Teacher Tube

Awesome... YouTube for Education! TeacherTube was launched on March 6. The goal of this web 2.0 tool is to provide an easy way to share instructional videos. Here are some of my favorites: Did You Know, Technology Fear Factor in Education, Literature Circles, and Why Teach Technology?

School 2.0

My creation,
originally uploaded by SteveHargadon.


I love this photo created by Steve Hargadon with quote by David Warlick.  It makes me think about the power of having students find and/or create photos to go along with quotes or statements... what a great learning experience.

Yeah, but...

Will Richardson wrote a post on his blog yesterday about an eye-opening experience he had substitute teaching for a grad class on educational technology at a New Jersey University.  He expected that this class full of dynamic young teachers would embrace the use of technology in the classroom.  However, they responded with excuses and yeah, buts.  In two days, 44 people have commented on Will's post, and the comments are ALL worth reading.  What will it take to change paradigms for teachers, new ones and seasoned ones?

MACUL Conference

I just returned from the Michigan Association of Computer Users for Learning (MACUL) Conference. I enjoyed presenting with Gina Loveless & Terri Waklid on middle school technology-enhanced social studies lessons and the MDE Curriculum Integration Project. Click here to download our presentation.

I most enjoyed Steve Dembo's presentation "The Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Tools." I may need to work a few more web 2.0 tools into my agenda for the Walled Lake web 2.0 usergroup!  Of the ten tools he highlighted, four were new to me and I learned new things about all the rest.  His top 10 tools are:

1. Bloglines - a Feed reader/aggregator & also one of my favorites.


2. Delicious - A social bookmarking tool & another one of my favorites. I learned that you can use delicious in new ways, such as: creating memory games, adding comments, making trading cards, and finding photos with creative commons licensing.


3. Flickr - A photo sharing website. I learned to spell words with images!


4. Picnik - a photo editing website - a simple Photoshop-like tool.


5. Jumpcut - a video editing website. I want to check this one out before using with students.


6. Gcast - Easy podcast-creation tool


7. PBWiki - a wiki made for education


8. Wikispaces - another wiki made for education


9. Google Docs and Spreadsheets - Great for on-line collaboration. Can save as Word or Excel documents. I see this as coming in very handy for compiling data for science experiments and creating a class database.


10. VYEW - Cannot wait to try this out for staff development! It works sort of like WebX.

Google Earth Super-Zoom!

 

This is so cool!  The hippo picture above is a screen shot from Google Earth.   Turn on the National Geogaphic magazine layer (one of the items listed under "featured content") and you will see several icons of  cameras and airplanes.   Click on the icons to view close-up images that are included as part of National Geographic's Africa and Australia Mega fly-over project.  Other close up images that I have viewed include camels, elephants, and birds. 

There are over 500 different Megaflyover photographs available.  They were selected by Mike Fay from his library of almost 92,000 images, taken from a small plane flying at low altitude.

 An fabulous lesson plan to go along with this is listed on National Geographic Xpeditions.  In this lesson, students imagine that they are going to travel along with National Geographic conservation fellow Michael Fay. They think about questions they'd like to answer regarding human-nature interactions, and list the equipment they would take to study one of these questions.

Where can you find educational blogs?

Participants in the web 2.0 usergroup are working on finding blogs that interest them - some having difficulty finding blogs that relate to their professional interests (elementary art, chemistry, etc).  Here are some Internet resources that may help...  Scott Mcleod's survey (see Excel file) on Dangerously Irrelevant, Blogs for Educators from Answers.com, EdBlogger Praxis, and Edublog Awards.  Google blog search doesn't seem to be much help...  If you know of other good tips and strategies to get started finding blogs, please add a comment to this post!