EDTECH at Boise State University

This project has students creating a blog account for a character in a Shakespeare play and updating it throughout the unit. Students each get assigned a character and have to create a blogging platform for their character. They use this site for all of their assignments during their unit. They need to have a blog post for every scene their character is in and comment on other scenes that their character isn't in. They also need to memorize one passage and record themselves saying it on their blog. I like this as an organizational tool for the assignments over a unit. It gives students a good way to interact with each other and practice their writing while they deepen their understanding of Shakespeare. This project is great because it can be applied to any reading that is being done in a class over a long period of time. A Shakespeare play is read every year in high school in my district and this is something I would want to use in my English class to support that.

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.

This is a great project where students get to demonstrate what they know about Quadrilaterals. For this assignment, students selected a quadrilateral to make an Instagram account for. They are to create an account that contained correct information about the shape and use an appropriate username. They also had to include at least 5 pictures of their shape. All of the posts used the class hashtag so they could easily be sorted on Instagram. When people finished their account page they had to go to other pages and check their peers quality of work. Questions, comments, and concerns were addressed by the students in the form of comments and likes. This particular example made use of a lot of poster paper and physical models. It would be easy to go all digital with this project and have students take or find pictures of their shape in the real world. This gives students another way to express what they know and interact with their peers.

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.

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.

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.

LRNG is an organization who works with cities and organizations to connect students' learning with career opportunities, and to prepare them for life and work in the modern economy, by providing guidance and access to local and national opportunities, peers, and mentors.

The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology published a 2017 update to their 2016 National Education Technology Plan Update (NETP): Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update. The Director of the Office of Education Technology at the time, Joseph South, noted in the report, " Feedback from our stakeholders indicates that the previous five year update cycle was not frequent enough. In response, with this 2017 update, we commence a pattern of yearly, smaller scale updates to the NETP to better account for the pace of innovation in the field."

This was a very interesting read, which highlights several issues related to copyright...some things I had not even considered with consideration to online digital tools.

This article has excellent suggestions on how to integrate social media with young students and how to dispel some of the road blocks you may encounter.

Informative, causes one to reflect about the changing nature of education and how to expand education beyond the four walls

This resource offers excellent ideas and additional links from EdTech to integrate the use of videos into instruction.

An easy way to make an interactive image and have all resources tagged in one location.

Good article on changing the intent of these policies from acceptable and "negative implications" to empowered learners with positivie guidance.

This was an article offering helpful suggestions for creating an Acceptable Use Policy. It also had a great deal of information and helpful suggestions about Digital Citizenship.

This has great information for parents and students with regard to safety while using the internet.

This page on the Educause website offers a collection of Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) from a variety of educational organizations, as well as articles and papers about best practices in creating AUPs.

The United States Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology has published a resource, Building Technology Infrastructure for Learning, that offers practical and actionable guidelines for educators and school leaders to help them provide Internet access to learners and make decisions regarding technology services. The guidebook is an excellent resource for anyone needing to understand or to create an acceptable use policy (AUP).

One of the best ways to keep the internet safe in your school or library is to teach responsible use, which is why developing and implementing your Appropriate Use Policy (AUP) is so imperative. Make sure that students understand that agreeing to the terms of your AUP is their "ticket" or "pass" for going online in the library.

Emphasis on simple and clear acceptable use policy so students understand the guidelines.

This Canadian website contains digital and media literacy information. I found the safety tips by age groups informative.