In Web 2.0 classrooms, teachers encourage students to use social networking for collaborative work. This article delves into the issue of safety in regards to social networks. It provides five links to websites, which help students become aware of the possible dangers of social networking. The article summarizes the different links, discussing the particular purpose and audience of the linked site. Some the sites even provide resources for parents and teachers.

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.

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?

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