Cassandra Holman

Educationworld.com is a great free website for educators.  This website has five main tabs:  Lesson Planning, Professional Development, Administrator’s Desk, Technology Integration, and School Issues.  I found the Lesson Planning tab most useful.  They offer lesson plans by subject, top 10 lesson plans, and lesson plan features.  The other tab that I thought that was very useful was Technology Integration.  They offer technology resources and give ideas of how teachers can integrate technology into certain subjects such as social studies.  Teachers can also find free templates to use.  Some examples of the templates are award certificates, calendars, icebreakers, setting goals, and parent-teacher communication.  These templates are nice because you can save them to your hardrive and edit them as needed, or just simply print them off as you see them already made up.

4Teachers.org is a great source for teachers and students alike. 4Teachers.org is a website that offers a variety of tools. Some tools you do have to pay for a monthly subscription, but the large majority of the tools are absolutely free. One tool that I thought was neat was the Classroom Arcitech. This tool lets you put in the dimensions of your room and then has the objects that you can place in your room. Another good tool is the Casa Notes. This tool allows you to create notes that you send home such as: progress notes, reminders, field trip slips, and homework passes. They give you the templates and you can change some of the data, color scheme, and add a graphic to the notes. The neat thing about this tool also, is that the notes can be done in English or Spanish.

Another tool is the KidVid. This tool allows students to make their own videos. It helps them to create a storyboard and script, shoot the video, edit it, and then the students can choose to show their video using the web or a CD. Another fun tool that teachers can use to help their students learn is the Arcademic Skills Builder. This tool is basically an archive of academic video games. They have games like Meteor Multiplication, Alien Addition, Coconut Vowels, and Verb Viper. Now students can even play eachother from different computers.

EdTechBrainstorm.2007.10.25 is a discussion between Doug Symington and Arthus, a ninth grader from the United States.  They discussed topics that Arthus had discussed in a previous interview and the uses of technology in high school.  Doug stressed the importance of listening to the youth about technology and education.

Arthus said that he thought Twitter would be a great tool for education because teachers could send Tweets and parents could subscribe to it.  Also, the school could send out announcements through Twitter and the students could receive them over their cell phones. 

Arthus and Doug also s social networking.  Arthus said that he preferred Facebook over MySpace, saying that MySpace had a bad interface and wasn’t as private as Facebook.  On the topic of privacy Arthus said he wasn’t really nervous about stalkers, but more so about how his profile might affect his admission to college or getting a job in the future.  He also said that he thought that Facebook should have the profiles set to complete privacy as a default and users should go in  and change their settings if they want more things available to the public.  He thought one of the biggest problems was the fact that others can tag a picture of you and you can’t control it. 

A topic that I found surprising was that at Arthus’s high school the students do not have to sign and acceptable use policy, they just have it posted.  The main thing that students can’t do is use external email accounts, but the students have found ways around that.  Arthus argued that schools shouldn’t block certain tools because in the workforce and real world people will have to use these tools and then won’t fully understand them.  Instead, he thought that schools should teach how students to safely use the tools.