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This teacher makes a really strong argument that you should not feel that you have nothing important to say. This is the way to make some strong networked relationships. I like her quote "This has led to many great conversations with other educators about teaching issues." Blogging has connected her to peers throughout the world. I find that being an online educator is lonely so this may be the way to go to share resources and to discuss with others that share our online world.

I really enjoyed reading this article because I'm feeling the same excitement as the author did when she first began blogging. While I'm just learning how to "officially" blog, I have been using Edmodo with my students as a way to connect with my students outside my classroom. It allows us to communicate and ask questions to one another outside of normal school hours, yet in a more structured classroom like forum, unlike Facebook. But because it works similar to Facebook, the students love it and don't mind logging on and doing their assignments. One day when I was out sick, I was able to log on an have real time discussions with my students. If they had questions about the assignment they were able to ask. They can also turn in their assignments via Edmodo instead of waiting for the next day/week. My feelings are if the students are into it, then it's something we need to be doing as well to keep up with them. Teachers who use Web 2.0 tools such as blogging have an advantage over those that don't because these are the social networks that students know and are familiar with. Also, the author of this article points out the fact that teachers have a new way of connecting to each other and share ideas. From what I remember when I was younger, the traditional teacher's only way of communicating and sharing ideas or concerns with other teachers were via phone or before/after school meetings. I don't know how often that actually happened, but now with blogging you can share your information any time with any body.

This article explores ways to enhance online communication between students.

Rob Kelly discusses how to he used online discussion boards in a skills based course. This concept could be followed for any type of study group. Given students learn best when they not only teach the information but share and collaborate with others, this idea enhances the learning process.

I'm the only Accounting teacher and have been teaching for 2 years at the high school level. I feel this article does a great job not just on how discussion boards can help and guide deeper levels of thinking among Accounting students, but provides the opportunity to take baby steps including technology in the classroom and push critical thinking. I can appreciate this article greatly because I believe we all learn through experience and as Gee mentions, some of the students have worked in the field and may be able to offer their peers another insight.

This is a brief article describing the Adobe Creative Suite update to 6.0. Aside from listing the latest updates, he most interesting part of this article is that Adobe is introducing the Creative Cloud. If you follow the link about the cloud it unveils a whole knew way of creative possibilities. The Creative Cloud is something I want to look into for our classroom. I am wondering if it is an alternative to purchasing hefty licenses every year.

I have a hard time imagining the powerful suite of Adobe apps working well in the cloud. For this cloud service to work, I would imagine one needing a seriously fast and reliable Internet connection. None the less, I am really excited to see if this lives up to the promises. Thanks for sharing.

I use Photoshop all the time at my school. I'm looking forward to what CS6 has to offer. Want to research more on The Creative Cloud. So far what I know, I like.

This is an academic paper examining the reasons why an online learning group should 'move ... from cohort to community.' (abstract), and how students resources and strategies may be managed to accomplish this. The paper asserts that students in a distance learning situation are isolated from each other and the teacher, therefore it is of vital importance that the cohort needs to create a sense of community rather than simply exist alone in the virtual learning room. The article quotes Vygotsky's social development theory of 1978, Selznik's seven elements of community: history, identity, mutuality, plurality, autonomy, participation, and integration (1996), and how the author's of the article modified the characteristics to conform more with current online learning theory. I found this article particularly relevant to the current situation I find myself in. Even though I am happy in my own space and don't need the close interaction with others, I can see that it is important to push myself forward in the sense of gleaning the most benefit from the course and those many intelligent people out there. This is difficult for me because I find the time necessary to maintain so many contacts, and actually have something worthwhile to say and share goes against my slow, ponderous thinking and non-gregarious nature!

I created this as a presentation tool for a school law class a few years ago. Our assignment was to research a current topic and share that with the class. I thought that this would be a way to make it seem relevant and purposeful. I wonder if I were to rewrite this...what would I change?

I found a link from the Newstand that connected me to an article from mashable.com, which discusses a new educational program from the people at TED talks. The program allows teachers to turn any YouTube video, including TED talks into a lesson. The article aligned this new tool with the phenomenon of flipping classrooms. To flip a classroom means to prepare a lesson that students can complete at home. The pedagogical foundation of flipped classes is connected to project-based learning. The proponents of this approach believe if students can cover lessons at home, then classroom time could be used for collaborative student projects. The new TED-Ed program allows for teachers to create a unique URL, where student can access the video as well as a series of questions. The types of questions vary from multiple choices, to short answer, to more high order thinking questions. These HOT questions expand the ideas from the video into high order thinking akin to Bloom's Taxonomy. The TED-Ed team is also producing their own educational videos, which are a collaboration between educators and animators. At this point there aren't many of the TED-Ed videos produced, but the ones I explored are quite interesting. The mashable.com article has links to TED-Ed. I am not the biggest proponent of flipped teaching, but I am intrigued by TED's involvement.

"Kurt Wootton, co-author of A Reason to Read. "In my view, the repetition must not come before allowing students to participate in the creative tasks, but rather repeated practice walks side-by-side with the creative process."" I find this statement to "hit the nail on the head" as the debate between rote memory and creative "aha" moments continue. The analogy of the musician practicing for hours playing scales as well as note for note renditions of other's work is appropriate to this discussion. The book, "Outliers",by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses the 10,000 hour rule. To paraphrase; To become world class at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice. The author's examples range from Bill Gates to The Beatles. When two sides are set up as an US vs THEM debate, it misses the oppoprtunity to combine perfect practice with creative inspiration. Putting together a perfect meal is based on proper choices of various food combinations. Putting together a perfect learning environment is very similar in that a combination of repetitive learning and creative opportunity helps the learning as well as creative process.

"Kurt Wootton, co-author of A Reason to Read. "In my view, the repetition must not come before allowing students to participate in the creative tasks, but rather repeated practice walks side-by-side with the creative process."" I find this statement to "hit the nail on the head" as the debate between rote memory and creative "aha" moments continue. The analogy of the musician practicing for hours playing scales as well as note for note renditions of other's work is appropriate to this discussion. The book, "Outliers",by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses the 10,000 hour rule. To paraphrase; To become world class at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice. The author's examples range from Bill Gates to The Beatles. When two sides are set up as an US vs THEM debate, it misses the oppoprtunity to combine perfect practice with creative inspiration. Putting together a perfect meal is based on proper choices of various food combinations. Putting together a perfect learning environment is very similar in that a combination of repetitive learning and creative opportunity helps the learning as well as creative process.

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.

I have never been a fan of lecturing during class...for either the high school or college classes I teach. If there is information I need to share, I will always use a Power Point (or something similar) and then make those files available for students to download. But even when presenting information in this manner, I continue to engage students with questions, asking for real life examples, etc. And I limit the time, or break it up with another activity. It seems to work pretty well and the ideas from this article pretty much confirm what I have always felt about the lecture style class.

A discussion of "disruptive innovations" and how online learning can be used in brick and mortar schools to engage students in richer, more complex learning experience and increase student/teacher interactions.

The article explains the importance of Problem-Based Learning in Education. It is crucial to create lessons that incorporate interesting, safe and useful activities.

I read this and thought how true it is that giving feedback to students taking an online course...or working on a website etc. is as important as feedback we give on essay writing, reading, speaking and listening. Feedback is a key communication tool for students to know where they stand. As is any feedback - provided it is constructive.

An Interesting "brochure" categorizing Ipad apps using Blooms taxonomy of thinking skills; remembering, understanding, creating,  applying, evaluating & analyzing. A handy guide for how to use in the classroom.

I am glad for the realistic easy viewing of Bloom's taxonomy of skills. Using the iPad in the classroom it is a good quick reference to see what apps I am already using and promoting that my students use as well as which apps I would like to promote with enhancement of other skills.

I am not sure I agree with the categorization on many of these and I definitely do not think it is all inclusive. It is interesting though.

This site gave a quick tutorial on how to use Adobe Presenter 8. It seemed like an easy video and voice tool to use. It reminded me of a you tube video and it was a little like animoto. It was hard to tell with the brief overview. This presentation tool could lead to some real creativty for use in projects at school. I read a lot of articles while I was in newsstand icnluding: Tech in the Classroom: Earbud yo-yo, and Social Learning networks promote student engagement, global awareness, but I thought the Adobe Presenter was the most creative.

The article looks at how to shift from limited classroom instruction focused on lecture, homework, discussion, memorization to using the web as a tool to expand the learning experience. Imagine getting a tweet from a student who is outraged when Lennie kills Curly's wife in Of Mice and Men? Aaron Iffland explains how to make your classroom viral while requiring students to engage more in their own learning.

I like this article and I think students learn best by doing. I think I am addicted to my phone. I can paly games, read, wrtie, email and socialize all at the sametime. It's fun and educational!

Have you ever thought, "Gosh, I wish I had time to learn more about Flickr, wikis, or (enter your Web 2.0 tool here)?" Well, this is your chance to take the time to focus on your personal and professional development around Web 2.0 tools. It's fun to explore these tools and figure out ways to use them in the library, with your personal Web sites, or in other ways.

I will give Zoho a look. We use google docs at my school now. Each staff member and student was given an account with the same extension. With so many sites to choose from it takes time to see which ones you lke. Google docs seems to show up in many articles.

Zoho Writer looks interesting as you need to be invited to participate. Google Docs are used extensively within our school, though I only used them for our NGY Ning project last year. We also use Google Docs for attendance in our after school programs.

This is a review of a new app for iPad users. It allows users to share photographs and layouts with each other, keeping what they like. It also permits easy feedback to contributors via Twitter or blogs. Additionally, users can tag what they have kept so it's easier to find in the future when they want to use it. Although the reviewer's intersts are not explicit, the software appears to be useful for collaborative creation, and it's freeware.

I like that this app has a starting point so a person doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. Seeing what other people have done already to get ideas is always helpful and a time saver. I like this one.

I like this article and after buying my iphone and playing with an iPad; I don't think I can ever go back to android. LOL

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.

Throughout the ages of educational ideas and philosophies teachers have been big fans of having their students keep a journal. Journals are kept in language arts, foreign language classes, and I have seen them in science classes. Students don't particularly like doing them unless they enjoy writing. If given a choice between keeping a journal in their spiral notebook and keeping it online, I would wager that a majority of students in this digital age will prefer to keep it online. So why not give them the choice and tool of Penzu.

This article made me think of some of our discussion topics this week about blogging and how it engages students. I had wondered about the use of threaded discussions rather than a blog. However, this article focuses on how students preferred the blogging. They felt an online discussion was more academic whereas blogging allowed students to engage with their learning by applying to their existing lives and knowledge base. Students felt they could develop their own voice and create a more meaningful sense of community with their online classmates. I thought this was interesting because I have used both forms in my VHS and f2f classes. I really find the threaded discussions to be more productive, but it appears that students feel the blogging is more productive. I will need to rethink my tools.

Brenda offers some great suggestions and ideas for using Voicethread in classes. Brenda suggests using Voicethread as an assessment tool for teachers but I am thinking it might be a great tool for students to assess/comment on each other as well.

Laurel, I agree that students could also use Voicethread in class as a tool for commenting on peers' work. I could see groups viewing each other's work and offering feedback, as well. I like that you can add images to this. Have you used Voicethread before? I will have to spend some time checking this out.