I’ve heard or read these lately. According to the January 2006 issue of Technology & Learning, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that: Amost one-fifth of teens blog. Teens from urban homes are more likely to share their work on the Internet than suburban or rural teens. Girls create more content than boys. Boys download and share files more than girls. Last week, … Continue reading By the Numbers
Thinking more about the possibilities for Wikis in the schools, lots of ideas come to mind. The collaborative nature of a Wiki can have many degrees. It could be a collaboration among a few people, or a larger group of teachers, or an entire school, or the whole world. It doesn’t have to be restricted to allowing everyone to edit everything. One possibility is to … Continue reading Wiki Project Ideas
If you don’t want to use our WordPress Installation for your teacher site, the next best thing is to use Edublogs. This is a free site where teachers can create their own blogs. It’s using WordPress, and it’s relatively ad-free. They’re using a newer version of WordPress than we are, so there are a few neat things that we don’t have yet. At the same … Continue reading Let the Students Write
Teachers’ Domain is a multimedia digital library for K-12 teachers and students. It includes classroom resources, lesson plans, and professional development resources in all academic areas. These resources are correlated to national standards. The site requires registration for use. It’s easy (and free) to register, but this process must be completed to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions on the materials in the collection. Once … Continue reading Teachers' Domain
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Science Digital Library is a collection of resources for education and research in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The resources are organized in multiple ways, so you can find resources by topic or by target audience. The content isn’t developed or maintained by the NSDL. It’s just an index of resources hosted elsewhere on … Continue reading National Science Digital Library
I just posted a page on Cyber Safety over on the technology part of the district web site. The district sent out a letter to parents in December warning them that some students are posting personal information on sites like Xanga and Myspace. Students (and adults) need to tread lightly when posting this kind of stuff online, because they could become victims of various forms … Continue reading Be Safe Online
One of the primary principles of the American democracy is right of the people to know what our government is up to. Across history, as government operations become more secret, they also become more corrupt, and tend to deviate from the values and goals of the society. There are reasons for the government to keep secrets. If we’re at war, we don’t want the enemy … Continue reading From the Source…
I’ve described podcasts, and given some examples of podcasts about education and technology. But technology is not an end unto itself. If these things are going to be useful for teachers, we have to use them to teach science and social studies and math. You can search the general podcasts repositories, but it’s hard to find things there. The categories are very broad, and there … Continue reading Finding Education Podcasts
What’s that song? You know, the one that’s playing in your head that you can’t remember the words to? It’s bothering you now, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. Sure, you could probably hum a few bars, but what good is that going to do? Well, go over to The Song Tapper and see if you can find it. You have to … Continue reading We Got the Beat
Basically, a wiki is an editable web page. Traditionally, a web page was created by one person (or entity) and viewed by many people. I could make a web page for my computer applications class, and the students and their parents could go to that page and read the information that’s there. On a wiki, the web page essentially looks the same, except they can … Continue reading What's a Wiki?
I was complaining (in Searching Audio and Found It) about not being able to search audio archives. I was looking for something I heard in a podcast, and couldn’t find it, and, since it was audio, I couldn’t Google it either. Along comes PodZinger. This is a search engine for podcasts. I looks like they take the podcast audio, convert it to text, and make … Continue reading Ask and Ye Shall Receive
If this doesn’t impress you, nothing will. Maybe you haven’t bought into the hype. Perhaps all that Web 2.0 mumbo jumbo went over your head. It’s possible that I may be wrong that things are changing. Take two minutes and go to Protopage. Go ahead. I’ll wait. See what I mean? For the web-challenged (or lazy), here’s a quick overview: Protopage starts with what looks … Continue reading The Web Has Changed
