A Trio of New Year's Ideas

Happy New Year All,

My inbox is full of End-of-the-Year Round-up and lists of amazing ways to integrate technology in the classroom in 2013.

I thought I'd share a trio of my favs:

The Daring Librarian Super Geeky Tips for the New Year

The Daring Librarian reminds us it's time for some tech housekeeping: update passwords, clean up and save files, edit privacy settings and back up data to name a few.  Excellent advice!

20 Innovative Educational Technology Pinterest Boards

I know how many of you are addicted to Pinterest... Edudemic provides a great list of boards to explore for ed tech ideas.  

Edutopia: Big Education Ideas for 2013

Edutopia lists Collaborative Learning, Social Media, Open Education Resources, and the Common Core among the Big Education Ideas of 2013.  Interested in learning more?  Take a few minutes to explore this comprehensive list of blogs, videos and articles.  

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to post to this blog more often, and better share the resources available to us... please let me know what you are most interested in!  

MB

Will.i.am Sings "What I Am" on Sesame Street...

I stumbled across this video on Pinterest this morning and it made my day.  Apparently it has become the theme song of classrooms across the country - one 5th grade teacher reported her kids sing it every day.

Watch it and and I dare you not to smile...

Happy Tuesday,

mb

Some Great Web 2.0 Tools for HTS Teachers

Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers on Prezi

Polly and I have been brainstorming, and have come up with a huge list of Web 2.0 tools to introduce in our workshop next week.   I thought it might be helpful to post our resources in advance.  If you have a few minutes to review the resources, and have any questions about how they might best work in your classroom, let us know. A number of "how-to" videos have been embedded in the Prezi, so you always have the resource sat your fingertips :)

If you have a few minutes to explore this Prezi, be sure to select the "full screen" option above the "more" tab.

Enjoy!

Mary Beth and Polly

My Weekend with Pinterest

I'm continuing to explore treasures from the MSET Conference, and spent a few hours this weekend setting up a board on Pinterest full of techie teacher ideas:

According to the website Hongkiat.com:  "Pinterest is a platform that allows you to showcase your interest and ideas via the simple act of pinning. This pinned collection of yours is easily shared to your network of followers or friends. They, in turn, can continue pinning materials from your board to theirs and spread the info further, all at the speed of a click.

 The potential behind this information transfer is enormous and now that the technology for it exists, academicians and educators should be quick to jump on the bandwagon and start pinning as well. To help this process along, onlineuniversities.com has created this infographic showing the ways educators can use Pinterest to collect, organize, collaborate and encourage active learning amongst students. Think of it like the bulletin board you always pass by at the school corridor – only more regularly updated and with plenty of space for just about everyone to put their stuff up and show to the whole school and beyond."


One of the many things I pinned this weekend was the infographic from this website:

I would not encourage our students to use Pinterest, as there is simply no way to manage privacy settings within the site, but after even a little bit of time this weekend, I do think it would be an amazing tool exploring ideas with networks of like-minded teachers.