In Cultivate Your Personal Learning Network Part I, you learned to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. The second part of the Learning Loop is the “Outputs” stage. Here you will...
When I’m doing a creative project (or just working on a presentation) I am always looking for large, beautiful photos bearing a Creative Commons license. Works released in the Creative Commons can be reused, remixed, redistributed, and revised for free– this makes it easy for me to share this ex...
Online teachers and instructional designers need access to good tools for capturing screenshots and annotating them. These tools are invaluable for giving step‐by‐step computer instructions to students and faculty, and can really help you communicate information visually.
If you’re new to screen...
Did you know you can save time and effort by starting a Frequently Asked Questions Discussion Board in your course? Do you get tired of answering the same student questions over and over? Save time and effort by starting a Frequent Asked Questions forum in your course! It i...
Image by solbronumberone via Flickr
This is a presentation I made to help my Beast Bloggers’ Support Group create a Content Plan for their blogs. I wanted them to take a broad view of their objectives and strengths as they develop their blogging identities. I had them list out their objectives...
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Even in the upper grades, students are struggling to make the transition from “learning‐to‐read” to “reading‐to‐learn”. Give a struggling reader a context‐reduced novel written in old, antiquated language and you will realize that students need as much life‐like context as w...
As an English teacher, I always felt like I was drowning in a sea of papers. I needed to get the students to do high quality thinking, and the only way I knew how to evaluate that thinking was through their writing. Last semester, I got smart and had them turn in their final art reflections as...
Nothing keeps up class morale than silly games. Usually, I do these at the beginning of the year to help get to know the kids, but I’ve recently learned how valuable it can be to play a silly game when deadlines are coming and grades are due. 15 minutes of silliness can go a long way towards getting...
We’ve all been there: you wake up in the morning and realize “there’s no WAY I can go in to school today!” So you call the substitute and hope that your students don’t have a totally unproductive day without you.
If you do most of your lesson planning on PowerPoint (or my darling, Apple Keynote),...
TouchPad Pro turns your jailbroken iPhone into a wireless remote control for your computer, allowing you to mouse, type, and control presentations from anywhere in your classroom, wirelessly.
I’m sure there are as many ways to use this as there are teachers. I have used it to advance my class...