Today’s teens are constantly surrounded by visually stimulating, interactive content. Television, portable digital content, and websites all seem to reach out to their young audiences with eye-catching material. So it’s no surprise that today’s learners expect to be encountered the same way in the classroom, which is why Brainpop’s education strategy is a good one to mention.

In the past we have covered several resources on student blogging such as guides for teachers and blogging platforms. It’s truly something that we, here at TTB, feel is one of the next giant leaps in education. The ability to provide students with a global audience for their creative and analytical thoughts can provide an impact that is extremely hard to accomplish within the four walls of any school building. With that in mind, it was exciting to sit down with E-Pals’ Rita Oates, their Vice President of Education.

There are few people these days that don’t know about YouTube. People from almost every background are using it to express their own ideas, remix other material into their own, or even follow the election. It currently hosts so many videos that it would be hard to search for any given keyword and not come up with relevant results.
YouTube has a dark side, though. A side that hosts many videos that are highly unsuitable for school audiences. You would be hard stretched to find any school that did not block …

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.

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. …

Everyone has “that kid” in one of their classes that has become the unofficial technology guru. This kid is usually found either on a computer, talking about computers, or helping someone with theirs. Chances are that they have often helped you out with multiple technology related problems. So why not pay them back, or better yet, let Google pay them for you. How?

Students are always trying to pull out their portable game systems and get a few last minutes of gaming in. With their portability it’s easy to just slip it out of their pocket and get right to it. For a lot of us it’s becoming a problem in our classes. Their eyes are glued to these machines. So why not use it to our advantage.

When starting a research assignment students often turn to Google. Even teachers do – you do right? And often times I wonder about the credibility of where they get their info from. Google makes it easier to keep it in check with Google Notebook. Let’s take a look at it’s features and then explore it’s possibilities for students AND teachers.

To some, a classroom webpage is simply one that students or parents can log into and view basic details about your class. At least at my school this has been the case. They usually go up, have a couple of minor changes, then for the most part collect dust. WikiSpaces can change that.

I teach Arts & Humanities which means that I teach how the world communicates through art. This is some important stuff folks. Students are learning to communicate, analyze, understand, express and create. This should be some of the most relevant course work they encounter on a daily basis. It should, but when students enter my room they are expected to turn off one of their favortie means of communication and one of their favorite mediums for intaking art… their cellphone and their mp3 player. No wonder they shut down. Don’t …