Instructional Technology

Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

If you teach third grade, your students are getting ready for the next level of learning. These new challenges for students mean more work developing challenging lessons. Stay on top of your lesson plans with these resources designed for third grade students.  But first, check out our large list of resources including themes, motivating students to read, free printables, resources for slow learners and much more.

I'd always hoped I'd one day see Tom Lehrers 'The Element's' animated. Who knew I be the one to do it?

Christopher Shamburg is an Associate Professor in the graduate program in educational technology at NJCU. He's also a former high school teacher, a Folger Shakespeare Library Educator. Chris has a new book out this month, but before I get to his book, let me give you a good example of what he is getting students and their teachers to do in English language arts classrooms. As a Folger Educator, he worked with students and faculty at Washington DC's McKinley High School in a project called "Remixing Shakespeare." You can watch the video of the students doing their Macbeth remixes. It shows how they create original short audio dramas using scenes from Shakespeare. I've seen Chris do this in a workshop for teachers and he's using open source software (like the Audacity audio recorder/editor) and simple no-tech sound effects (coconut shell hoofbeats & the potato chip crunch of footsteps) as well as the students' recordings of the dialogs and license-free audio sound effects. There are so many lessons going on with this, including the ethical and legal remixing of other creator's work.

Taking a Good Look at Instructional Technology (TAGLIT) is a set of assessments and reports designed to help school personnel understand the current status of technology use in their schools.  TAGLIT includes surveys for school technology leaders, teachers and students.

The ISTE Classroom Observation Tool (ICOT®) is a FREE online tool that provides a set of questions to guide classroom observations of a number of key components of technology integration

Great links of things for kids.

Interactive Whiteboard templates and resources for the school classroom - Great game gererator...I would think this would be great in Elementary School.

A list that seems easy to debate.

Macintosh and Windows

This overview would be a good size and in clear language to communicate with faculty about blogging and generalizing to other collaborative tools.

Free animoto in the classroom...