Microsoft Free Teacher Guides A Great Resource for Educators Microsoft, The multinational corporation that develops, licenses and suports computer materials and software, has a great section for teachers and students. Microsft has created Teacher Guides where it provides free teaching tips and step by step guides for popular teacher tasks. These guides are supposed to help teachers and educators learn and explore better ways to inspire students and integrate technology in class. Here are the main categories you find in Teacher Guides Critical Thinking It provides lesson plans and student handouts that teachers can use to improve their students critical thinking skills particulary when doing a research. Free Tools in The classroom Microsoft offers some of its free tools to teachers to help them get their students engaged, energize their lesson plans, and save time. Digital Storytelling This section provides resources and materials for teachers to use with their students in storytelling. Microsoft Office in The Classroom Microsoft Office Web Apps
100 Helpful Websites for New Teachers | Teaching Degree.org By Tara Miller You’ve been preparing for teaching for years, and now you finally get your chance to have a class of your own. With so much to learn as you get started, it can be overwhelming keeping it all straight. The following websites are loaded with helpful information that new teachers will appreciate. Sites Just for New Teachers These sites offer help specifically for teachers in their first or second years. New Teacher Survival Central. Sites for All Teachers The sites here are packed with helpful information that teachers of all experience levels can use. Inspiring Teachers. Inspirational Sites These sites offer inspiration for creating dynamic learning experiences. Smithsonian Education. Technology in the Classroom Learn what you can do to help bring technology into your classroom with these sites. Thirteen Ed Online. Blogging in the Classroom Blogging can be a great tool for learning, and these resources will help you learn how to do so effectively. Class Blogmeister. Educators Who Blog
5 Thoughts on Maximizing Student Voice Last night my grad school colleague and friend Brandon Wiley shared with me 17 minutes of thought-provoking lecture – from a student. I was struck by this inspiring Ted Talk from 17 year-old Nikhil Goyal. He is a current senior at Syosset High School in New York, and has chosen to make his valuable student voice heard on his own school experience. The video is embedded below. From his student lens, he disagrees with those who say our education system is broken, but instead, Goyal believes that “the system” is doing exactly what it was designed to do many years ago. His insights have me thinking about how to provide for more student input during the upcoming school year at at local level. Do we really solicit feedback from our students? Collecting the data on student voice will take a significant effort, but is the easy part here. Nikhil has a book coming out in September entitled One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School.
The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter Twitter isn’t just a cute way for keeping in instant touch with friends on mobile phones anymore. It has ramped up quickly to be the search engine of choice for some with its human driven results. Applications galore allow you to find friends all over the world with similar interests and keep up with them in real time. Businesses can form instant direct relationships with their customer bases simply by signing up and using the service regularly, and according to the models Twitter is trying out, they will soon be able to advertise to the Twitter community as well. We’ve compiled an alphabetized glossary here for you so that you can just scan down the list and find the term that you are looking for, as well as a list of popular Twitter applications and instructions for incorporating Twitter into your website and blogs. Twitter Basics If you had no idea what Twitter was walking into this article, we’re going to start you off at the very beginning. Then, set up your profile. Tweet Regularly
Twitter for Learning Interesting Online Tools That You Probably Don't Know About - 33 Items 30 Share CevherShare Share 30 There are certain online tools which could be useful to you but you haven’t heard of cause they’re just start-ups for the moment and haven’t started advertising their services on every single online zone so you will get the chance to see them. Fortunately, I snoop around and try to find useful things for my visitors and I selected these 33 online tools that you might find useful. Geckoboard Geckoboard is a status board for your business’s vital signs. Because it’s a web service Geckoboard is available anywhere there’s internet, whether it’s a 60″ monitor in your office or on your smart phone. Mobilastic Create beautiful, responsive websites that look great on all screens: mobile phones, tablets and desktops. Mobilastic is a mix of a website builder and a hosted CMS, having mobile and responsiveness at its core. HotGloo Good software doesn’t need to be complex. Motache: The easiest and fastest way for your business to GoMobile Dropmark Skills Floom Flourish Snapjoy ifttt
100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner | College@Home For those unfamiliar with the term, a learning style is a way in which an individual approaches learning. Many people understand material much better when it is presented in one format, for example a lab experiment, than when it is presented in another, like an audio presentation. Determining how you best learn and using materials that cater to this style can be a great way to make school and the entire process of acquiring new information easier and much more intuitive. Here are some great tools that you can use to <a href=">cater to your individual learning style, no matter what that is. Visual Learners Visual learners learn through seeing and retain more information when it's presented in the form of pictures, diagrams, visual presentations, textbooks, handouts and videos. Auditory Learners Auditory learners do best in classes where listening is a main concern. Kinesthetic Learners Kinesthetic learners do best when they interact and touch things.
Inspirational Kids Video above: "What Student Achievement Means to Me" Learner ~ Leader ~ Educator ~ Mother Passionate about learning and sparking the learning in others, I believe in modelling my own learning. Currently, I am a Vice-Principal of an Inner-City school in Surrey, BC, Canada where we have approximately 475 students who attend. In my time as Vice-Principal, I have been involved in numerous projects, including, but not limited to: - Innovative Learning Design Team - Aboriginal Laptop Project - name of project will be changed to TELAL this year - Technology Enhanced Learning for Aboriginal Learners. - Digital Playground Sessions for staff members. - Attendance Matters Project - Formative Assessment Book Club and other Professional Book/Resource Chats - Family Literacy Implementation - School Blogs - including design, promotion, moderating, and updating. - Developing and maintaining our school Youtube and Twitter accounts. - Guided Reading Implementation At a district level, I have been involved in:
25 Apps that Add Form and Function to Twitter - The 2.0 Life Teaching With Content Curation 21st Century School | Feature Teaching With Content Curation With two mobile laptop carts that are used primarily for technology classes and a student body that has limited access to computers outside of school, Stockton Collegiate International School isn’t exactly a hotbed of ed tech. In Hauna Zaich’s 8th- and 10th-grade English classes, for example, students—a good portion of whom are English learners—are using a process known as “content curation” to cull through the many resources on the web, select the most relevant ones, and then organize those resources in a logical format for sharing and later use. Defined as the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that relates a specific subject, content curation is less about creating new resources and more about amassing information and then maintaining it in a logical fashion. Flipping the Classroom
The Best Places To Create (And Find) Internet Scavenger Hunts & Webquests There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about the definition of a “Webquest.” Bernie Dodge, who originated the model in 1995, described it like this in a comment on this blog last year: “A critical attribute of a WebQuest is that it engages higher level thinking, the upper part of Bloom’s taxonomy. Things like creativity, analysis, synthesis. judgment…. A WebQuest is also wrapped around a single challenging task, not a sequence of separate activities A WebQuest isn’t a scavenger hunt and it isn’t a worksheet with links.” Here’s an additional helpful comment Bernie added to this post: “A WebQuest is centered around a challenging, doable and (ideally) authentic task. Obviously there’s a place for both WebQuests and scavenger hunts, but they are different places with very different goals.” I can empathize with his desire to make the distinction clear between a scavenger hunt and a webquest. Given that, however, we all live in the real world where ambiguity reigns supreme. Related
58 EdTech Resources You May Have Missed–Treasure Chest April 10, 2011 Welcome to this week’s edition of Treasure Chest—58 EdTech Resources You May Have Missed. It’s really difficult to keep up with all that happens in educational technology. This is my attempt to make it just a little easier. I usually don’t get too excited over an edtech resource, but this interactive solar system site is “out of this world.” Interactive 3D model of Solar System Planets and Night Sky Featured What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School? Tools Digital Tools–Building Digital Literacy presentation by Nik PeacheyTeacher Tools – 100+ Free Internet Resources for Real Teachers in Real Classrooms–Free resources for every classroom.DropTunes Is a Web Jukebox for Your Dropbox Music Stash–You can play music tracks through Dropbox’s web interface, but only one at a time, in a very minimalist player. How-To iOS Miscellaneous Computer Hardware Chart Poster: All Computer Parts In One Image–Here is a beautiful chart of computer hardware and parts. Slideshow/Video