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A great list of techie type teachers to follow on Twitter. One click follows them all!

"Summer has officially started for many of you! I know that you will probably be relaxing for the first few days, but eventually you may feel the need to be inspired and motivated for the upcoming school year! Social media provides us with incredible opportunities to choose the way we want to develop professionally. You can choose the topic, the medium, and who you want to learn from. You can choose the way you like to learn, because social media provides us with several multimedia experiences, such as webinars, LMS, live video, and more. The experience is usually dynamic and motivating because you are learning with others around the world! Additionally, you will be developing your Personal/ Passionate Learning Network (PLN)."

"These free instructional modules were developed by education faculty and professional developers for their colleagues. They can be employed as extension units in existing courses or can be used independently in workshops and meetings. Each module includes articles, video footage, PowerPoint presentations, and class activities. They draw from the wealth of the Foundation's archives of best practices and correlate with ISTE/NCATE NETS standards."

Professional Development is no longer a "one-size fits all" experience. There are many different free technology tools that can be used to deliver sustainable professional development. Administrators, Teachers and Staff can experience professional development in their classroom, office, school district or even from the comfort of home. This workshop will give you free and different ways to deliver professional development to your staff and colleagues, keeping in mind that all of us, at some time or another, feel like the teacher in the teacher tube video below.

This list was set up in response to requests for help in finding social networks aimed at learning professionals. The list contains a mix of networks for both educators and workplace learning professionals. Use the list to find one or two relevant networks to join.

Being a lead teacher is a big responsibility and it is important to work out a 'job description' with your principal. You need to know exactly what is expected of you. A lot of lead teachers find they become over loaded with work auditing, upgrading, maintaining etc the school ICT infrastructure. You may enjoy taking on this responsibility it is just a good idea to understand the expectations of the role in the first place.

Soshiku is a simple but powerful tool that manages your high school or college assignments. Soshiku keeps track of when your assignments are due and can even notify you via email or SMS. And it's totally free.

The online workplace of an international community of education professionals. K-12 teachers, librarians, administrators, and professional development staff, as well as university faculty, students, and researchers gather here to learn, collaborate, share, and support one another.

Powerful Learning Practice offers a unique opportunity for educators to participate in a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them in 21st Century learning environments. The PLP model is currently enabling hundreds of educators around the country to experience the transformative potential of social Web tools to build global learning communities and re-envision their own personal learning practice.

"Chris Dede, a professor of learning technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a leading authority on online teacher professional development. For 16 years, beginning in the early 1990s, Dede taught a course at HGSE called "Learning Media That Bridge Distance and Time." The rapid changes in interactive technology during that period brought the potential of online teacher learning into sharp focus for Dede. "I saw it as an important way of scaling up quality instructional practice, and an important lever for education reform, but also I saw that it wasn't going far very fast," he explains. Dede's investigations into online professional development led him to gather a group of researchers, distance-learning experts, and professional development providers at a conference at Harvard in 2005, and subsequently to publish, as editor, Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods (2006). The book, which explores the strengths and tensions of online teacher training, has become a key resource in the field."

A nice list of resources and links for activities that promote discussion in the classroom.

""Adults vote with their feet," a favorite adage of adult educators, is frequently used to describe a characteristic of adult learners. In most circumstances, adults are not captive learners and, if the learning situation does not suit their needs and interests, they will simply stop coming. In discussing adult education, Knowles (1980, 1984) distinguished between teacher-centered and learner-centered instruction. He promoted the latter because it viewed learners as mutual partners in the learning endeavor (Merriam and Caffarella 1991). Known as the andragogical model, the use of learner-centered instruction--which supports addressing the needs and interests of learners--is regularly championed in the literature as the most effective way to teach adults. However, Merriam and Caffarella (ibid.) assert that "adult learning in formal settings, for the most part, is still instructor designed and directed" (p. 26). Given the wide support for learner involvement, the discrepancy between adult education theory and practice is perplexing. How can instructors of adults become more learner centered in their practice? This ERIC Digest suggests guidelines and strategies that can be used in formal settings by instructors of adults to involve learners more effectively. "

"How to work with well-meaning but demanding moms and dads."

The school year is either over or almost over for the majority of readers of Free Technology for Teachers. The summer is a good time to explore and experiment with new things that you might use in the fall. In the PDF below I've compiled 77 resources that you might want try out over the next couple of months. Even if there's nothing new to you in it, please consider passing it along to a colleague that could discover a few new things from it.

Free, just-in-time professional development that you can experience now, anytime, anywhere. This series of compelling courses provides deeper exploration of 21st century learning concepts.

Free Classroom Guides and Educational Downloads for 2011 Get our easy-to-print guides that include useful tips for teachers, parents, and school administrators.

At Teaching Channel we believe what makes teachers inspiring is how they became experts -- the hours and years they've dedicated to improving their craft to benefit their students. Our mission is to capture their technique on video so that all teachers -- new or seasoned -- have a place to find inspiration. Of course you could just lean back and admire great stories, but we also provide tools to take a few notes, trade ideas, and even build your own personal workspace. And because we know teaching is not one-size-fits-all, we tailored our technology so you can find what works best for you.

The purpose of Teaching with Contests is to assist educators in finding contests that can be used in the classroom to motivate students. We are here for the student and the teacher not the promotion of products or company public relations. Our goal is to select contests and programs whose primary goal is education and secondarily business/product promotion.

I use the term stupid under fairly constrained conditions. To me, a stupid act has a degree of willfulness about it and is serious. Making an error once is ignorance; making the same mistake multiple times is stupidity. Unfortunately, I see stupid acts and beliefs related to technology in schools way too often. These would be my nominees for the most stupid things** a teacher can do related to technology...