Managing a class of students in a computer lab or a classroom with multiple student computers can often be a hassle. Anytime students have the option of choosing between a computer screen and the teacher, they will often choose the computer. Needless to say, you will have a rogue student playing solitaire, visiting other websites,  or just basically goofing off. Enter iTALC.

Tests that are included with textbooks or other teacher resources can be hit or miss, and often, creating your own tests and quizzes is the best way to accurately assess your students knowledge on a subject. But, it can take a while to go about formatting a test from scratch using word processing applications. That’s where Easy Test Maker steps in.

We’ve covered several different ways to generate bibliographies, but Bill over at bloggingonthebay.org has pointed out a useful tool, The Citation Machine. The concept of this web resource is that it gives you the fields to fill in about your source and it generates a citation for you. Handy. Check out Bill’s article here.

We’ve covered a few ideas for technology on the cheap before, but this one may take the cake. The article has been posted on a couple of other boards including the classroom 2.0 Ning.
Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University has designed a project for creating an interactive whiteboard out of a Nintendo Wii Remote, an IR LED light, and of course your projector. The price? $50(projector not included). The site has a video demonstration, details on how to make the pen, and includes the software for running it.
The concept …

It’s true that a computer can have a huge positive impact on the classroom, but sometimes these machines misbehave. One crashed computer can mean months(often years) of hard work are gone forever.
Scenario: You arrive at school ready to take on the day. You go to turn on the computer and get a strange error message or blank screen. Windows never boots, and the thought of all those important files being erased strikes a chill down your spine.
The good news is that in almost all cases those files are still savable. …

Ever had that student that constantly turns in their work done on a program that you don’t have(ahem, Word Perfect)? Or perhaps you needed to do some work for school but the schools computer uses a program that you don’t have at home? Usually, the solution for this involves finding a program to convert it to a format that plays nicely with your computer. Sometimes these programs are free, but often not. Zamzar.com not only does the conversion for free, it does it without ever having to download a thing. …

Ever noticed how there is never a printer available when you need one. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to que a document from your home computer to print on your school printer when you arrive in the morning without having to worry about flash drives, disks, etc…? Or how about the student whose printer always seems to explode whenever they have something due the next morning? There might be a solution. PrintAnywhere.com offers a free service that lets you print to any printer(or share yours) without having to …

Orlando, Florida will be an Educational Technology hotspot this January as it will be time for the Annual FETC conference. Being billed as one of the largest and most successful Educational Technology conferences in the US, and sponsored by big names like Apple, Harcourt, and Discovery Education, it’s looking to uphold that expectation and then some. For those that haven’t come across this conference before, it is literally packed with great sessions for teachers, administrators, technology coordinators, curriculum designers, and media specialists covering:

Once a year…1000 remarkable people gather in Monterey, California to exchange something of incalcuable value, their ideas.
This opening line starts off every one of the 18 minute videos that appear on Ted.com. What are they? They are presentations from some of the greatest minds this world has to offer, covering a vast array of topics. They take place once a year in Monterey, California and are then shared via the web. The value in this is huge.

From time to time teachers often like to assign something like this:
Students are to read through magazines or scholarly online articles and find 3 that are relevant to subject X. Each article will need to be accompanied by a short write-up documenting their relevance to the topic.
This isn’t a bad approach, and actually brings a fair amount of relevance to the material the teacher is covering. But let’s imagine something bigger. (This one hits fairly hard on the advanced side, but is great for showing where things could go …