EDTECH at Boise State University

Another page from the EPA website, this database provides educators and learners a like with more information on environmental topics. Want to learn more about air pollution? or you want to see evidence and data? This is the place to start your search. A great resource for students to research environmental topics themselves.

This is a great resource created by the EPA to help educators teach their students about the environment. It provides lesson plans and resources, as well as videos, games and even project ideas that students will love. Great page for anyone teaching about human impact on the environment.

This website allows ELL/ESL Learners to copy and paste text from online articles into the tool which then turns each word into a clickable button for instant translation. Helpful for students who just get stuck on a few words or do not understand the context of certain words.

2Lingual is a ELL/ESL Learner friendly search tool powered by Google. It allows learners to search for articles in both English and a language of their choice from a drop-down list of many languages.

Blogger makes blogging accessible and easy. It also connects bloggers with a community of other bloggers across many areas. I have used Blogger in my personal/professional life for many years. It has been slowly improving over that time and the new blogs are capable of a lot.

iNaturalist is a social networking app for naturalists. It harnesses the power of crowd sourcing by enabling any person, with a mobile phone and access to the internet, the opportunity to participate in citizen science. Users create 'observations' by posting images of the local flora and fauna. If the observations include geolocation/time data and the specimens, are confirmed by two other users, then it becomes research grade. This means it could be used in real studies being conducted by scientists, such as herpetologists and botanists. The app is great for identifying wildlife and connecting students with experts.

Voicethread allows users to create videos and share with others.

Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting.

Voicethread is a great way for students to add narration to their presentation slides. Simply upload graphics and images to the slides then record narration over it. Great for presentations you wish to share with others and students can receive feedback from the Voicethread community.

This educational youtube channel was created by two educator brothers. One creates videos in which he teaches the humanities and arts while the other creates videos for science. The videos are fun and engaging for younger students around the 5th grade mark.

Use this Chrome add-on to block the majority of pop-up ads during online use. This add-on even blocks youtube commercials and its great for classroom use in general.

Everything from creating templates to publishing files as websites, the Tips page for Google Slides is full of helpful tips.

This browser based polling system can be embedded inside a Google Slide with the PollEv.com Chrome Add-on. Students can use almost any device with access to the internet to answer questions during a presentation. The data is projected immediately on the Google Slide as students answer.

A kid friendly research website complete with its own encyclopedia, atlas and educational games designed to help with homework. The website is written by professional educators for young learners and provides a safe space online for students to visit outside of school hours.

The new version of Promethean software has been designed to cater to a changing classroom with more diverse connectivity using BYOD and so on.

Learning communities help to share the responsibilities of student success within a school system. Since PLNs require a shared goal, when used in a school it helps align the vision for students, teachers, and administrators. PLNs are a continuous cycle of research, planning, and implementation. They are data driven and reflected upon. Everyone within the PLN is responsible for the development and implementation of the community. When everyone participates it creates an environment of trust and expertise that can be shared equally amongst all of the members. The learning that takes place within PLNs helps to keep school systems aligned and functioning.

This was a very interesting article that really had me thinking deeper bout PLN. One specific line " Learning communities convene regularly and frequently during the workday to engage in collaborative professional learning to strengthen their practice and increase student results" really caught my eye. How does one find time for such intensive participation? Separate from that I like the idea of learning being a group responsibility and not just an individual one.

Hi Ryann, I love this article and how it chunks the topics into easy comprehension for the reader. Collective responsibility stuck out to me the most. I think this is so important whenever tackling a project as a team. The team is interdependent and I think its important for each member to take responsibility of their strengths that they bring to the table. Nice article!

Teachers are developing PLNs to connect with other educators and professionals all over the world to stay up to date on their teaching methods and resources. This article gives an overview of why many teachers belong to a PLN and why it is beneficial to their professional goals. I appreciated that the author named and discussed three popular PLNs that I plan on looking into further. They were Classroom 2.0, Edmodo, and The Educator's PLN. I agree with the author completely when he states that "teachers are lifelong learners." This article is a great read for those new to PLNs.

I loved all of the information on the various tools that can used in managing a PLN, There were several tools I wasn't familiar with and look forward to being able to use in the future.

I found this post to be extremely informative regarding how teachers can use PLNs for learning, moreover for modeling learning for their students. The social network portion of this article was authentic to the purpose of this course and aided in making connections regarding the usage of social networks for educational learning tasks. The review of the three PLNs was also helpful as we navigate this course and begin to implement strategies and plans for the incorporation of social networking into our own classrooms.

Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Traynor provide an introduction to communities of practice in this PDF found on their website. The introduction includes a definition, examples of what communities of practice may look like, how they began, and in what sectors of the community they are used today. Myths about communities of practice are also addressed.

By Etienne and Beverly Wegner-Trayner, this is an 8 page pdf of the basics of CoPs. I really like that there are myths debunked and demystified within the content of this paper as well.

I appreciate the scope of this resource including elements such as where the concept of communities of practice comes from, where it is applied, and myths about its usage. Moreover in regards to the myths I find it helpful that the resource includes a guide to how true the assumption listed may be such as: partially true, mostly false, false and maybe. I believe this section adds value to the theory of learning communities by acknowledging the misconceptions and limitations. Additionally I found the table with dialogue examples featuring various types of learning community tasks to be quite helpful in making sense of the dynamic ways these communities can be utilized.

A cute powtoon video discussing the benefits of Connectivism as a learning theory. In the video she explains that an a advantage of connectivism is that the learner can connect with people around the world and understand different perspectives. Connectivism also encourages critical thinking and indepth examination of a topic.The important thing is not to know everything about a topic, but to know where to go to find the information.

This is an excellent resource! The video gives us a very nice summary and delves into the implications of a connected world and where we're living today. I am likely to use this video later on.

I appreciate the visual components of this resource and third person example of "Amy's" usage of connectivsim. Using Amy as an example this video allowed us to see the overall picture of connectivism theory as well as how it would look when being used by a student, switching our perspective of the theory from that of the teacher to that of the student.

The article opens with the idea of teachers being or becoming life long learners to achieve success, satisfaction, and empowerment in their position. This is then promoted by the idea of using PLNs to participate in the role of life long learner. PLNs are then described through a variety of scenarios including a general definition as well as additional adjective descriptions and elaborations such as engaging, exciting, and virtual friendships. How to develop a PLN follows the definition with the gains or benefits of forming PLNs wrapping up this resource. When reading through the gains it is clear that learning is the overall anticipated outcome whether it be: anytime, anywhere, with anyone, self directed, informal, formal, collaborative, or life long.

This resource is a personal account of one teacher's usage of personal learning networks that supports the theory and nature of doing so as well as helps to create a working definition of a PLN for the reader. Additionally, this resource features how the educator used social networking to engage in personal learning networks as well as an example of overcoming the objections of skeptics to such practices.

First exploring today's dynamic educational environment the author creates a connection between online classroom and the network of connections that are made through connectivist learning opportunities. The what and why are then built upon with a look into the six skills one should incorporate when attempting connectivist pedagogy: technical competence, experimentation, autonomy, creation, play and developing a capacity for complexity. The article is then finalized with with some suggestions of tools to incorporate into one's connectivist classroom.