Technology Tips For All Teachers -TeacherTechBlog » Headline

iPods in the Classroom and Home

Scott Walker — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:12:55 +0000

Bate Middle School recently received a grant through Striving Readers allowing us to pursue a pilot program using iPod Touches, but we didn’t want to chain them to classroom. We felt that in order to prepare students for a mobile society, they had to go home with them too. Over the course of the next year TeacherTechBlog will exclusively focus on the happenings of this project. The hope is that we will learn through these reflections and equip others to join in this vision. In upcoming posts, you’re going to hear about implementation, apps that make it happen, and strategies for classroom management. Feel free to join us in the journey by submitting your thoughts, ideas, and questions.

By incorporating technology in the classroom, the children will know how to take full advantage of these useful tools for learning and might even consider an online education when applying to different college programs in the future.

Two New Sites Hosting Academic Lectures and Courses

Scott Walker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:24:36 +0000

These might deserve to be noted as being more along the lines of higher education, but are still worth noting. Academic Earth and a subsite of Youtube, www.youtube.com/edu are now featuring tons of online college courses and academic lectures.(Wonder if my school is blocking them yet?)

Both of these sites are featuring lectures from the likes of Yale, Harvard, and MIT. But each have their own layouts, organizations, and niches. YouTube for example, features the well known “YouTube” interface that most of us are familiar with by breaking it down into “Most Subscribed” “Most Viewed” “Channels” and a Directory which is a staggering list of the schools. Breaking it down by school is probably more useful if you are a student at a particular university, the rest of us will probably be hitting up the search. Regardless, it appears that YouTube is more of a casual lecture by lecture viewing.

Academic Earth, while not appearing to have as many schools on board, really shines when it comes to checking out lecture series and courses. Hit up the playlist and you will see what I mean. It also seems to do a better job at helping you find what you want by allowing you to narrow it down to topic, speaker, and university. Academic Earth also makes everything open meaning it is all able to be downloaded and embedded.

Living in the times we are in, a lot of content tends to be condensed, and broken into bite size pieces for the casual viewer. Since both of these sites are focusing more on the raw lecture and entire courses, it really lends itself more to the TED crowd, or those looking to down entire subjects. Regardless, they should be checked out.

Are You Following #edtech?

Scott Walker — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:22:02 +0000

A seasoned Twitter vet will more than likely recognize #edtech(or similar) as being something known as a hashtag. What is it? A hashtag is the twitter community’s answer to categorizing posts on twitter. Often when checking a twitter feed you will see these tags denoted by the # mark. Though twitter doesn’t officially support them in it’s web app, they can easily be searched in search.twitter.com.

They work by users marking their posts with the appropriate hashtag so the other users can easily follow what’s happening. Twitterers talking about things in the realm of education/technology will often use the #edtech tag. The neat part is that someone doesn’t even need to have an account to follow the action. Try it here http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23edtech. Currently there is a lot of noise regarding people joining certain groups such as the ed tech twitter group, and registering at wefollow, but if you sort through it you can find some good resources, tips, etc…

Thinking of joining twitter? You won’t be alone. You can start by getting an account and adding @teachertechblog. Then you can visit wefollow.com and add some of the top ranks for the #edtech group. By then you should be well on your way to a timeline full of… stuff… hopefully good resources and the like.

Quickly Find Web 2.0 Apps at go2web20.net

Scott Walker — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:03:53 +0000

Blogs, wikis, Facebook, Myspace, etc… All of these reflect the growth of Web 2.0 sites on the net, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The amount of sites like these are growing like crazy, and being able to find the useful ones is getting harder and harder. Thanks to go2web20.net though, you can find most of them in one place, sorted by category and searchable.

If you search for education or e-learning in their search box you will find a small selection of general apps that can be used in Education, but I think the power here is the usefulness for nitch groups like design, art, and music. Over the next couple of weeks you’ll probably see a few of these featured. Feel free to share how you’re using them in your classroom though.

Teach Students to Use Social Media with Edmodo

Scott Walker — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:20:02 +0000

There are a lot of social media websites out there that I would love to rangle into the classroom. Making them work in a classroom environment, not having them blocked, and pleasing the admins is the hard part. This is exactly why I was extremely excited to stumble upon edmodo.com today. A quick glance at it and some would mistake it for Facebook. A deeper look into the features and some would call it a twitter clone. I’m in the process of checking everything out, but this is what I’ve found out thus far.

The whole thing is a lot easier to explain if you are a frequenter of Facebook and Twitter. On your initial visit you are asked to choose whether you are a teacher or student. Of course you choose teacher and go through the typical sign up. Once through you will be presented with this page.

Here you will notice the timeline similar to Facebook. Before you get to doing that you should create a group. Groups can be classes, small groups, etc and when you post items, only they will be able to see it, unless made public. Once a class is created a code is given for students to join the group. Students need only visit the site, sign up as a student, supply the given code and they are in. (Note. Students don’t need to supply email addresses.

Something you will notice above the posting bubble are several categories, leaving you plenty of options for items to send. (files, links, posts, events, assignments, etc…) When these various posts appear in the timeline students are able to store them in their locker for later retrieval.

I look to see several things added to the site. Mainly text messages to give it the complete twitter-esque feel. But for now I am very satisfied.

Here is a link to their guides. Edmodo Guides