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A great article that discusses some of the potential uses for technology and communication beyond the walls of the classroom. Through the use of the internet, online programs, and direct communications like Skype, Edmodo, and other instant messaging, students can attend the classroom, even if they can't get to the school on days of weather inconvenience. Snow, Water damage, bomb scares, you name it. Provided that the students could access the internet and had power, the school could exist for that day. Part of the issue is getting kids to realize that the learning can occur outside of the classroom. Another part is that sometimes snow days occur at very inopportune time, like right before benchmark/standardized tests. But, it appears that for the most part the article discusses saving money and keeping the schooling going, when the weather won't allow it. Not sure how many snow days your school has but... not the biggest issue for me. But then there is the other side of this issue. Some parents, and myself included, agree that there just isn't enough time off in the winter. Go to school in the dark, leave in the dark, creates no time for play, no time for a mental break from the classroom. And in a world where students have been accused of not spending enough time outside being kids, I would have a difficult time as a teacher expecting to see them sign in to my classroom, when I was also outside playing on one of those mythical "Snow Days."

This article discusses a couple of new books that are being published to help train teachers in blended and online learning models. It is a series of lessons that other teachers have had to learn in order to create high learning thinking skills.

This article discusses the disagreement between administrators and teachers regarding online safety taught at school.

Survey conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Microsoft revealed that students are not savvy in the area of being safe and ethical in cyberspace. Schools, teachers and administrators need to bridge the divide for students to not only be safe, but skillful digital information users.

Seeing as we "talked" a lot about blogging policy and digital ethics this week, I thought this was a perfect information literacy article.

This discusses the world-wide impact of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) but also where they fall short. They lack the relationship between teacher and student which can be so important to learners. In fact, they said that less than 10% of those who sign up for MOOCs actually complete the course. The access to such a great opportunity to learn is wonderful, but not sufficient for all.

This article written by two Danish academics, Johan Jessen and Anker Helms Jorgensen, discusses the issue of determining whether sources are credible and how we can do this online. They explain the credibility can be random and that perceived trustworthiness plus perceived expertise equals perceived credibility. However, they put forth that aggregated trustworthiness can actually be an accurate determination of whether information is credible. Readers can look at "likes" and user evaluations to determine if a source is trustworthy. As users of Web 2.0 tools we must become media literate and be able to determine which sources are trustworthy.

School district implements common planning time and allows teachers to collaborate using a wike for lesson plans and web links to enhance classroom teaching.

Thank you for sharing that example of the wiki and teacher sharing. I may discuss this to be a possible option for a professional day for my own dept members as we look to design our own text.

This article is about the Big6 and how to use it with Web2. They talk about how to use the Big6 with email, online discussions, real-time communications, desktop teleconferencing and collaborative writing. It fits into the Research and Information Fluency Remixed. I liked the format on another site http://www.librarymediaconnection.com/pdf/lmc/reviews_and_articles/featured_articles/Eisenberg_May_June2010.pdf but found I had to put the address into Google in order to access it. The URL did not work.