Kansas Educators

With her award-winning Guide for Educators, Kathy Schrock has become the guru of online education resources. She is also an Director of Technology for Nauset Public Schools, a previous library media specialists, an Adobe Education Leader, a Google Certified Teacher, and a Discovery STAR Educator. Kathy has been kind enough to share her Top 12 favorite free ed tech tools!

Hard Fun

Isaac Asimov

"Professional Development for Teachers"

"The book will never die. But the textbook probably will," says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis. Inkling is working directly with textbook publishers. First, they'll port their existing tomes onto Apple's iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they'll create all-new learning modules - interactive, social, and mobile - that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.

Welcome to the iZone Schools page! These are the model schools that are seeking to innovate in core areas of school transformation

he Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. We have 1200+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. Listen to a recent interview by Salman with NPR's All Things Considered Download the Khan Academy factsheet. You can also read more about the Khan Academy vision in this document. The Khan Academy and Salman Khan have received a 2009 Tech Award in Education. The Tech Awards is an international awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of Ziggity Zoom where you can play games, color pictures, read and listen to stories about many different characters, watch kids videos or explore Play Worlds and other activities. This site is designed for kids and their parents to encourage creativity, reading and to really let your imagination soar. Our mission is to encourage kids to learn, be creative, be active, and to help parents by providing worksheets, tools, and articles that promote positive values and healthy living."

Welcome to our online learning community for Celebrate Kansas Voices presented by Story Chasers, Inc. (a nonprofit) and other partner organizations. CKV is a statewide digital storytelling project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the Internet. Our project is starting in 2010, based on the successful Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project which started in 2006.

Oftentimes, teachers want to offer a fun assignment to students that they will be excited to participate in. With Blabberize, students can upload photos of any person, place or thing. Then, you can trace the mouth of the photo and record a voice for the photo to speak through. There are an endless amount of possibilities that students can do with this fun tool. Sharing information about authors, subjects and books are great ways to use this tool. You can even save the projects and embed it in class websites or blogs.

One of my favorite TV moments is when Norm of the series Cheers walks into a bar and everyone shouts, "Norm" as if they were welcoming him home. Part of the Cheer's theme song, Where Everybody Knows Your Name by Gary Portnoy, goes: Making your way in the world today Takes everything you've got Taking a break from all your worries Sure would help a lot Wouldn't you like to get away Sometimes you want to go Where everybody knows your name And they're always glad you came You want to be where you can see Our troubles are all the same And this is what Twitter is for me, a place where my Personal/Passionate Learning Network (PLN) knows my name, they're glad I came and we find out all our educational problems are pretty much the same."

Emily Hunt From Common Sense Media will be joining us. If you haven't had a chance to check out this website, you really should! We'll be live at http://edtechtalk.com/live on Thursday, April 15th at 7:30 PM EST Visit Seedlings at: http://bitbybitseedlings.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

"Students are so emerged with technology, sometimes they act as the educators, showing their teachers how to do certain things and use certain tools. This video asks the simple question of if we are paying attention to the way our students learn. Besides being a visual, spatial or audio learner, most students fall under the category of "digital learners." With fascinating facts like the 10,000 hours college graduates have spent playing video games and the 70% of our nation's 4-6 year olds that have used a computer; it is no wonder why students are being classified as digital learners. The video also asks if we as teachers are reaching our students. Are we engaging them? The technologies that students are using so much in their everyday lives should be infused into the classrooms so that we do reach our students and so that we do engage them. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, virtual tours. These are just a few of the dozens of items presented in the video that offer a new way to use technology with our students. It brings up a great point that since our students already know how to use these technologies, we should be using them to teach. Even recent graduates who are no longer in school encourage the idea of using technology to engage students, not enrage them. Podcasts are another great option to teaching. With thousands available in almost any subject, you can teach students without having to stand up and lecture them. This video offers great advice and inspiration for engaging digital learners today."

If you learned it you should have got an A on it (Scholar Ladies video and Beyoncé remix) Singing and dancing students, teachers and administrators in the YouTube video, "Scholar Ladies (Get An A On It)" share a positive message about high expectations for school learning and good grades.

To piggy back onto my last post about Alan November's call to make students contributors to their own learning, I wanted to share the "Skype Jobs" of my students. There is a sense of excitement in the room, when our students get ready to conduct a Skype call. I almost want to compare it to a "traditional" vision of a newsroom before a deadline. Everyone is buzzing, running here, running there to get ready for their job assignment. Don't ask why, but I have the memory of a scene in the "Watergate"movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in my mind