Web 2.0: Enhancing Education Through Technology

A fabulous article about assessing student learning throught the use of digital portfolios. Audio commentary, photos and more are all gathered in a portfolio throughout the year to assess their learning. A great tool for special needs students!

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.

Dabbleboard is a great place for students to have the ability to draw collaboratively. If you have an assignment where students are required to diagram or draw then this site might be useful.

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

Summaries the benefits of blogging: blogging is public, we are more attentive to quality of work; blogging creates a person-centered discussion; and blogging "encourages higher levels of reasoning-- at times upper levels--analyzing, evaluating, and creating--of Bloom's Taxonomy" and ways to get started.

This blog post describes the Web 2.0 tools that are being used in the author's school to help students reach each level of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Provides a clear and thoughtful description of how to align Bloom's taxonomy (higher order of thinking skills - HOTS) with new technologies. I like that fact that it covers doing Advanced Boolean searches as well as utilizing web tools for student evaluation of HOTS.

Thank you for sharing this article. I plan to use excerpts of this piece with my students. The connections between "action verbs" and "digital verbs" in the thinking process is excellent. I will be interested to hear my students' perspectives on how the use of digital learning tools helps them develop their thinking and understanding of new concepts.

This website page has many Web2.0 based apps and some interesting thinking on creativity and innovation in harmony with constructivist teaching methodologies. 'The teacher takes on the role of a facilitator, guide, and co-learner as much as is possible. Learning is driven by students, and it is immersive, flexible, and responsive to student needs and goals. Constructivists value creativity, through writing, designing applications, and making works of art.' Randy Roberts

Socrative is an awesome tool used in Education to gain a better understanding of what our students have learned or are learning during a lesson by getting. In this post about socrative we see how it can be used assess writing in the classroom.

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.

Zamzar is an awesome tool for educators who are going the extra mile trying to use technology in the classroom. Too many times educators receive files from other schools or colleagues that just don't work on their computer because of different operating systems and software platforms. With Zamzar you can take files of many different file types and have them be converted to another file type. There isn't any software that needs to be downloaded; just internet access.

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.

A very cool site that matches up iPad apps with learning objectives.

There are so many things out... some good, some bad, so when I find a resource that has done some of the leg work for me, I'm always interested.

Wow, What great tools? We are thinking about incorporating apps into the Web Development class next year. Very excellent sources and information. Thanks for sharing Sterling!

University students create videos for younger, k12 students to help inspire future computer science students. This is two fold. The process of creating the video also reinforces topics mastered while benefiting society.

This is amazing on so many levels. Thanks for sharing. For us- great teaching resources, but also a great learning tool for the MIT students.

Technology competition opportunities for students.

This site was great. Our students compete in a few contests, but there is no comparison to what is out there for them to explore.

What I liked about the site and the TSA overall is that it is STEM related. Not specific to content area but general to all technology courses. Had many types of technical competitions. A change from FBLA or Robotics competitions which are specific.

This article gives reasons why schools should encourage tweeting among their student body. It shows the benefits of connecting students to students, teachers, parents and the entire community. Reading this article could give the reader new ideas for communicating and connecting using a popular Web 2.0 tool.

This article has merit from the perspective of a district principal. The 12 reasons are aligned with the school mission statement and since Tweeter is free, it is accessible to all stakeholders in the school community. It suggests that parents receive training in the tool to build two-way communications. Tweeter will help build a Personal Learning Network (PLN) and allows for anytime, anywhere PD, and that it is easier to send a tweet than it is to correct a webpage. The last reason #12 actually seems to be the most important in that students can make a connection not with only one mentor but with "a million other mentors" to learn from using Tweeter.

Some things to think about if you are considering using infographics.

Four years ago we toured the Portland HS. They were all warm and fuzzy about their new 1:1 student laptops. We asked about blocking sites and they stated they were teaching responsible use over locking everything down. We must teach responsible use but everyone needs to realize that the lure of wasting time on connected devices is too much for many of them.

/we began our 1:1 initiative 5 years ago and each year we have a different image for the students. We have several eBooks and programs which are used for curriculum. Deep freeze was installed to prevent "distractions" and DyKnow is used by teachers to keep students on track. The district filters based on the State guidelines. Teaching guidelines really doesn't work, neither does locking the system--it prevents so much education using Web 2.0 tools. I'm not sure there is a happy balance unless the students are mature enough or afraid of consequences. Taking the tablet away hasn't helped either.

This is the first of three shows in which talk about Howard Rheingold's new book, Net Smart, How to Thrive Online.

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.