Article from NY Times about a man who looked at successful teachers & wrote a book about 49 ways to become a better teacher. "He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach."

"Technology keeps changing the routes we take to get our projects from here to there. It doesn't pay to memorize the route, because it's going to change soon. The compass, on the other hand, is more important then ever. If you don't know which direction you're going, how will you know when you're off course?"

"Teacher Kelly Finn, left, works with students Rachel Mathews, center, and Sarah Xu during a writer's workshop at The Barstow School in Kansas City, Mo." - Photo to the right of the article.  Article advocating tech use in schools. One school is doing writer's workshop and using technology as part of the process. Not much detail on how they are doing that exactly, but interesting to see how schools are forging tech & writers workshop together

The features in Google Docs can be used to facilitate a digital writer's workshop based on peer editing, and they are particularly useful when combined with cooperative grouping strategies to fine-tune students' editing skills. While students are writing their drafts, teachers can take advantage of opportunities to lead small instructional groups to help them focus on specific cooperative grouping job-related skills, then students can share their drafts with other group members who use comments to suggest revisions based on their job. The immediate feedback provided by peers will likely encourage writers to check comments and revise at home and stay on task during classroom work time. The revision history will keep student comments and revisions honest and focused on the task.

This is why you should be on Twitter - what's obvious to you, is amazing to others. Great little video. 

Sue Waters' guide to hashtags & Twitter etc Great links.

History Tech website chooses 15 virtual field trips. Useful for Humanities?

AMAZING site which lets you create beautiful data visualizations. Perfect for exhibition, maths, infographics etc

From Free Technology for Teachers, this blog post highlights 5 ways students can visually explore the news. Great for humanities

This site has some great suggestions for making beautiful posters. It talks about white space, font, color etc. It has links to hundreds of great examples to look at. 

Post I wrote a while back on Creating Common Craft style videos. Some good examples of student work here too.

A good basic overview of how to make a Common Craft Style explanation video.

Icons used in our Growing Up Digital curriculum. 

What to do if your Twitter account has been hacked.

Great lot of PD ideas for online, independent learning. We're looking to integrate some of these for Connecting East 2.0.

A curriculum for Digital Citizenship for Grades 9 -12. 

Some free textures that could be used in presentations.

Here are the Daily Shoot ideas of what to take a photo of each day.