Extras from chapter readings (week 3)

I was initially pleased to discover new resources for royalty-free images and clipart.  In addition to teaching media literacy lessons and co-teaching content area lessons, I also advise our student yearbook staff and student morning news crews.  Teaching them not to use anything they find during a Google image search takes up much of the first week of class!  I was disappointed to find out though, that the iClipart for schools the text recommends in chapter 8 requires a paid subscription.  It is no longer free.  Discovery Education, the other site the text recommends, is still free, but its image library is much smaller. 

Extras from chapter readings (week 2)

The biggest take-away for me in chapter 6 was probably the technology evaluation rubric example.  I have something similar in place in my library media center for apps.  It's more of a form or survey than a rubric, and since it requires some time and effort on the part of the teacher, it's not very popular.  I have had very few teachers actually go through the process in order to try out a new app.  I much prefer the rubric as a process for evaluation and plan to implement something similar this year for all technology.

Extras from chapter readings (week 4)

I am completely inspired by and in awe of Sugata Mitra.  His TedTalk, "Build a School in the Cloud," was referenced in chapter 12's cloud computing section, and made me a fan!  Here's the link.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU&list=PLfAPeARVYiRjdkw88S10zjlIscSiEtJbJ
I love this idea of self-organized learning environments.  I can imagine it may not be too popular with mainstream educators, but wow...just wow!

Extras from chapter readings (week 1)

So, I am a little bummed that my rented e-book does not seem to have the included multimedia extras.  The links do not seem to work on my Mac through the Kindle app.  Initially, when reading chapter 1, I was a little discouraged that the text is not as current as I would have liked.  Some of the resources and technology tools referenced seemed outdated to me.  I was pleased to discover that though the text was not published last month, I did discover a new resource - Curriki.  I am not sure why I didn't know about it before, but I am looking forward to browsing through its curated collection of lessons.

Educational Games Reasearch leads to detour (week 3)

My research took much longer than expected because I kept getting distracted.  I swear sometimes I am like the little dog in UP!  Somebody say "squirrel!"
geocaching.com
This one, in particular, led me down a path to incorporating this into my lesson planning for this school year.  I am super-excited to use this, possibly with the great stuff I learned earlier this summer at the Google Summit about MyMaps and TourBuilder.