Kansas Educators

National Education Technology Plan 2010"

Join me for a Conversations.net live and interactive interview with Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. This is a downright FASCINATING history of blogging and its historical importance.

"Teach Your Kids Online: 40 Incredible Educational Resources for Kids! "

The purpose of this resource is to provide "Just in Time" training through an online interface for K-12 educators based on the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T). These standards are the basic technology skills every educator should possess. In the process, educators will develop their own skills and discover what students need in order to meet the NETS for Students, as well as the new MMC Online Experience requirement. Participants who fulfill all of the requirements have the opportunity to earn SBCEU's. To learn more about the session, look under the tab "The 21 Things". We hope you take advantage of this unique opportunity.

"Help spread this important message: Show our military there are still plenty of people who appreciate their service and sacrifice. Pass this YouTube video link to every person you know so it will eventually reach every present and former military person across the globe! Love your freedom? Thank your military."

"Best Things in Life Are Free We are happy to share our products with you free of charge, and that's what Goodies are all about. Our customers-even non-regular ones-have a chance to download various Jumsoft products just like that! We regularly add sets of Keynote, iWeb, and Mail Stationery themes, and more to the Goodies package, and all you have to do is follow this section of our site and seize the opportunity to get our designs for free! "

Peter Lourie is a present day explorer/archeologist who has his own website talking about his adventures. He also has a teachers page where he shares many of his lessons as well as experiences visiting and talking with students. This would be an excellent resource for elementary teachers to look at for a while. The man has been TONS of places that we all study in Elementary and Middle School.

"There are new web 2.0 tools appearing every day. Although some of these tools were not originally meant for use in the classroom, they can be extremely effective learning tools for today's technology geared students and their venturesome teachers. Many of these teachers are searching for the latest products and technologies to help them find easier and efficient ways to create productive learning in their students. More and more teachers are using blogs, podcasts and wikis, as another approach to teaching. We have created a list of 100 tools we think will encourage interactivity and engagement, motivate and empower your students, and create differentiation in their learning process. "

"Gail Lovely is adamant about the nature and potential of Web-based learning tools. "Web 2.0 is about trust," she said at a recent talk. "It's about sharing and collaborating." And, she insisted, it's about putting the power to learn and create in the hands of the students. "

"The links below are categorized to help you find Web 2.0 tools that might be of use to the K-12 classroom teacher. "

LISTEN AND READ CAREFULLY. A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward. This video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward. Not only does it read the opposite, the meaning is the exact opposite.. This is only a 1 minute, 44 second video and it is brilliant. Make sure you read as well as listen...forward and backward. This is a video that was submitted in a contest by a 20-year old. The contest was titled "u @ 50" by AARP. This video won second place. When they showed it, everyone in the room was awe-struck and broke into spontaneous applause. So simple and yet so brilliant. Take a minute and watch it

"Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurence within the body of text."

Great collection of Differentiated Instruction resources

Blog you should read

One of the great things about Twitter is the wealth of useful links that get shared between users. My conservative estimate is that 25% of the resources that I've bookmarked over the last few years have come from Twitter users. The one thing that I wish Twitter had was an option for bookmarking those links without having to open them outside of Twitter. Packrati.us was built to do just that, bookmark links without leaving Twitter. To get started using Packrati.us authorize the service to access your Twitter account and your Delicious account. Once you've authorized Packrati.us it bookmarks in Delicious all of the links you Tweet or reTweet. If you're a frequent user of services like Four Square or Gowalla you can tell Packrati.us to ignore links from those sources. Packrati.us also allows you to specify hashtags to ignore or to add to your links.

"Cheating, and specifically the time-honored act of plagiarism, has been receiving a good deal of attention in education circles of late. The rise of the Internet as a virtual paper mill has tuned educators in to the fact that students, when given the chance, will often resort to dishonest measures in order to get high marks in a course. Many of my colleagues have reacted very strongly to the rise of Internet cheating. Some have strengthened their policies on the matter, others have added new paragraphs to their syllabi addressing the issue directly, and still others have been spending hours online trying to find any paper they believe to be pilfered from a source other than the student's brain."

Mobile learning games + simple, powerful online assessment.

"8 Wonders of the Solar System, Made Interactive What might future explorers of the solar system see? Find out by taking an interactive tour through the eyes of Hugo Award-winning artist Ron Miller. Text and narration by Ed Bell"

Best of History Web Sites is an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1200 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of quality K-12 history lesson plans, history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more. BOHWS has been recommended by The Chronicle of Higher Education, The National Council for the Social Studies, The British Library Net, The New York Public Library, the BBC, Princeton University, -- and many others.

"Welcome to the iPod Touch Classroom Wiki! This wiki has been created as a collaborative space for educators using the iPod Touch in the classroom. There has been a great deal of demand for a space such as this so that schools and teachers who are using the iPod Touch to share what they're doing. This wiki is (and should be) a work in progress as we explore best practices and ideas for implementation of the iPod Touch in the classroom. If you are using the iPod Touch in your classroom, school, or district, please consider joining this wiki and share what you're learning!"