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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.

Create interactive and informative educational timelines in an extremely easy manner. Students will love being given the option of creating a timeline. Use Timerime for history, art, science, social studies or just about any subject in which they are required to understand the time frame at which events occurred.

Some useful strategies for creating effective presentations.  While the audience this writer is addressing is creating presentations for adult professionals, there are many useful strategies that can be integrated by any teacher. This post covers not just how to create the presentation, but also strategies for delivery as well.  It could be useful for helping teachers learn how to overcome the "traditional" Powerpointless presentation.

I found the suggestions useful but also really liked the link to places to get photos to use in presentations. Much more professional then google images.

What a better way to promote collaboration by students than for a student to create his own social networking site for his high school.

I wonder what program he used to create the social media website.

webs.com

Hohli charts is a simple method of creating dynamic data sets that then display as charts and graphs. This web 2.0 tool would be great and simple for students to use in a k-12 educational setting.

This article introduces a contest which promotes reading and media skills that began in 2008. It is sponsored by major publishers such as Simon and Schuster and Scholastic and 5 regional libraries, The contest is for students in grades 1-6. The students need to create a storytube on a book they have read. It is important to point out that teachers are not replacing a written report or are using this to enhance the report. I reviewed some of the winners and it is so great to see kids excited about what they read and using technology so easily. With students creating video media at such an early age and being so comfortable doing it only leads me to believe that when these students reach high school the work that they will create will be fantastic.

This article originally appeared in SLJ’s Extra Helping. Sign up now! By Jennifer Pinkowski -- School Library Journal, 07/09/2008 Funny accents, strange wigs, and spoiler-free plot summaries are the common elements in the winning videos made by contestants in StoryTubes, a new contest for kids that promotes reading-and new media skills-by capitalizing on the popularity of YouTube.

This link explains how libraries are using the power and popularity of YouTube to promote learning, literacy, creativity and technology. StoryTube is a great project idea that uses the power of the contest as a wonderful motivator.

Use PrimaryWall to create a virtual cork board/sticky note website that can be used for student interaction with a lesson. Easy to use and taylored to the K-8 teacher's classroom.

Platform for combining writing and stories from social media into a unique mashup. Once signed in, create a story by searching various social media platforms for content. For example, you can search Twitter for a certain keyword or hashtag. Then, drag selected content into the story pane. Content from multiple searches can be included in one story. The key feature is the ability to add text throughout the story. For example, you could ask students to take a stance on the budget battles in the U.S. Content from social media and the web can be pulled into the story. Then, students create their own content, justifying or disagreeing with the stories incorporated into the story. Completed stories are published and then shared. Give Storify a try for current events projects as well as teaching media literacy.

blogging platform for posts larger than Twitter and smaller than a traditional blog. Posts are usually rich with a combination of text and multimedia. A unique feature is the ability to "tumble" blog posts. This takes a post of a friend and posts it on your page. If you use Twitter, this is similar to retweeting. Tumblr is a nice tool for teachers and older students but everyone will need accounts. Create an account for your class and have your students create accounts as well. Then, follow your students' accounts and vice-versa. Now you are all connected and can interact in numerous ways. Your students now have an excellent vehicle for all manner of writing and multimedia projects.

Brainflips is an excellent place to create multimedia flashcards that your students can use while studying your vocabulary words.

My Carnigie's story maker is an excellent tool that can be used for teaching creative writing to your students. With this tool, students will be able to create a story in minutes, with animation if desired, and then share their story with somebody else or even create a print out.  My Carnigie Story Maker is extremely user friendly and students can get started within minutes and won't need much training to do so.  Students will be able to get their creative juices flowing as they practice their English Language skills and if you happen to be a Foreign Language teacher, this site would be great for your students as well.

"A Glog is like an online poster. Students can be creative by using graphics, photos, videos, music and text to create Glogs. Students can create pictures/diagrams/graphs in other programs such as Kidspiration and use them in their Glogs. They can also take photos of their original drawings to display in their Glog."

This educational web 2.0 tutorial demonstrates a great online method of taking collected data with your classroom and inputing the information into a chart in just a couple of easy steps. Create cutomized data charts simply.

Chartle is an awesome site that allows students and teachers the ability to create dynamic and graphic charts based upon data collected in the classroom. This site is extremely easy to use and can be easily used across most grade levels. Click the link to view a short tutorial and example of what Chartle is.

Two teachers collaborating together with Biology, art and technology to create a video on DNA.

For any teacher that wants to experience what cross disciplinary, project based teaching and learning can be, I recommend the short video, " Team Teaching: Two Teachers, Three subjects, One Project http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ASO9FM6gDLs The video explores the opportunities that exist when a traditional physiology topic, blood, is integrated with multimedia. The results are motivating. The viewer experiences art and science coming together under the umbrella of one topic. The team teaching approach is aided by the fact that teachers begin their day an hour before students in order to meet and coordinate the team approach. Students engage in research as they work toward creating multimedia presentations that are placed on display at a local art gallery in order to promote blood donation. This project based approach allows students to share their works with a large audience while creating a community connection with the local blood bank as well as the local art gallery. The teachers guide students through the project and become a resource, rather than only a "holder of knowledge". Students are given real world deadlines and are held accountable by their teachers through online digital portfolios. The exciting part of this project, for teachers interested in attempting this approach to learning, is the opportunity it provides for the teacher to grow outside of their normal curriculum.

From the Free Technology for Teachers blog, I found an entry about web search lesson plans created by Google. From our previous readings, I've come to understand research strategies as a major component of media literacy. In the blog, there are links to the Google created lessons. The plans are developed according to skill level. I find this an interesting and helpful teacher resource; however, there are some search categories, which are quite elementary, if not useless. Student's research habits are often deplorable, so these tutorials point them in generally useful directions. It is necessary for our students to develop strategies for differentiating between poor resources and rich, academic sources. Is Google created strategies the best option?

It appears this link may be dead

Hi Kevin, I am sorry about the dead end link. If you are still interested try here: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/05/web-search-lesson-plans-from-google.html

'We do not need to teach creativity, but rather inspire its daily practice.' This opening sentence is intriguing yet inspiring to me. As said in the title, this article introduces 18 apps to support students developing creativity at different thinking stages. The writer also suggests some practical strategies which could be incorporated in our daily teaching practice. Nevertheless, what strikes me more is the reminder that we, as a class, school, or community, need to build a culture of trust in the first place to cultivate culture of creativity and innovation.

What a great article about creativity.  What I loved is that the article states that schools do not need to teach creativity.  Schools need to foster it by providing students a safe place to take risks and providing them tools that make that risk taking possible.  Creativity is about finding solutions to problems using one's own ideas and thinking skills.  Students can do this when given the power and opportunities to do so.

Like Chris, the opening to this post caught my eye. "We do not need to teach creativity, but rather inspire its daily practice." Ms. Darrow's article captures the importance of creating a school that values it's students, encourages them to take some risks, and lets them practice these skills with abandon. With support and coaching from teachers, students can work through the steps outlined in this article using technology to streamline the process, help them develop real life/career skills, and appeal to their interest in digital media. I like how Darrow labels this process; there are clear steps to increase understanding. Collaboration or group work can use this format as well, group members' jobs are easily created with the resulting structure. It also creates natural places to scaffold the process for individualizing learning in a classroom full of all kinds of learners. Each activity we do in a class may not need all these steps and some may need more, but I plan to keep this article in mind as I tweak my courses this summer.

This article gives a great example of how a librarian created a lesson that uses many web 2.0 tools while students demonstrated their media literacy skills.

By using libguide a Boston Librarian was able to create a lesson for students to learn about an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. Using libguide allowed her to combine news links, a Delicious linkroll, an RSS feed, and a Google Map that compares the relative size of the spill to Manhattan, Paris, and other global cities.

This article is about how the Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning has changed. The new higher order thinking is the following. Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing, Applying, Understanding, Remembering. The article also includes the three domains of learning: Cognitive, Affective, Psychomotor.  As stated in the article, Bloom's Taxonomy was create in 1956 and the old taxonomy included the following: Evaluation, Synthesis, Analysis, Application, Comprehension and Knowledge. The auther feels the new taxonomy , "reflects a more active form of thinking and is perhaps more accurate".- See more at: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html#sthash.BeAdOInN.dpuf. Questions to ask are how does the new technology fit into the new definition of "Bloom's Taxonomy". At what stage will all education require technology as the main component and source for educating students?

Taking a risk means that failure is an option. Many students may see taking a risk as a negative. If we want students to take risks, we must not only create an environment that encourages students to take risks, but makes risk taking seem like the best option.

This article talks about how to encourage students to take risks in the classroom. These "risks" can range from just questioning to imagining to trying out something new. This is a very important higher order thinking skill that many students have trouble comprehending and acting on because they would rather stick with what they know (or what they think will get them the highest grade). I think the ideas in the article can be applied to high school classrooms as well as college classrooms.

A great article about helping students be more creative by incorporating risk-taking activities in the classroom. Create an environment where taking risks are rewarded. Also start with small risk-taking activities and build up into more complex ones.