Technology_In_Education_ (Summer_2012)

How teachers are using cell phones in the classroom and many more informative uses of technology

How teachers are using cell phones in the classroom and many more informative uses of technology

Atavist is an educational model of Constructive Infusion of learning featuring media and software applications. Their mission is to enable anyone to tell rich, beautiful, entertaining stories-whether they be personal, educational, journalistic, or something else-online and on mobile devices.

This is a great way to measure how well technology is being integrated into the learning process.

I love how this is basically a rubric. It helps to make sure that what you see as an effective use really is effective. I also really appreciate how each block offers specifics for the different subjects. It makes it a wonderfully easy tool to use that will greatly help. Thanks for sharing!

For many people, flipped instruction is nothing more than making or posting videos and then doing the homework in class. However, this is a bad assumption as this article demonstrates. This article goes through a number of assumptions and their subsequent misconceptions, thus providing a clearer picture of what flipped instruction is and how it can be a very beneficial mechanism for helping students learn.

This article is an outstanding resource for teachers and principals who are studying the concept of flipping the classroom. A principal could the article be used for a professional learning activity with his/her staff. Individual teachers could use it if they were considering flipping their classroom. I have posted another site/article in our Diigo group on flipping titled, How the Flipped Classroom Is Radically Transforming Learning. The article is written by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, who authored the book, Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student In Every Class Every Day.

This site contains an article written by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, authors of the book, Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student In Every Class Every Day.  The site also has links to other sites about flipping the classroom.

Text Message (SMS) Polls and Voting, Audience Response System. This site can be sued for literally any subject and any level to gather feedback and poll students. This could be used as a way to check for understanding.

I found this website to be a very practical tool for teachers and students to use to gather information on a number of things. As a teacher you could poll the class to see what kinds of topics the students would want to learn about or take an in-class quiz to see where everybody is at in the unit. Students could use this poll tool to develop a poll to give them feedback on a project they are working on. There seems to be an infinite amount of possibilities with this type of tool. Other resources that are similar to it are Google spreadsheets and the i-Clickers that I had used in some of my classes at Hawkeye Community College.

This is a great tool for increasing student interaction in the classroom, while simultaneously allowing the teacher to formatively assess student learning. What I like about it is that you can use your cell phone to text in a response, which means every student (well almost) will have one of these devices. So at anytime, the teacher can say, get out your cell phones and text a response on (insert topic here). This is mostly a student used resource, but the teacher does have a lot of use in it through the reporting functions of the tool. This is probably the most important aspect of the tool because it allows the teacher to make informed decisions about his/her teaching allowing for any necessary changes. I know there are a variety of these types of services, but I think this one has worked the best for me in the past.

This blog post is all about authenticity in project-based learning. A major criticism of PBL is that many projects fail to meet what some people have as a authenticity standard. For many if it isn't situated in the real world, working with real tools and problems, then it isn't authentic. However, this article provides a nice perspective on how there are varying degrees of authenticity, which are appropriate based on the context. This would be a great blog to follow if you are interested in PBL.

Compfight is a great resource for modeling appropriate use in the classroom. It is a search tool that allows you to search Flickr creative commons licensed photos that can be used royalty free. This is the perfect resource for teachers and students when creating multimedia projects. Also reinforces copyright rules which are so important as we head into a very digital world in this century.

This article provides a framework for integrating technology in the classroom responsibly by considering how technology interacts with both content and pedagogy.

This is where I go for most of my PBL resources. There is a nice DIY guide that takes educators through the process of creating a PBL unit. There are a number of documents and videos to help make the concepts easy to understand, while providing a practical implementation.

Discusses cognitive theft and the "low road in math".

While this is written to apply to math, there are so many other fields of study where this can apply. It's more about having the mindset that each problem is a journey for the students and you're the easy shortcut that you have to not allow them to take.

It seems that most of our day as teachers is consumed with litercy education. Since when did we find that literacy was more important than the other content areas like social studies, science, and MATH! This blog would be a great resource for teachers to visit because it gives great insight into mathematics education. Math just doesn't involve adding and subtracting, but it provides problem solving skills that students will need to have. The only resource that I can think of that would apply to mathematics is the use of calculators. The age old question that revolves around calculators and math is do they help with learning math or hinder it?

This is a blog created by teachers Franki Sibberson and Mary Lee Hahn. They created this blog to present books for teachers to use in their classrooms. Some of these books are children's books that they recommend a teacher to share with their students and some that they do not. Other books on their blogs are those for teachers to develop professionally. Either way they give descriptions of the books they read and tips on how you can use them as a teacher.

This site is an interesting blog that provides titles of books that other teachers can use in their respective classrooms and for individual professional learning. At the same time the authors of the blog, two teachers, promote the subject of reading by giving others ideas of how to make reading interesting and fun for students. The movie of Caine's Arcade is an a real "hoot!" Caine's creativity is absolutely UNREAL! A must see!

This is blog written by a teacher with the pseudonym Mrs. Mimi. She has written this blog to teachers describing the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to teaching. While there aren't many practical teaching applications provided in this blog, however she does recommend books to use in the classroom every now and then, what she provides is still worth the time to read. In a very humorous way she describes what it is like to be a teacher in a classroom. The teaching profession is a very stessful job to have and by reading this blog of entertaining classrooms stories this stress can be relieved. Somewhat at the very least. As teachers we need to take time for ourselves and find time to laugh otherwise we will be burned out before we know it.

This is a great online website that offers some great articles. ERIC is always being updated so it is easy for students and others to find excellent resources about a given topic. Also, this website allows you to narrow your search to something like Peer Reviewed articles.

This is a wiki created titled "Welcome to the Future". It is all about technology in education and how it is the new era. It also offers a lot of different types of technology including cell phones (which is a huge technology in today's class). This was a great find.

Here is another blog about how to incorporate technologies into education. There are tabs at the top in which you can click on. I roamed around for a bit and found this pretty cool! :)

The ICTmagic wiki is a wiki that I found to be a great resource for teachers to have access to. It gives a variety of ideas to educators to use in their classrooms. There are so many different topics to look under for ideas to use that don't just involve technology, but every other facet of the classroom. Some of the many categories listed besides those that pertain to different types of technology include classroom management, displays and posters, educational games, news about education, blogs, etc. This is just a short list of many categories this wiki has to offer teachers. Teachers of all kinds would find this wiki advantageous to use in finding different techniques to run their classroom and other ideas to use in teaching content knowledge.

This website provides a list of different Web 2.0 tools that are available for people to use to display information in any way, shape, or form. What is great about these tools is that they aren't strictly for education use. Anyone can use them for a variety of reasons. Some of these tools are for presentations, videos, mobility, community functions, etc. What is great about these tools is that you can access them from anywhere and anyone can access them. These are the perfect tools for collaborative projects. Teachers and students will both find the tools on this website helpful in completing their projects. Because their are so many different tools to choose from they can find the one that will work best for them.

This is a website that can be used by teachers, parents, and students to gain information on technology and its use in the classroom. Here there are links to blogs and articles that discuss technology. There are also lesson activities that coincide with all content areas. My favorite aspect of this website is that they review different types of educational technology. As a teacher you would be able to see what other people thought of these types of technology before you decide to use it.

This blog has so many ways to use different technology resources in the classroom and some great questions to ask yourself.