Issues and Trends

Donnison, S. (2007). Digital Generation Pre-Service Teachers as Change Agents: a Paradox, Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 32(4).

Digital Generation Pre-Service Teachers as Change Agents: a Paradox

MOOC around the World. Moocish online education resources

MOOC around the World. MOOCish online education resources

Backchannel type free resource. You can choose the length of time you would like to have chat available on archive.

"Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. pdf Full Text"

"Transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991, 1995, 1996; Cranton, 1994, 1996) is the process of effecting change in a frame of reference.

Share ideas - Mind Map

A webpage that allows teachers to interact with students online. It reminds me of eLearning.

A webpage that allows teachers to interact with students online. It reminds me of eLearning.

I used Edmodo for about four years and I loved just about every minute of it. For a long time, I swore by Edmodo, as it had the most capabilities and services, and tried to convert most teachers to at least trying it out with one class. The site has definitely changed over the last few years, adding new features and even an App Store, however there are so many new LMS resources out there now, that I kinda felt like Edmodo has started to lag behind and is often playing catch-up. I also started to get kids in class complaining that it was just too much like Facebook and that it was really difficult to find assignments and resources easily. I've since switched to Schoology (https://www.schoology.com/home.php) and it has fixed nearly every complaint and problem I had with Edmodo. It gives the teacher more customization options and it is really easy to grade assignments and quizzes. Students have also told me that it's way easier to know where assignments are and what they are supposed to do and how to turn it in. Don't get me wrong, Edmodo is still very awesome and it will help you become a better at your management of assignments, just know that there is a lot of competition and innovation happening from other sources. Great post!

An online guide for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in classrooms grades kindergarten to 12th grade.

An online guide for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in classrooms grades kindergarten to 12th grade.

There are a lot of resources here for all classrooms, teachers, and students. It is divided up into 14 different categories and everything that I've looked at is free to your classroom. I've been searching for a few resources, such as a good audio-to-speech converter and some better graphics organizer sites. I typically have students create a end of the semester portfolio that documents all of their learning and their final products in various categories and I can see how sites like Cacoo, Organizely, and Popplet could really help me out.

Blog to share ideas and resources with teachers, parents, and young people.

Blog to share ideas and resources with teachers, parents, and young people.

Megan, I love reading and checking out blogs. Especially when they relate to education! Lisa Nielsen's blog seems to be a great resource for not only teachers, but parents and students too. I think that it can help impact and benefit aspiring teachers because it has so many resources and ideas related to education!

Blog for K-16 teachers about digital writing.

Blog for K-16 teachers about digital writing.

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!

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.

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!

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.