Top ten skills needed to succeed as a teacher (and technology)

photo credit: davidsilver
This article started out as the top ten skills needed to use technology effectively, but as I wrote the list, I realized that technology shouldn’t be separated out. As we proclaim that technology is a tool, we also shouldn’t single it out when talking about what skills it takes to educate. The [...]

Setup a Facebook Page instead of using your personal FB account

One common question I see asked all the time is whether or not teachers should friend students on Facebook. Although you can set your privacy settings on Facebook to hide certain aspects of your life from groups of friends, this isn’t fool proof. Friending everyone including students and parents simply begins breaking down yet another [...]

Language arts teachers, take note, experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in real time

Dracula
Experience Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a new way — in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as [...]

Group Twitter bot

Chris Hamady had the idea that at the eTech Ohio State Technology Conference we should be able to use Twitter to communicate great things that individuals see throughout the conference. It needed to be set up easy enough for people that have not been using Twitter to use. After discussions with John Schinker, they contacted [...]

Next fall, every school district in Florida is required to set up an online school for K-8

In Florida, virtual school could make classrooms history — OrlandoSentinel.com
A new law that takes effect next fall requires every district in the state to set up an online school for kindergarten through eighth-grade students.

This is fascinating to me, and I’m surprised that this didn’t get more news coverage when the legislation was being passed in [...]

Why do students need email?

On the Ohio Technology Coordinator’s listserv this question was posted:
We already had one case of student to teacher generated e-mail that originated on a student computer inside the school. The FIRST question I got as the Tech Director was ‘Why are you allowing students to send and receive email in school?’
And my question would be, [...]

SYSK – Test your SMTP mail server with telnet

photo credit: TalkingTreeWhen troubleshooting email, it may be necessary to see what the email server is spitting out, just to make sure everything is working. The easiest way to do that is to use the telnet command. Telnet allows you to connect to various services on remote or local machines through the command line. [...]

Interactive response systems

photo credit: swpermanAs we investigate ways to use mobile Internet devices in our classrooms, it hit me that they could be used as an interactive student response system (ISRS). Since current ISRSs are around $100 per person, why not invest in a more useful device such as the iPod Touch, Sony PSP, or Nintendo [...]

Your assignment: 20 minutes on your DS before school

Scottish authorities have begun other trials of ‘More Brain Training with Dr Kawashima’ on the Nintendo DS in 16 schools:
A 20-minute burst of the ‘brain training’ exercises on Nintendo’s DS console at the start of the day apparently improves performance in maths tests by as much as 10 per cent, according to a Scottish [...]

Where is the importance of tech education for educators?

Will Richardson sums it up so eloquently for me:
…which is how in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we’re not talking 21st Century skills for educators first? The more I listened, the less I heard in terms of how we make the teaching profession as a whole even [...]