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In order to understand Circles, Communities, and Sharing, it was important to grasp how each worked and then discuss what is best for the learning environment. Tools Each teacher received the following: markers, tape, yarn, and two package of photos of their peers On the think tank wall, each teacher was provided with the following drawings: three circles, share options, and a house community. Process Teachers started by categorizing the photos and labeling the circles with each category Teachers placed the photos into the proper labeled circle Anticipated Question: Can I place the same person in multiple circles? Teachers label their house community with an interest: CrossFit, Bulldogs, Blackhawks, etc. Each teacher takes his or her picture and does a gallery walk of the community houses. Once a community of interest is found, each teacher places his or her photo into the house community. The creator of the house community returns and determines whether to "accept" those people into the house With circles and a community created, teachers are ready to share ideas. They choose one of the options, draw/write/place links on the wall, and decide whether they are sharing to a circle, house community, public, or more. Using yarn, they connect their idea to whomever they are sharing to see visually how ideas spread

"Teachers who have begun to challenge these assumptions engage in alternative practices that begin to help us articulate the commitments of connected teaching. These commitments and practices include: COLLABORATION: Connected teachers work collaboratively. CURIOSITY: Connected teachers bring an inquiry mindset to classroom practice. COURAGE: Connected teachers give up some of their control over the learning experience. CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: Connected teachers engage their students in public life. CARE: Connected teachers share their interests and learning with their students."

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

"The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled "Training Our Future Teachers." The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much. The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received "the connected and concentrated focus they deserve." What's more, "instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced." Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, "don't see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.""

"Since the advent of e-learning and PLNs (personal learning networks), tech-savvy teachers have turned in their droves to the social networking site Twitter. But whilst the site provides a host of useful #edtech functions, from networking and making connections to sharing great new resources, some teachers are undeniably more successful at harnessing its power than others. Here are our top tips for how to be a great tweeting teacher…"

"Teachers see themselves as consumers, putting lawmakers, publishers, and administration in control. However, teacher are designers. Teachers hold an incredible amount of decision-making power. According to Marzano's work, teachers are the number one school-level factor relative to student achievement. So, stop choosing off the shelf. Design-- with your end users in mind."

"Teachers If you are a teacher interested in checking your students' work for copied material, you can use the list below where you can find the Top 10 FREE Plagiarism Detection Tools for Teachers."

Teachers in our district, especially freshmen teachers, have a ton on their plates this year. Between the new curriculum and teaching a classroom full of freshmen with laptops, our staff is swamped! That is exactly the reason why starting a PLN today is a good idea. A lot of people might feel that they don't have time to take on one more thing right now, but developing a PLN will actually make things easier for teachers in the long run.

"Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice issued aimed at a copy of Beck's Hoplessness Scale posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites (You may recall Pearson from such other related copyright nonsense as The $180 Art Book With No Pictures and No Free Textbooks Ever!). The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach."

The letter lays out why, after several decades, Conti believed he had to call it quits. Conti points the blame at legislators who "failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education," a testing company. He argued the New York State United Teachers union failed its members by not mounting an effective campaign against standardized testing, and said there's now a "pervasive atmosphere of distrust" preventing teachers from developing their own tests and quizzes.

"Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter."

" I'm sure many teachers would happily outsource homework grading and assessment to the droids. Blended learning will likely continue to make advances across classrooms as a substitution of teachers' time, though I see it unlikely to dominate instruction, particularly in elementary grades."

"The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence provides world-class professional development for public and private school teachers.  Participants are teachers and administrators who are eager to develop classrooms centered on critical and creative thinking, collaboration, and brain-based research. The Institute provides on-site seminars, workshops and conferences; a teacher residency program; and funding for off-site professional development, especially at the Harvard Graduate School of Education."

"Until we address the scarcity in children's lives and schools, addressing teacher quality is a futile distraction, just as continuing to change standards and tests is a futile distraction. Instead of labeling, ranking, and then firing teachers, our first best step would be to end the cult of high-stakes testing because the problems of education are mostly systemic (social and educational) and not the adults who choose to teach or the children we seek to serve."

"Just over ten years ago, Karl Fisch wrote a blog post that has stuck with me through the years. In it, he asked if it was OK to be a technologically illiterate teacher. Even though we've learned greatly in the last decade about the merits of using technology to replace teachers, I think Karl's arguments back then are even more relevant today."

There are a number of ways IPEVO and Evernote can help both teachers and students be more successful in and out of the classroom. Teachers can use the document camera to project a lesson, then easily save their lesson sheet to a Shared Notebook in Evernote so students can access the material at home or later in the year. For students, the document camera makes collaborating easier; groups can project a document to easily work on it together, then save completed work to a Shared Notebook to submit to the teacher or to share their work with the rest of the class. Together with Evernote, the IPEVO document camera can also help students create and maintain a digital portfolio. Students can capture projects, papers, and artwork using their IPEVO document camera and seamlessly save these artifacts to Evernote.

"United Classrooms is a service connecting classrooms across the world. The service allows teachers to create classroom profile pages. On their classroom profile pages teachers can post assignments, projects, messages for students, and announcements for parents and students. Teachers can monitor and manage all of the communications between students on the classroom profile page."

"Our flipped school model is quite simple. Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they've already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education. To change the learning environment even further, we've used Google Groups to enable students to easily communicate outside of class, participate in large discussions related to their schoolwork and learn from each other."

"On page 175 of the document, I included a simple diagram titled "The Networked Teacher". It was produced to support my discovery of emerging teacher networks supported by the advancement of social software. Of any idea in the dissertation, this particular theory and diagram may have had the greatest appeal, especially to those who were experiencing this phenomenon. The diagram has been reused, remixed, redistributed and used in hundreds of presentations by educators around the world. Below, I have included the evolution of a simple diagram as evidenced by several linguistic translations and a video inspired by the concept."

Cool example of the power of openness, and how ideas can be remixed for different contexts when the proper copyright licensing is applied from the get-go.

Two teachers and a few students at Monday's school board meeting questioned the decision, noting the other services provided by Google - such as Google Docs - in some classrooms. One student involved with the National Honor Society said his club uses Google's Gmail to communicate with one another. One teacher said her students use Google Docs to prepare essays. The program, she said, offers students a chance to review each other's papers and she can view students' projects from her computer as they are working on them. "My kids love this," said Laurie Davidson, a seventh-grade language arts teacher.