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Looking for Learning in 21st Century Classrooms A leadership guide to supporting and coaching best practice technology use across the curriculum. Administrators are given the charge to foster professional development of teachers through classroom observation, walk-throughs and overall supervision. In recent years, technology has changed significantly and the world has altered alongside that change. Education has begun the process of including technology, but finds variety in teacher expertise and practice. What questions can supervisors ask of their teachers to best promote technology-use to improve learning? Here are some helpful guiding questions.

Being a first year teacher can be overwhelming to say the least. There is new curriculum to learn, unfamiliar school policies, classroom management challenges, and new teammates. Technology can help to ease some of these first year growing pains.

: collaboration tools, Collaborative Technologies, Communications Software, Document Sharing, E-mail and Messaging, facebook, flickr, google docs, instant messaging, Interaction and Engagement, Skype, Social Computing, twitter

The number of document cameras (the latest evolution of the overhead projector and allows anything placed on it -- student work, book pages, etc. to be projected on to a screen) sold will take a huge leap upward as more and more schools see it as an extremely cost-effective way to use technology so that it benefits students. Teachers will love it because even those who are most resistant to tech can see its benefits and learn how to use it in less than a minute.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a student struggling with a writing prompt, six may be more like it. :( How do we help kids learn how to investigate / decode / explore a photograph or image, thinking critically, documenting their work along the way, ultimately drawing conclusions of their own? Well, thanks to the Center for Children and Technology / Education Development Center, we have a tool to do just that. It's called Image Detective

Check this out!

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in the series and is produced as part of an ongoing collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

As we explore the idea of a digital footprint and identity we must consider that at some point we want to our students to own their work and accomplishments and showcase them to a variety of audiences. If I'm Tanner or Tanner's parents I want as many people as possible to know of his accomplishments. I immediately sent out my concerns about our policy to our school technology representatives and one of the school leaders,

"The study, conducted by Scholastic, the global children's publishing, education and media company, and Harrison Group, a leading marketing and strategic research consulting firm, found that from age 6 - 17, the time kids spend reading books for fun declines while the time kids spend going online for fun and using a cell phone to text or talk increases. Parents express concern that the use of electronic and digital devices negatively affects the time kids spend reading books (41%), doing physical activities (40%), and engaging with family (33%)."

ALA's Office for Intellectual freedom...protect your freedom to read, search and learn in a digital age

A good description of uses

Teachers' Domain is an extensive library of free digital media resources produced by public television, designed for classroom use and professional development.

Justin - thought you'd be intersted in this - Liz