcasts, SKYPE, Google Hangouts, blogs, glogs, Facebook, Twitter, and online chat as nearly replacing the phone. The guidelines posted in the article have a great deal of value. The Venn diagram on page 9 and the indicators of a successful CoP on pp. 9-10 resonated with me. I will be interested to see how they mesh with our coursework.

This article is written in-response-to-a-response of an earlier article by the author (titled Researching religious education pedagogy through an action research community of practice - I've posted it as my #6 article). It seems that the response to the original article was critical of the a few items, most notably questioning whether the unnatural makeup of the group (too homogeneous or heterogeneous compared to the "general public") makes the practice invalid. Also, the article brings into question the nature of practice and theory, and how both impact one another.

Presidential campaigns implement extensive efforts to capture the youth vote by posting huge amounts of information on the Internet. This lessons combines students, social media, and politics.

present pdf files as flipping book pages on website--- Oops! Just noticed some body else recently posted this same site...

Flipsnack is a free and easy site to make attractive flipbooks by uploading images or video and adding text. It can be personalized and would be great for an online art portfolio for students.

Book creator from PDF file, book pages flip similar to real book. Free and embeddable.

teachers can use flippable eBooks to publish writing or other student assignments in book form

This site is from Education World and is speaking about using technology in high school classrooms. This post notes that students in this generation almost demand that technology is to be used in the classroom because that is what they are used to and have grown up with. Cell phones, music devices and tablets have become more prevalent each year with more and more students bring them to school. They cannot seem to separate themselves from social media, music, games, etc. This site has listed some great ideas of how teachers can incorporate technology into their classroom, some of them are: online quizzes, online databases, Microsoft OneNote, online classes, student online portfolios and blogging.

create speaking avatars as a learning tool and post them to any blog, website, or profile

Voki allows students to type up paragraphs or essays. Then their Voki avatar will read it back to them. Students will be able to detect errors in their writing by hearing it read aloud to them.

This site walks you through each step on how to upload a video to YouTube and post it on a website. This video is very useful because many videos are uploaded to Youtube and then can be embedded into a website for use.

A social networking site for classrooms. Teachers can create class groups where students can safely share post and share. This can also be used by teachers to give and collect assignments and give quizzes.

Ripp, P. (2013, August 8). Mystery Skype Jobs Created By My Students [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://pernillesripp.com/2011/10/25/so-you-want-to-do-mystery-skype/

An eBook creator and social sharing tool that provides a lot of interesting illustrations that you can customize along with your original story. 

I love this site! I was just looking for something similar to Photostory on PCs. This isn't exactly it, since it doesn't allow audio voiceovers and student drawings (at least from what I can tell) but it is drop-dead gorgeous. Can't wait until they release an iPad app -- imagine this on the retina display :) I am definitely going to use this in class -- maybe even this week. I also love that it's a creative writing social networking tool that encourages best work, creativity, and collaboration. Thanks for posting!

Discover an endless library of free books, picture books, & poetry or use simple tools to create books in minutes. Storybird is a creative community where readers & writers celebrate storytelling.

Weebly makes it surprisingly easy to create a high-quality website, blog or online store. Over 30 million people use Weebly to bring their unique ideas to life. This can be used with classes to post their work and upload their vlogs or published pieces.

From the HootSuite blog, a post about classroom exercises using social media in higher ed and how to use social media as a professional development tool to enhance curriculum.

Science Apps

Literacy blog with apps posted with links to the apps and an explanation of the app and how it can best be used within the classroom.

Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms used in our society. This project relies on this wide usage to quickly gather some statistics for a class to examine. For this project, the teacher posed a question on twitter about how likely it was for the person reading the tweet to get snow the next day. The next day students logged onto Twitter and read the responses to the question using its hashtag. Students were then able to respond if they wanted for further information. As a class, they organized the tweets based on how likely it was for the responders to get snow. They also organized the tweets globally to see where the responses were coming from. This is a great activity because it forces students to compare different statistical values and evaluate statistical language. I like this activity because different questions can be posted regularly. This can even be tweaked were questions or polls are tweeted and the class responds for the data. Statistics is one of the most widely used branches of mathematics and this activity gives students great practical exposure. I could see myself using this project with my students during our statistics unit.

This project has students examining statistics using blogs. For this project, the teacher gave her class data from a survey given to students from the year prior. The classes goal was to tell a story of the prior years class using statistics. Students had to find tools online to create visual representations of their data. They used their class blog as a hub for exchanging good resources and ideas. When they finished creating their visuals and summarizing the data, they finalized their work in a personal blog entry. Then students shared their blog posts and were given time to read and comment on other students interpretations. This a great project because it gives students an opportunity to write about math which doesn't happen as often as it should. It also gives students insight into all the different ways a set of data can be perceived. I like extending this idea of blogging to being a hub where students finalize and reflect on all of their projects during the year. As an English teacher, I value writing. I really value and chance I can to incorporate writing into my math class.

Teachers often face the question, "When are we going to use this?" This project is great because it gets students answering that question themselves. Students take a picture of something they see in the world and write their own math problem relating to the picture. This gets students thinking about why math is useful and pushes their problem-solving ability by making them formulate a good question. Once the student okays the project with the teacher, they are free to post with the class Instagram tag where other students can engage in a conversation about the problem. This is a great way to get students to engage in practical mathematics and it is easy to organize because it is almost entirely student-driven. This is a cool project that could be running year round. I could see myself setting this up and building a real-world problem bank with my classes.

This project involves students using Twitter to address a calculus level problem. In this project, students are asked to define what a limit is in calculus. These are very complex ideas that can be explained in many different ways. Students need to have a solid foundation with these concepts because the rest of the course builds on them. As students were researching their definitions, they tweeted questions live using the class hashtag. This allowed the teacher and other students to answer questions that were raised. Once students had their explanation they had to tweet it out to the whole class. Doing this in 140 characters or less can be very difficult. Once students all had a definition posted, they were able to go in and comment and retweet definition posed by their peers. I like this because it can be applied to many different situations. Students can be asked to define a topic or articulate their understanding of a concept in a clear and concise way. It also allows students to see their peers thinking and expand their own. This has numerous applications for students at numerous levels. I could see myself doing something like this when wrapping up a unit to check for understanding.