Lost in Translation: The ESL Explosion - This article from Edutopia explores the difficulties involved with teaching ESL. If this topic interests you, be sure to check the last section which contains several online resources for TESOL.

Reports reveal online learning's successes, needs - This article from eschoolnews reviews a report from the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL). The NACOL finds that while online learning has grown in popularity, it still is under heavy evaluation and scrutiny by state education departments.

The EAST Initiative: Students Use Technology to Promote Collaborative Learning - Here's a great article from Edutopia showing what students can do when fostered to use technology for collaborative learning. Be sure to check the 8 minute video on this to hear and see the students in action.

'Smart mob' tech spurs student activism - This article from eSchool news online looks at the effect that the pervasiveness of cell phones, PDA's and the internet has had on being able to gather very fast crowds or mobs to rally around a cause such as what recently happened in Jena, LA.

eSchool News Presents classroom management - eSchool News has aggregated many of their articles on classroom management as it relates to technology. There are stories here about keeping students focused, student projects that make money, how technology can lower bias in classrooms and more.

Snarewear, A new Eco Trend - The Wildlife Conservation Society has been dedicated to saving wildlife around the world for over one hundred years. Read about one of their latest efforts to give African poachers an alternative way to make money. This would be a great article to share with students and then have them try to come up with similar 'recycling' programs.

eBooks could spark interest in reading - "This story from eSchool news reports on a study conducted by researchers at Ball State University who found tha the use of wireless handheld devices, or eBooks, could help encourage reading among students who are reluctant readers.

Modern technology cracks the code of "The World's First Computer" - "This article from Edutopia tells the story of Antikythera Mechanism which is a compuer used by the ancient greeks.

Is Teaching an art or a Science? - "This segment from Edutopia asks people to weigh in and share their philosophy about teaching.

The Executive Wiki - "The poster child for the Web 2.0 movement, the wiki, demonstrates the spirit of open content more clearly than any other application. Wikipedia, the most famous wiki and the world's largest encyclopedia, defines a wiki as a Web site that "allows visitors to add, remove, edit, and change content."

Is Technology Missing the Mark? - "The emerging digital student has been the impetus for the evolution of the Web from information source to participation .. " Our challenge as educators, parents, and community members? How do we empower and protect our students in an environment that increasingly excludes us?
Tehcnology & Learning, March 2007"

Technology Literacy and the MySpace Generation - "The emerging digital student has been the impetus for the evolution of the Web from information source to participation .. " Our challenge as educators, parents, and community members? How do we empower and protect our students in an environment that increasingly excludes us?
Tehcnology & Learning, March 2007"

Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century - "The greatest challenge is moving beyond the glitz and pizzazz of the flashy technology to teach true literacy in this new milieu. Using the same skills used for centuries--analysis, synthesis, and evaluation--we must look at digital literacy as another realm within which to apply elements of critical thinking." (Educause)

Putting an End to Topical Research - "Topical research requires little thinking and little imagination. These assignments stress collecting rather than interpreting and analyzing. Students become smarter when teachers show them how to use their minds to wrestle with challenging questions, but scooping and smushing does little to advance their skill." (From Now On)

More 'reliable' Wikipedia Soon to Launch - Wikipedia co-founder is set to launch a new web site that aims to improve on Wikipedia's model while offering a more authoritative source of information.

Curriki Offers New World of Course Content - "Dubbed the "Wikipedia of curriculum" by its creators, the online community known as Curriki -- accessible at www.curriki.org -- aims to provide a place online where educators from anywhere in the world can post curricula and lesson plans for review and use by fellow classroom teachers.

Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview - "More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew
Internet & American Life Project.

The Classroom of Tomorrow: Here Today - "We must also build classrooms that not only meet the teaching and learning needs of today, but are flexible enough to adapt to new pedagogies, learning technologies and instructional tools – even some that do not yet exist."

Telling Tales With Technology - "Digital storytelling takes the ancient art of oral storytelling and engages a palette of technical tools to weave personal tales using images, graphics, music, and sound mixed together with the author's own story voice."

Web Radio - Streaming audio allows thousands of radio stations around the world to put their programming online and reach a global audience.

Leadership: Walking the Talk - We need to shift the focus from systems to people, and that takes real leadership. When we begin to put people first, we finally realize the fruits of our technology investments.

National Education Technology Plan - It is the responsibility of this nation’s educational enterprise – including policymakers – to help secure our economic future by ensuring that our young people are adequately prepared to meet these challenges. Today, they are not. This report explores why – and recommends steps to ensure that they will be.

Top 10 Returns On Investment - With budgets slashed, NCLB-inspired demands for quick spikes in student achievement, and the public clamoring for proof that technology is really working in education, all eyes are on the bottom line.

Video Game Studies and the Emerging Instructional Revolution - Having spent many hours playing at "twitch speed," students are bored by conventional media and likely to be attracted to courses that address their deeply imprinted interest in video games.

The Future of Learning Technologies: An Inerview with Chris Dede - My fundamental interest is in how emerging technologies expand human capabilities for knowledge creation, sharing, and mastery, so I am most interested in the learning technologies that lend themselves to complex data manipulation, intensive collaboration, and robust archives. (register for free access to this e-magazine)

A Field Guide to Cross Cultural Projects - CultureQuests allow students to examine, understand, and appreciate diverse cultures, including the student's own culture.

Thinking Through The Technology Puzzle - Here is what technology is for: questioning, exploration, discovery, analysis, understanding, application, and communication. This is also known as the learning process. Teachers need to ask themselves, "How can students learn the concepts central to this field of study better through the use of technology?"

The New Literacy - It is crucial that when teaching literacy to our students, we emphasize skills that reflect the information environment of the present, not the past. Whether we like it or not, with the information age comes a whole new set of basic skills.

Videoconferencing at its Best: Nashville Opera Brings "How to Write an Opera" to USN Students - This a true tale of just one instance where videoconferencing allowed distance learning to work its magic.

Implementing the Standards into Projects - "When creating an online project, begin by realizing that implementing National and State standards into your project is not only easy, it's the best way to teach!"

Gently Down the Stream - United Streaming, video on demand application available to New York schools, is proving its value in the classroom - "when combined with other media, video has proven to be a highly effective way of getting and holding students' attention so real learning can take place."

Monitoring Technology Misuse & Abuse
A Five-Step Plan for Creating a Digital Citizenship Program in Your School.

Leadership is Key to Ed Tech Success - The quality of leadership, researchers found, is also the primary indicator of whether technology funding--regardless of the funding level--is likely to be spent wisely or be wasted.

7 Time Saving Tools - Imagine if a technology could shave an hour off your day-or even 15 minutes. How much would that be worth to you?

Mass Storage - As students and teachers produce more multimedia work, large-scale web projects, and rich presentations, they encounter the need for mass storage.

Global Links: Lessons From Around the World - The world outside the US is rich with lessons about how technology can be used in schools. Technology Counts 2004, Education Week’s annual report on educational technology, presents a groundbreaking overview of technology in schools around the world, examining data, lessons, and trends. (free subscription).

The Coming of the Intelligence Age: Enhancing Education Through Assessment - In education, there is a ... convergence developing between assessing and evaluating student capabilities and progress, legislation, technology, and communications. This ... will ... lead to an increased use of intelligence systems to collect, manage and report data.

Summer Workshops Make the Difference - The skills I have learned over the course of three summers have helped me to be a more confident technology user.

AlphaSmart's Dana Wireless - Written by Merrily Schalansky, Tech Coordinator at Tuckahoe, describes the district's use of the Dana and evaluates it in this article.

A Gownup's Guide to Instant Messaging - An Internet communication medium is competing for a chunk of your brain: instant messaging - read about IM services and advice on how to safeguard your privacy and security.

Access Learning - Cable's Guide to Education Resources March 2004, includes .pdf documents of Hands-On History articles about Historic Preservation: Hands-On Heritage, Virtual Field Trips, History in the Field.

Learning & Teaching in the Technology Age - It was nine years ago that SDSU professor Bernie Dodge posted his insight on the optimal use of Internet-related research in the classroom to the WWW.

Defrag Your Computer - "Defrag" is short for defragment, the process of putting the various parts of files you have saved in a contiguous place on your hard disk.

The Handheld Educator - This special section of Technology & Learning magazine is finally online! Find tips and lesson plans for using heandhelds in your curriculum.

Education and Technology: The Future of Handheld Learning - What's your average fifth grader doing at 8:30 in the morning? If he's in Jan Kelly's class in Mogadore, Ohio, he's probably using a Palm to check his stock portfolio.

World Comes to Students - Imagine visiting an art museum in Cleveland, honing Spanish skills with teens from Spain and discussing the war in Iraq with a former congressman. Now imagine your child's school offering the same activities without kids having to leave the building. It's called distance-learning ...

Zero to Six - Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers - Toddlers and preschoolers are spending more than twice as much time watching television, using computers, or interacting with DVDs than reading or being read to by an adult.

Online Learning is a Must - ... traditional schools must learn how to use the Internet and distance learning to expand educational opportunities for students, enhance their course offerings, and engage students in unique personal ways.

21st Century Skills: Will our Students Be Prepared? - With a seeming disconnect between the NCLB-legislated narrow focus on core skills and the broader skills required for the information age, many fear our students will emerge from schools unprepared for the real world.

Images Can Make Powerful Slam Dunk Digital Lessons - A single powerful image can form the basis of an excellent lesson...A group of educators in White Plains wrestled with .. photograph choice ... and came up with an Inspiration diagram to outline the criteria they would apply to the task.

Professional Development: 21st Century Models - What do successful professional development communities look like? And what role does technology play in supporting them?

Education Web Logs - Express yourself through this new exciting medium.

Removing Barriers to Professional Development - ... Professional development initiatives have been criticized for their failure to produce significant changes in either teaching practice or student learning.

Advancing Knowledge with Technology - In this multimedia presentation, a middle school English/Soc. Studies teachers shares her approach to teaching with technology.

Videoconferencing in K12 Classrooms: Doable and Practical, FINALLY! - What is the big deal about video- conferencing in classrooms? To start with, all over the country, educators are discovering that they can accomplish most of the objectives of a field trip ....

Software for Handhelds - In the past few years software publishers have developed a multitude of education-specific handheld applications.

Want to Use Technology Effectively? Try Starting With Assessments - Technology will not improve assessment or learning... the key is how assessment should drive instruction...[and].. ensure that the technology serves as an effective vehicle to demonstrate mastery of the Standards.

Reviving Reviews - Is review time a deadly bore for you and your students? Add a little fun to review time and you might be surprised. Games will spice up reviews, revive interest, and ensure retention! Many fun lessons and games from Education World.

The Adventures of Mrs. A on the Geometry Internet Trail - A teacher's experience in using technology to make teaching mathematics new and different.

Integrating Digital File Formats into Classroom Instruction - A library media specialist's multimedia projects in which students search, archive, and retrieve digital file formats from the Web to enhance their units of study.

Writing With Web Logs - "Students will write when they have something to say, when they have an audience, and when they get feedback." ... Web logs-or blogs is a new use of technology to enhance writing and literacy skills while offering a uniquely stylized form of expression.

The Writing Process on the Internet - The Internet provides a complete writing environment for students to improve their writing by using listservs, webfolios and email.

Project Based Learning: A Primer - When students are challenged to get to work solving real-life problems, the whole world becomes a classroom.

Online Elementary Schools Grow - Online schools—a phenomenon typically seen in secondary and higher education—are now filtering down to the nation's youngest students.

An Online Textbook Case
"Textbooks are probably the most boring thing in the world...To make a textbook attractive they've gone online and they've added bells and whistles the kids are used to."

The Slam Dunk Digital Lesson
Sound lesson and unit design will flow out of some greater sense of purpose than the integration of technology into a lesson.

The Educator's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use - Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors...but encourage others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work." In other words, copyright was created to benefit society at large, not to protect commercial interests. Nowhere is this statement truer than in the educational arena.

Not Your Parents' Library, Part 1 & Part 2 - by Pam Berger - There was a time when librarians were experts at assisting patrons as they searched the card catalog, reference books, and microfiche to conduct their research. But enter the technological revolution of the last 20 years and voila! Everything's changed. Technology has transformed the role school librarians now play in the classroom and community. Read best practices and projects.

Putting Your Classroom in the Palm of Your Hand - The early years of the 21st Century will be remembered for the proliferation of handheld and palm computers.

DVD Poised to Become Future Teaching Tool - DVD is a natural next step for schools abandoned by laserdisc providers. ...DVD's future in the classroom will be on computers...

Passing Notes in CyberSpace - As a modern education professional you pride yourself on taking every advantage of technology. … you keep your students' parents informed of their children's performance and behavior via Email …. You believe these electronic messages are "private correspondence" and could not possibly have any repercussions. Don't be so sure.

Is Technology Making a Difference? - We've all heard of the wonderful things technology integration can do for the classroom, but what does it really look like when done well? In this video see how two fifth-grade teachers have made technology an everyday presence in the classroom with wireless laptop computers.

New Roles for Educators - Though teachers have always been learners, instructional designers and entrepreneurs, technology tools have added new twists to these traditional roles, providing many new opportunities for leadership and for teachers to also become "producers of knowledge."

The Digital Disconnect: The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools - A July 2002 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that using the Internet is the norm for today's youth and in interviews students said that they wanted to be assigned more—and more engaging—Internet activities relevant to their lives and that this would improve their attitude toward school and learning.

A Lexicon of Learning - Education, like all professions, has a specialized vocabulary, ASCD's online resource provides clear definitions of educational terms in everyday language.

Take a Varied Approach to Assessment - Looking for effective teacher assessment of technology integration? To get the best answers, start by asking the right questions.

Critical Issue: Using Technology to Improve Student Achievement - "Judging the impact of any particular technology requires an understanding of how it is used in the classroom."

Defining a Technology Integrated Curriculum - "I was seeking an overall definition that would fit the majority of the teacher's ideas of a technology integrated curriculum."

Seven Dimensions for Gauging Progress of Technology in the Schools, outlines how schools can begin to measure their own progress in transforming classrooms into active, stimulating and academically sound learning environments that use technology.

Early Connections: Technology in Early Child Education describes young children’s learning development and connects technology to essential learning skills. The primary focus is on how and when technology best fits into the learning of young children.

Excel as You've Never Seen It - "Spreadsheet software is amazing! Everyday tasks ... are within the grasp of every teacher."

Digital Libraries Offer Vast Online Resources - Read any good Cuneiform tablets lately? Find links to this digital library and others offering the classics, humanities, journals and science online resources.

Fostering the Student-Centered Classroom Online - "Many of my students use the Internet every day for entertainment, so it is only logical to them that their educators meet them in the same place." Read this teacher's account of his use of the Internet in his classroom.

Why Use Internet in the Classroom from Channel 13's National Teacher Training Institute, this article discusses how the Internet enhances classroom practices, includes video and transcripts.

Cooperative Online Projects this article discusses how involving staff and students in Internet collaborations can build Web education expertise. Well-designed projects provide learners with in-depth opportunities to hone telecommunications skills, use online tools and resources, and gain educational experiences.

Laptop Lessons - 12 months in the life of a teacher involved with the integration of laptops into a ninth-grade English curriculum.

Awards of Excellence from Technology & Learning this annual awards list reflects a diversity of educational offerings, from curriculum products, administrative tools, to professional development resources.

Kids Need Hands On Technology - In this online discussion, Elliot Soloway speaks about the increased presence of technology in education through the use of hand-held computers.
(RealPlayer needed)

Top Ten Technology Breakthroughs for Schools - Wireless, collaborative tools, virtual learning, handhelds are four of the current and advanced technologies in this article. Read about the part current and futuristic technologies are playing in schools. The common thread reflected in the piece is the ability of these technologies to impel us to think in new and innovative ways about the concept of "school."

Evaluating Guidelines for MultiMedia Courseware - From an ISTE study, a list to identify criteria important to multimedia instructional courseware evaluation.

Copyright and Digital Content - Everything on the Net is public domain. Right? In the digital age where massive amounts of information are distributed, it is essential that students know and understand copyright.

Using Technology and Real World Connections to Teach Secondary Mathematics Concepts - For our Math and Science Teachers - ENC has provided us with specific advice on how to use technology to make math relevant to students.

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