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Powerful ideas for all lovers of personal and political freedom - Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web, and was a Top 10 Finalist in the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Podcast Awards. Topics range from politics to philosophy to science to economics to relationships to atheism - and how to achieve real freedom in your life today. Passionate, articulate, funny and irreverent, Freedomain Radio shines a bold light on old topics, and invents a few new ones to boot!

Merits of Project-Based Learning. This is where I want my teaching to head back to. In career and technical education I did a lot of projects with my kids. Not so much lately and really want to move back to this because I really believe that it works!

It made me want to do more than I do. I cannot afford to use "time" as an excuse. Good learning from PBL's takes time and there are many benefits including providing applications to the teaching and answering the question "why do we need to learn about this?"

This article provides four points to increase parent involvement and communication: 1) Make a case for increased parent involvement, 2) Reach out to parents who want to make a connection, 3) Find ways to involve families in school culture, 4) Make the commitment to join the conversation with other teachers and parents. Within each of these four points, there are various links to more actively engage with tips, articles, and discussion groups.

Every school has a need to increase parent involvement for a variety of reasons, with such intended results as a better sense of "community" among families, faculty and students, improved student achievement, and the like. This can be a challenge for all these entities. It's helpful from time to time to have reminders of strategies that work.

Motivate and Engage Students with Web 2.0 Teaching Tools Hook even the most reluctant learners with Web 2.0 teaching tools. Boost your students' academic achievement with these Web 2.0 applications. Revitalize your lessons by integrating these instructional technology tools into your teaching plans.Web 2.0 sites come and go.

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.

61 slides with definition of portfolios, reasons to use them, google tools to use, and examples. "Portfolios are purposeful collection of work that exhibits efforts, progress, and achievements over time"

An interesting look at an "objective" method of assessing student work. Rather than looking at the Web 2.0 tool, this looks at the level of Bloom achieved and the amount of time spent.

A teacher explains how she uses creative inspiration and blogging technology to help students achieve better writing results.

How using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Edmodo can enable formative assessment and improve student achievement. Students become more engaged in learning through the use of these tools in the classroom

This site overviews the importance of using media in instruction and provides some Web 2.0 tools to achieve animation for teaching.

This is a very cool article. I loved the comparison of a teachers introduction of education background is compared to a computer " It's like going to Dell's website to shop for a computer and getting nothing but photos of the factories and descriptions of how the computers were built." Use a video to introduce ourselves and explain all we can do in the classroom. We should be making them look forward to what they can do during the year with me. Very Cool.

This is a very cool article. I loved the comparison of a teachers introduction of education background is compared to a computer " It's like going to Dell's website to shop for a computer and getting nothing but photos of the factories and descriptions of how the computers were built." Use a video to introduce ourselves and explain all we can do in the classroom. We should be making them look forward to what they can do during the year with me. Very Cool.

This article uses well researched data to support the use of interactive white boards such as Promethean or Mimio. It concludes that use by experienced teachers can increase student achievement by allowing teachers to better chunk and scaffold information and better monitor student progress.

The author encourages educators to take control of their own learning and to remember how important is their role in encouraging students when embracing new tools to develop creativity and innovation; students need to be guided to realize that the technology they use to socialize may be use to connect to experts in topics of their interest, and to collaborate with them.

This article suggests how to use Web 2.0 tools to assess students in the digital age. The article has many useful links. I wish that the examples of the actual rubrics were larger. Overall, I found the article to quite helpful.

How do we assess students' learning in these in Web 2.0 environments? We want to go beyond assessing the mere mechanics of using these tools; unfortunately, most current rubrics for Web 2.0 learning devote only a minuscule amount (usually 16% or less) to actual student academic learning.

This article is about standards-based learning and 21st century skills. How to improve student learning through teacher's decisions and technology. He has a excellent list of rubrics Web 2.0 tools. Some examples "rubrics" are......Wiki/Blog, Images/Photo/Flickr, Video/YouTube,Podcast, Social Bookmarking, Twitter, Videoconferencing, General Assessment: Prensky's 21st century skills, General Assessment: enGauge's 21st century skills, General Assessment: Partnership for 21st century skills. I really liked the links and rubrics and found them very helpful. However the rubrics were small and a little hard to read.

This Prezi about Bloom's Taxonomy was a good example of a basic Prezi.. Each slide presented the six levels and the objectives for each level. I liked how each slide had websites you could use to strengthen the skills needed to master each level. Example: Remembering, was the first level in the Bloom's Taxonomy and this slide showed how a student might use the website, SpellingCity.com or use flashcards to help them remember the information the teacher presented. The Prezi showed the six levels and ways to achieve or master the level presented.