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Create a virtual classroom with blogs. 21Classes provides powerful and secure services to get your students safely blogging.

Blogs and websites for teachers, students, and schools

Kidblog | Safe and simple blogs for your students.

This article has a lot of good resources for teaching digital citizenship, particularly for elementary educators.

What kinds of jobs will our students have, and how well are we preparing them for the future? The World Economic Forum, a not-for-profit foundation, is reaching out to educators worldwide. Their call to educators includes redefining what it means to be educated and prepared for work and civic participation-as well as an integration of technology.

The QR, or "Quick Response" code, is much like barcode, except that it can hold more data. With one quick scan using a QR code reader app (most of which are free) the "matrix image," as Edutopia's Monica Burns calls it, can lead you to a specific place on the web.

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely and privately show content to your friends and family, or blog the photos and videos you take with a cameraphone.

Canva makes design simple for everyone. Create designs for Web or print: blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and so much more.

David Warlick E-mail Class Blogmeister Conditions & Privacy

(Please note the link to a Free Demo download on the right hand side of the linked page) Orwell is an episodic indie game that puts players in the role of an analyst working for a fictional surveillance state in the wake of a bomb explosion in a public square. Players are tasked with scouring news sites, social networking sites, message boards, blogs, text chats, and the like for clues as to the identity of the bomber and possible motivations for the bombing. Potentially relevant information is highlighted, but it is up to the player to decide whether each piece of information is worthy of inclusion in a report to be passed up the chain of command. The items selected create the narrative that law enforcement will act upon, but the player has no say as to what actions are taken beyond selecting what to include in the accumulated data. The story unfolds through the narrative that player-selected data constructs and the actions that result. Mistakes can result in the detention or prosecution of innocents. This forces the player to exercise research and critical thinking skills, particularly evaluating data as relevant or irrelevant, reading between the lines, and maintaining awareness of how each piece of information contributes to an overall narrative. Embedded in all of this is a clever critique of the surveillance apparatus and how it relates to our conceptions of freedom, safety, and privacy-a critique, I would argue, worthy of the game's name. I selected Orwell for this critical thinking post because it is essentially a gamified exercise in research, or, put another way, research with training-wheels. All of the pieces of data that the user can include are presented in context, and players must evaluate how a clue relates to both its context and to the investigation as a whole in order to make useful selections. That kind of consideration is essentially what we are doing as we research material for inclusion in an academic paper, and so I believe the game doe

The first time that I tried to scan a quick response (QR) code, I held my iPhone up to a poster on the subway. I was underground without any cell service, and I didn't know that there was such as thing as a QR code reader app.

As mobile learning becomes more and more prevalent, we must find effective ways to leverage mobile tools in the classroom. As always, the tool must fit the need. Mobile learning can create both the tool and the need. With safe and specific structures, mobile learning tools can harness the excitement of technology with the purpose of effective instruction.

Let me begin by saying: reports of the death of the book are wildly exaggerated. Likewise traditional storytelling. Human beings have been telling stories around campfires since the first cavewoman struck a flint against another flint and noticed that an interesting spark flew off.