Kansas Educators

The Summer Challenge Tuesday, July 21, 2009 When I was little, I loved school so much that I would ask my mom to give me homework out of the encyclopedias during the summer. Well in the same tradition, I decided to offer summer homework to the teachers in my division. Totally optional, but there would be a reward in the end--four hours of professional development credit awarded upon the submission of a portfolio containing all eight challenges. To my surprise, several teachers have accepted the challenge. I have even had teachers from other divisions ask for my homework after hearing what the Early Childhood teachers were doing. They are having so much fun! They have proudly shown me some of their projects. Some say they probably won't do the portfolio for credit, but just wanted to complete the challenges to learn something new. I am linking to the project documents here if you would like to take the challenge. Summer is a great time to learn something new!

ISTE urges tech training for future teachers As the FY10 budget process unfolds in Congress, ed-tech advocates want funding for a new grant program for pre-service teacher

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In spite of all the talk about Twitter in connection with the Iranian elections and all things international as of late, I doubt that many of my university colleagues will be including Twitter on a syllabus this fall. I've talked before about the "Twitter Cycle" or the fact that, at first glance, Twitter appears trivial, and even, dare I say, stupid. The fact that one's thoughts need to be distilled to 140 characters or less constitutes a seemingly outwardly unacademic endeavor and therefore many open a Twitter account, declare it the dumbest thing ever and never return again. In this post I have two bold goals: to briefly lay out the case why Twitter is the platform for the globally minded and to provide 10 tools that I believe are central to those interested in all things global, including language learning.

21 Things for the 21st Century

Welcome to Reedy Technologies. This site has been designed to provide technology resources to educators. Its focus is to assist teachers in the integration of technology across the curriculum. Grade Level Resources This area has been divided into grade specific sections. Each grade level has general resources at the top for all subject areas and then subject specific resources below that section. Teacher Resources This area contains resources specifically for the classroom such as lesson plans, units, rubrics, worksheets, virtual field trips, and internet tools for the classroom.

Welcome to the Google Apps Education Community, a site to share, connect & learn This site is brought to you by Google - especially for Google Apps educators and students. Come join and help us build it! New! View presentations from the Google Teaching Theater at NECC 2009 Tutorials & Tips View videos and tutorials on how you can use Google Apps at your school and in the classroom. Have an idea? Submit your own tips & tricks! Join the discussion Participate in the Community Forum by reading posts, asking questions, helping others, and choosing and sharing the best answers to your questions. Google Apps in Action Vote and submit on the best examples of using Google Apps in education. Get on the map Find other Google Apps educators & students around the world. Stay current Subscribe and read the latest Official Google blogs, the GoogleAtWork twitter account, and the Google Apps Education Community newsletter. Spread the word! Know another Google Apps user? Send them a link to this site to learn more.

Are you looking for science project ideas, plans and advice? Students will find hundreds of science fair projects, experiments, and help at these 12 free websites. Some help you find ideas. Some give you step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments. Some provide advice on creating projects -- including award-winning ones -- for science fairs. And some have help forums where you can get help when you're stuck. Many of these sites have videos to illustrate their experiments.

Touchcards is an iPhone app that supports loading cards from Quizlet and StudyStack, two of the most popular flash card sharing sites on the web. Thousands of great free sets are already available, and you can always create your own. You get the benefits of the hard work you or other people have put into creating sets on Quizlet and StudyStack, but also have the freedom to study the cards on your own. If the flashcards are edited and changed after you've imported them, you can easily re-sync them with Touchcards, so you'll always be up-to-date. If you need to create your own flash cards and don't want to use Quizlet.com or StudyStack.com, you can create a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs, with one column for questions (the front of a card) and one column for answers (the flipside of a card). Publish your spreadsheet as a web page and tell Touchcards where to find the set. Touchcards is easy to use and interactive, relying on swipes, taps, and shakes to study a flash card set. You can make your own cards in Google Docs or through Quizlet and StudyStack (both sites are free to use and have active communities). Thousands of free flash cards are already available, covering topics in math, Spanish, French, English, music, anatomy, the GRE, MCAT, SAT, LSAT, weather, body parts, history, algebra, geometry, chemistry, accounting, and many more. Flashcards can be an integral part of learning new material. It's important to mentally anticipate the answer or definition to a given card. Doing this increases retention of knowledge and facilitates building a mental model around the material. In short, you'll do better on tests.

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GIMP is a an attempt at answering the call for freely distributed image editing software. While Photoshop is widely regarded as the industry standard for all kinds of image manipulation, it's costly and overblown for the average photographers use (ok, so I let in a *little* comparison). Yes, Photoshop has a ton of useful tools, support and plugins available, but it was never available for Linux operating system users until the introduction of Wine. And it was those users of Linux who initially requested something to run on their operating system to manipulate photographs.

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