Taste of Tech

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 time, they don’t have all of the cool plugins that we have. So there are advantages and disadvantages to using it. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about or anything.

The neat part is the section of the site for students. Learnerblogs is a companion site to Edublogs that allows students to create their own blogs.These free blogs also do not have ads (except for a small banner for Learnerblogs itself). Students can create blogs easily, and communicate with the global audience.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It’s a great way to give students a global voice, and people don’t need to have accounts or passwords or anything to see the content the students are posting. At the same time, the students have to know how to behave safely online (see this post about that). The other problem is that you, as the teacher, lose control of the content. Free speech is always a double-edged sword.

If you’re concerned about these things, consider going to Moodle. Moodle is online courseware, but our teachers are (so far) primarily using it to do online discussions. Because the students have to have accounts to get it, the content is much more private. Also, since it’s hosted locally, the school has more control over the content.

Either way, the days when children were seen and not heard are over. Everyone can have a voice now.

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 logged in, you can select a topic and a grade level to see resources related to that area.  Within each topic, there are a number of subtopics to choose from. The subtopics each have an annotated list of multimedia resources relating to that topic and grade level. Each resource  includes the multimedia components, a description of the resource, correlations to standards, and lesson plans for using the resource with students.

You can also do keyword searches to look for a specific topic, type of material, and grade level. As you find things you want to use, you can save them in "my resources" so they can easily be used later. You can even organize your resources into folders and annotate them with your own notes.

Teachers’ Domain is free for educational use and is produced by WGBH Boston.

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 the Internet. Because the resources are specifically chosen for inclusion in the collection, and are well indexed, it does make it easier to find accurate, appropriate, and relavant information for teachers and students at all levels.

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 of cyber crime.

We don’t want to keep students from using these technologies to interact with one another. It is important, thought, to teach them how to behave safely online. The posting includes several links to web resources to help parents help their children stay safe online, including some really kid-friendly stuff.