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This is a "news" article written to announce Skype's international collaborative efforts in education. For example, there are programs with orchestras and museums that classes can participate in, thus offering students the possiblity of interacting live with authors, musicians and the like. Although it contains useful information, it should be understood that this is essentially an advertisement for Skype.

This is a link to a video of a high school that uses only Project-Based learning PBL, a teaching/learning style where students create projects to demonstrate their learning of the objectives set out by the teacher. It goes through the process of how to set up PBL projects as teachers. It's a decent introduction to the process: something to pique one's interest. At the end there are links to other videos with more information about PBL.

Project-based learning has come to the forefront of education as it is being used to assess what the students know and how they can use the knowledge in the "real world" to problem solve. The approach by the school to implement PBL into their curriculum goes directly back to state standards. I thought the video was well informed and I was impressed with the 60-65 times the students speak in front of others (public speaking).

Go inside Manor New Technology High School, part of the New Tech Network of schools, where an unwavering commitment to an effective schoolwide PBL model keeps both students and teachers motivated and achieving their best. More to this story.

Spaaze is a website that allows for the simple creation of a virtual cork board. It is extremely dynamic and easy to use. You can add video, images, files, titles, and notes all in one spot so your students can have easy access to unit material. The canvass size of Spaaze is huge so you can add quite a few units to one canvass.

Create awesome animated maps. Have your students create a roadmap of places they have been. Have students add video and pictures of those places and create a timeline on how long it took for the trip.

PBS Learning Resources is an excellent site for teachers and students to find educational films as well as other media types such as sound, images, and lesson plans. This site has a couple thousand videos for you to see. These videos are all free.

A timeglider is a web-based timeline software for creating and sharing history and project planning. Our computer apps students learn about the history of computers and technology. The timeglider I looked at could incorporate video sound and images. I also think the timeglider would be fantastic in a history class. It could make the lesson so much more interactive and engaging, rather than just listening to a teacher lecture.

This site provides a number of videos featuring a wide array of assessment issues: from the needs of today's students to using data from online assessments.

math videos made by students

Storify is a website which allows you to make stories using tweets, photos, videos, or anything on-line. Storify creates a file by gathering content from all over the web and putting into one place (making a story).

Interesting interview with Dr. Chris Dede, Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, about using technology in the classroom and re-imagining teaching and learning. You need to be a member of the Thinkfinity Community to view the video.

This was a very good video and put into perspective what the 21st Century Learning Classroom would be like.

This is a How-To guide for using Acrobat to create, edit, and interact with assessments. This includes adding and commenting on video and audio elements in the document. We have this program on our school computers so it may be worth giving this a shot!

This is a collection of movie clips in which Mathematics appears

This link accesses a number of articles based on the model of the "flipped" classroom. In this model, students view videos as homework and engage in collaborative learning activities tied to their homework. This approach advocates for, and emphasizes, less teacher "lecture" and more student collaboration engagement, while in the progecss, the application of higher level thinking skills.

This article showcases a great new tool which will can be used as a creative way to teach, share, and create information. Jux allows students to briefly outline an idea or theme, connect those words with pictures, and display the words concurrently with a slideshow, photos, videos etc.It allows students the creative latitude to design their own presentation and also match up concepts with an audio and visual system.

Here is an amazing Prezi focusing on the creative potential inherent in collaboration, social networking, and humanity's learning to collectively think "outside the box." The link to the Prezi is via Eric Tremblay's blog titled, "e-Learning Acupuncture." Enjoy.

After viewing the award winning Prezi, I can see just how creative we can get using a Prezi. I enjoyed the History for Music video presentation set to Lady Gaga's song. Now that was pretty impressive!

I loved the History for Music Lovers video presentation set to Lady Gaga's song! Spectacular! The award winning Prezi in the shape of a musical staff sign is also special. "Oh the places we will go!" (Dr. Seuss)

This article, written by EDUDEMIC author, Jeff Dunn, offers 5 distinct reasons why schools need to move toward Digital Textbooks/ebooks as opposed to traditional paper books/texts. He begins by adding support to his stance by citing Ed Secretary, Arne Duncan's call to make "textbooks obsolete". Among Dunn's reasons and pertinent to our Media/Inform Literacy discussion are these ideas: Using digital texbooks or ebooks on line, allows for students to interact with the book. Some books have videos, highlighting/notetaking features, moveable models and interactive diagrams. In addition, such technological books are more immediate-they are simply accessed by the press of a button. Arne Duncan also remarked that the US is lagging behind other countries in converting to these computerized books. With states desiring a lead position in education in the US, and Obama's push (Connect Ed) campaign to have all schools connected (internet/computer/tech), this transition to Digital Text/ebooks seems a likely probability-and exciting one too. Though sitting back, especially in a beach chair, with a paper book still holds an appeal for me.

There are some amazing tools listed on these sites, including a Mind42 map of Web 2.0 Tools. I can see that my map is quite lacking compared to these. But, now I have an idea as to what to aim for. It would be great to set my students loose of some of these tools. "If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow." (John Dewey). This has been one of my favourite quotes along with "We need to prepare our students/children for jobs that have not been created yet" (Unknown). For me, they sum up what we as teachers need to strive for and that we need to keep on trying to stretch ourselves and our students...after all, we are 13% of the way through the 21st Century. It's exciting.

This article discusses 5 technology tools to help teachers incorporate differentiated instruction into any lesson. These tools appeal to different learning styles and individual strengths. Advanced students can be challenged and struggling students can receive help. The 5 programs/tools cited are Museum Box, The Elements, Garage Band, Intro to Math, and Dragon Dictation.

Each of the apps listed in this article deserve a glance, some especially for the younger grades and special education. Garage Band appeals to all ages - my colleague uses it to set poems to music in her 2nd grade class. I hope to have students use it this year as background to a video. The Elements app is awesome! (I just spent an hour checking it out - I was completely swept away and so not focused on the task at hand.) I can also imagine an group project with Museum Box, that would appeal to the ultra-organized students. This article really showcases just how technology and all the ensuing apps has something for every student to latch on to and feel success with.

This news article points out the different ways sound and visual technology can enhance student learning. No longer are students just creating information blogs, but they are able to include sound in their projects and blogs, using Chrome Classroom. Different applications are: BookTrak, BioDigital Human, Pixir, Geddit and MoveNote. All are programs used in the classroom to enhance learning by bring visual and sound into the students learning. Using the BioDigital Human on Chromebook and see the different parts of the body come alive using video and sound can only improve a student's memory. Three different senses experiencing the learning at the same time.