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Provides a list of the 14 best educational blogs to watch in 2015. The blogs range from technology, 21st century skills, eLearning, instructional practices, Web 2.0 tools, and general resources.

Thank you for this source. People are always asking who should I follow. This list is a great place to start. Teachers will enjoy looking at these and expanding their PLNs.

This is a good website about using Flipped instruction for science learning.

Teaching in sonography is primarily the sciences so I was interested in this resource. I have saved it to my own library to reference in the future.

Instructional video on how to use screencast-o-matic to make presentations

This publication takes a deeper look at the best practices in co-teaching in the english classroom to provide meaningful instruction for students will special needs.

This website talks about information about instructional resources. I really liked what it had to say because it made me really ask myself questions about instructional resources that are used.

The visual at the beginning of this article is something I would use in my classroom. It is simple and easy to follow. I like things like that! I like that this article defines student-centered learning first and then give researched-based strategies. We are so research and data driven that I think it brings comfort to educators to see that these strategies have been tried, tested, and approved!

The information in this article supports one of the things that my school tech integrationist is trying to get teachers to do with social media. He is asking teachers to do Penpal Schools, which will connect students with other students from around the world. I am going to be having my class do Penpal schools. I also want to try out having my students blog about books we are reading in 7th grade language arts after reading about the benefits of blogging in this article.

Very cool! I really wish I had students at an older age level. Though I can do something like this for 2nd graders it is more difficult with their reading and writing skill levels. Still a pretty cool tool to use for students and teachers alike. Thank you for sharing!

Social Media is important. When I was in middle school and high school we didn't learn about social media or how to be safe on the internet. It was more of a foot note than a subject in class that we learned about. Blogging was foreign to me until now. I feel like I have missed a lot because of this.

Makes math seem relevant to students.

Wow, this is great! I've never seen a website like this! I can absolutely see how I would refer to this site when my students pose that ever-popular question, "When am I ever gonna use this?" I think this sight could be used by teacher, students, and parents to help deepen the understanding and application of math concepts! I wish I had a similar site to share with you, but, like I said, this is the first I've seen of this type! Thanks for sharing!

Great site for both teachers and students to show how math relates to everyday life! Thanks for sharing this is something I can see myself using in the future.

If you teach in any of the STEM subject areas, you need to check out this blog. I regularly check back for different resources in my area of Technology Education, however there are great resources for everyone as well. There are also some ideas for lessons that you can implement into your classes using the tools that he talks about.

A major push in my district and in the State of Iowa, is to get students reading more technical documents. Like you, I only have so much time to try and go out to find articles that will be interesting and relevant to students, so I use Scoop.it to do the hard work for me. I have it setup to email me once a day with stories and articles that are based around my subject area. You can absolutely do the same for your subject area!

I have to do a lot of file conversion as apart of my subject area, especially Drafting and Design. I also have students who have projects that require file conversion as well. This resource has proven to be invaluable as it has nearly every file format you can possibly think of and it does all the conversion in the cloud. Therefore, it is not slowing down your computer and it will email you when it is finished.

This can be used to put a website into the QR code generator and made into one.When the QR code is scanned the website that was generated into it will display all of the information on the website. It can be used my teachers and students to use to manipulate for information. Multiple QR codes can be put around the classroom and students can do a scavenger hunt to find, which one is pertaining the information they need.

I have never thought about using QR codes in this fashion and it seems like a great idea. One such way that I can see this being a huge helper is during presentations. If a student wants to link to more information but doesn't want to type out the huge URL that is associated with the site they can simply make a QR code that links to the URL and insert it as a picture. Then the other students can snap the QR and go to the website and read up on more that the presenter had to say. This would be used primarily by the students because it would be the teacher integrating it for the most part. I haven't heard of any other types of technology such as this.

What a cool idea. Thanks for posting this Megan. The scavenger hunt idea is a great one to facilitate meaningful instruction.

This is a great blog to follow, if you are worried about becoming boring in the classroom. Shawn will raise a lot of common questions and situations that occur in education and make you think about challenging the status quo. It is also a great resource for educators who are moving to a standards-based or competencies based grading system.

Think Thank Thunk - Dealing with the fear of being a boring teacher - Jeremy Cooper This looks like a great blog! Very captivating! Shawn Cornally states that he "helps run a competency-based high school" so, based upon that, I'm sure that many of his posts deal with high school level material. However, as an educator, good is good, across the board. So, I'm excited to read about his ideas even though they may not directly pertain to my grade level. I think this could be a great resource for educators to gain new ideas within the teaching realm. You might also enjoy marvelousteachermusings.com. Many of her posts are on the lighter-side, but she still brings some great ideas to think about. I particularly like her post on July 28 "If Teacher's Planned Inservice Training". Enjoy!

"edWeb.net is a highly-acclaimed professional social and learning network that has become a vibrant online community for exceptional educators, decision-makers, and influencers who are on the leading edge of innovation in education. edWeb members are teachers, faculty, administrators, and librarians at K12 and post-secondary institutions. edWeb is a place where educators who are looking for ways to improve teaching and learning can gather and share information and ideas with peers and thought leaders in the industry. Any educator can use edWeb for free to create a personal learning network or professional learning community to make it easier to collaborate, share ideas, and move forward faster with new ideas and initiatives, particularly those than leverage technology to accelerate improvement."

Taking the time, even 15 minutes a day on social media for your classroom can make a different. I think this is an important reminder on the reasons why we should use social media. This is a great starting point if you are just introducing social media into your classroom. I will continue to revisit this website to improve my instructional practice.

20 different websites are given to give teachers access to lesson plans that engage students and provides outlines to support a classroom that supports technology, common core, and professional development.

Websites like this that have a list of other places to go make it easy to keep your resources organized and who doesn't love free online resources!

This website is a lot like the one Tabatha posted, I like that there are websites out there that can give a teacher multiple resources on just one page, it takes the search out of teaching, which is really appreciated from a busy teacher. This is mainly for teacher use, but students benefit.

This teacher describes how she transformed her classroom into a 21st century learning environment for her students.

I found this post very interesting. It is easy to see how PBL may work in a science or math classroom, but I have always wondered how it would look for English. It seems like this teacher has truly grasped PBL, and her students are enjoying the learning process. I think this resource could be utilized by any teacher who instructs about English content, but depending on the age of the learners, the students may not reach full autonomy as those in this article did. I particularly enjoyed one quote from the teacher, "Finally technology is embedded into the structure of all we do... It's never an accessory tacked on at the end." As we have learned about in other EdTech courses, technology needs to truly transform the learning experience. I believe the teacher is doing that in this classroom.

This Blog is one that I have bookmarked and will coming back to. This teacher's description of her class is how I want to work to make my class to look like. She had her premise but she had been able to create a class based on inquiry, openness and trust. This empowers students to create a social media campaign, create their own curriculum, and at the same time become more advanced in the content. Ms. Barseghian, I'm gushing, but your class sounds inspirational and worth the gushing.

"Through the intentional development and sequencing within the CCSS, it is critical that educators and curriculum developers consider new and existing instructional materials through a different lens when looking at their alignment with student learning standards."