The term professional learning community describes a collegial group of administrators and school staff who are united in their commitment to student learning. They share a vision, work and learn collaboratively, visit and review other classrooms, and participate in decision making (Hord, 1997b). The benefits to the staff and students include a reduced isolation of teachers, better informed and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. Hord (1997b) notes, "As an organizational arrangement, the professional learning community is seen as a powerful staff-development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement."

ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards NETS have served as a roadmap for improved teaching and learning by educators throughout the United States. The standards, used in every U.S. state and many countries, are credited with significantly influencing expectations for students and creating a target of excellence relating to technology. In 2006, ISTE began work on the next generation of NETS for Students, which focuses more on skills and expertise and less on tools.

Through our interactive projects, journals, games and publications, this treasure trove from author Bill Zimmerman provides people of all ages with affirmation of the human spirit, encouragement of their own creativity and sense of fun, and words of comfort and healing." />metas Make Beliefs, make beliefs for children, make beliefs for adults, make belief, make beliefs cartoons, make beliefs comics by Bill Zimmerman

Bernajean presented at NECC on 6/30/2008 http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2008/

Comic Life allows you to easily create comic books (or documents that look like comic books). Upon opening, Comic Life immediately finds and opens your iPhoto library, giving you a collection of photos to work with. Then you select your template, drag photos into place, drag speech bubbles on top and type text into the speech bubbles. Comics can have as many pages as your storage allows. When finished, comics can be printed, exported as web pages, movies, photos, or uploaded to a .Mac account.

There's a long history of comics in the classroom, and the list of references at the end of this article is a great starting point for learning about this concept. While there's still resistance to this medium being used in education - whether by staff or students - there is also a growing movement to use every valuable tool available. Comics have some great uses in the classroom and in a variety of curricula. From pre-readers to high school students, from English to ESL to Science and Math, comics can help students analyze, synthesize and absorb content that may be more difficult when presented in only one way.

With the recent influx of new teaching and learning technologies, schools are implementing digital portfolios. The program at lona College developed a four-point rubric to evaluate web-based digital portfolios. A web-based portfolio, as used in this article, is a digital portfolio that incorporates web-based materials into teaching and learning. The three main elements evaluated were form (design and aesthetics), function and usability (ease of use), and components (presence and communication of the required samples). This rubric has allowed an objective, systematic, and reliable evaluation of...

We watched an example of a student-produced film about the bombing of Hiroshima and discussed how we would assess it. It was difficult to say since we weren't the ones that gave the assignment, but it got the conversation started. Our speaker said that in many cases a scoring guide (i.e., rubric) isn't even provided, or the scoring guide focuses exclusively on the mechanics of the product (e.g., number of images, number of PowerPoint slides). Too often, she says, the product is simply turned in without the kind of serious assessment that we usually give to more traditional writing assignments. I've observed this over the years as well, and have often felt like technological glitz has been substituted for high quality content. This is especially common with teachers who may not be very technosavvy themselves and may be more likely to be overly impressed with the polish that modern ditial tools can impart without any effort on the part of the student.

The Scoring Guide for Student Products was created to evaluate the content knowledge and the effective use of technology in communicating ideas and information that is evident in the products that students create with computers. Check out Using Scoring Guides vs. Rubrics to understand the scope of a scoring guide.

Comic books can be useful tools in improving literacy and teaching even reluctant readers some of the terminology typically associated with other forms of text. In this lesson, students will be introduced to onomatopoeia, which describes words that imitate the natural sound associated with an action or an object. Using comic books and strips, students will find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers, especially writers of comics, use onomatopoeia. Students then use an online tool to create their own comic strips using onomatopoeia.

The Comic Book Project. An arts-based literacy initiative at Teachers College, Columbia University.

DigiTales - The Art of Telling Digital Stories. Crafting and sharing personal, emotional stories with today's digital tools.

Educators are, in large part, bullish on the role technology can play in improving student outcomes. But too large a percentage of them aren't receiving adequate training in the areas that matter most: instructional software, technology integration, learning outcomes management, and designing individual lesson plans.