PSU Professional Development

This may be of interest for those looking to attend a conference for professional development.

Thumbs up for an easy to navigate site on the use of SMART boards

Elluminate goes beyond web conferencing with best-in-class web, audio, video, and social networking solutions that help you create a 21st century teaching, learning, and collaboration environment

Has many great ideas and programs to use in class. I like the engrade program.

WiZiQ enables teachers and learners to collaborate through virtual classes, online tests, educational content, and content network. You can set up a free virtual classroom.

This is an online tool that will help you manage and cite online sources. This could be a valuable tool in getting kids to properly cite the resources they use.

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. Larger words indicate the those used more frequently in the text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

This is a simple but clever tool that will take words or passages and randomly create a poster. This would be a good thing to generate word walls for vocabulary or even to do a passage that one might use to emphasize a theme or style.

This works with google earth. Teachers can create lessons on google earth that are centered around literature. This will take the student to the place on the "map". The teacher can embed bits or bytes of information there for the student to view.

This has a little bit of everything. It has email, online word processor, online presentation tools, online note takers, and much more. These are all offered online so you can access them anywhere. This is a bit more oriented toward business use but would be good experience for the students to use something like this as they may very well have to do it beyond school.

This is a website that has links to online popular resources such as Jing, Ning, YouTube, voicethread and many more. They are organized in a visual that makes it very appealing.

Bringing Scientists, techies, volunteers and teachers together to improve hands on learning.

This site provided by the Library of Congress has professional development opportunities for all types of educators: teachers, librarians, administrators, and facilitators. The site allows you to download ready-to-view professional development modules. All of the pd opportunties on the site are standards-aligned.

This blog was started by a staff devleopment team at Austin Community College. It would be a great place for librarians to find professional development opportunities specific to libraries. The site offers information on webinar dates, library-related conferences, e-learning, etc. It is a site I want to return to so I can explore free professional devleopment opportunities for librarians!

A list of resources for school librarians ranging from Evaluation and Weeding, Book Repair, Selection Tools, Collection Development Policies, and General Collection Development. This is a great site to bookmark for any librarian.

This website highlights the uses of Google Earth which is a free download for anyone to use. There is a community message board you can join and check out. It features many of the resources Google Earth has as well as important topics facing education and our earth. There are also features that allow people to stand up for their own causes to help preserve the earth and it's resources. It's a great website to share with colleagues, students, and friends.

Great podcasting website for teachers. It has plenty of podcasts that you can download yourself and use. You can also post your own podcasts. This site also includes video tutorials on how to use it.

This online conference, which takes place in June, will actually feature a panel of students who speak on their thoughts on the future of technology and education. It would be interesting to check it out to see how teachers are collaborating with students on the issue of future education.

This guy is awesome. On this website not only can you check out his blogs but he has all kinds of cool and relevent experiments he shows you how to do in your own classroom. Sure it favors science but there is plenty of stuff for any teacher to enjoy on here.

From the Apple Learning Interchange website. It showcases podcasts created by "Apple Distinguished Educators". There is a contents bar on the right side with topics such as Staff Development, Student Instruction, Elementary, Middle, High School, or Higher Education.

Great website for educators to share slideshow presentations in all content areas of education. Share you own shows or download slides already created. Don't reinvent the wheel or hesitate to share something of your own.