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 …

For those of you that are unaware of or haven’t accessed your free Edublogs account since December, they’ve gone through some pretty interesting changes. Most of these changes hinge on the idea of needing to pay bills(understandable).  It may be a hard pill to swallow if you had made lesson plans to use their free accounts to host a classroom blog since the switch happened mid-year around December. There are now ads, a huge cut in storage space, and several features that let you manage your users have been cut. …

I know this isn’t really a technology strategy that will help you in the classroom, but sometimes a little tech at home is necessary. That mentioned, there’s been quite a bit of buzz going around about a free service that unmasked calls in which the caller has chosen to block their number. Not a bad little feature to have when the little jerks youngens decide to prank you at home.
The service is called trapcall and here is what lifehacker.com has to say about how it works. “TrapCall works like this: …

My students and I just finished a unit in which they were producing short commercials using still images and voice overs on Windows Movie Maker. We were in the process of adding audio when a student asked if I had any music they could use, and a quick Google scored this gem. http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
Kevin MacLeod over at www.incompetech.com has produced tons of high quality music segments that served as a priceless resource for adding great music to each of the projects. Since scoring films/commercials etc… require fitting music to the …

We’ve talked frequently regarding student blogging here at TTB. Until now the tips have been based on research and best practices from other teachers. As of today, however, my student are putting their finishing touches on their first blog. Together they have pieced together about 50 brief technology tutorials which can be checked out at http://www.studenttechspot.edublogs.org
Needless to say, I will be refining my tips and blogging about the process in the near future. I think I have slimmed down the process and hopefully made it less intimidating for teachers as well …