100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You a Better Teacher

Integrating Technology into the Classroom using Instructional Strategies
based on the research from:
Classroom Instruction that Works
by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, Jane E. Pollock

These authors have examined decades of research to determine which teaching strategies have positive effects on student learning. The stategies are:

Identifying Similarities and Differences
Nonlinguistic Representations
Summarizing and Note Taking
Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
Generating and Testing Hypotheses
Homework and Practice
Cues, Questions, and Advanced Organizers
Cooperative Learning

Click here to access ways of using technology to advance each of these strategies…

Read Write Think provides educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and english language instruction.

A wide array of standards-based lesson plans that meaningfully integrate Internet content into the teaching and/or learning experience can be found at ReadWriteThink. The lessons can be selected according to grade band (K–2, 3–5, 6–8, 9–12) and area of literacy practice. Each lesson is research-based, and includes a detailed instructional plan. The lessons are written for teachers, but include student-ready materials such as worksheets, interactives, and reviewed Web resources.

Thinkfinity.org is a website, sponsored by the Verizon Foundation, containing thousands of free lesson plans, interactive and instructional materials, and professional development opportunities for educators and the literacy community.

The content is created and approved by leading education and
literacy organisations. There are:

· Thousands of K-12 lesson plans and student materials
· Calendars of historic events with associated instructional
materials
· Strategies for integrating Web-based resources into classroom
learning
· Links to discipline-specific websites that focus on science,
humanities, geography, history, maths, art, economics,
reading/language and adult and family literacy
· Resources to help develop and expand skills in literacy
instruction

interesting to see if it lives up to the promise…

The periodic table of visualisation

Cyber-bullying is back in the spotlight. Earlier this month the federal government announced it had established a Youth Advisory Group, consisting of young Australians, to advise it on cyber-bullying and other online issues.

Within a week came the report that two year 9 students had been forced to leave a Sydney girls’ school for cyber-bullying.

Today’s Age has a great piece by two lawyers from Deacons, Nick Abrahams with Victoria Dunn, which outlines cyber-bullying’s defining characteristics, and what sets it apart from traditional bullying behaviours:

1. Anonymity: The impression of anonymity in the online world leads young people to feel less accountable for their actions and provides a false bravado to would-be bullies. In fact, a recent study has shown that, of bullies surveyed, 70 per cent had engaged only in cyber-bullying.

2. Geography: Rather than being limited to the school-yard, cyber-bullying operates wherever a young person uses the internet or a mobile phone. There are few areas of a young person’s life which cyber-bullying cannot penetrate.

3. Impact: The internet provides a means to make bullying comments available to a wider audience than ever before. Through social networking sites, comments can be viewed by potentially thousands of people. The impact of and embarrassment caused by these statements is therefore magnified.

4. Permanence: Verbal comments are fleeting. Online they stay around, potentially forever.

They point out the legal system only has piece-meal ways of responding and that currently, the most effective weapons for combating cyber-bullying are education programs and a commitment by schools to implement and enforce policies.

They suggest such education programs should include:

:: continuing education of teachers and schools about changes in technology and the potential for technology to be used by cyber-bullies;

:: educating kids about cyber-bullying – why not to do it and how to deal with it; and

:: educating parents about technology so they can understand what their kids are doing online and talk to them about it.

More here.

JK

I love microblogging services such as Twitter for their up to the minute community connection.

The 140 character limit also really forces teachers and students to shorten their entries to the truly necessary information.

It is fantastic for brainstorming and rapid sharing of thoughts, ideas, and links.

Its use, rather than being trivial, can be central to group and class communication – keeping a group of collaborating students informed and on the same page.

Microblogging can also be a powerful reflective tool – it makes you stop and think about what you are doing at any given time, before communicating your thinking succinctly for others.

Consider adding tweets to your collaborative learning landscape today…

JK

del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of Internet sites (bookmarking). Basically it allows you to store all your bookmarks online in a searchable personal archive. Adding a new link can be done with as little as two clicks of the mouse.

As you add the link, you also catalogue it (or TAG it) for future personal reference, and to help others search your archive.  The image above is a ‘Tag Cloud’ – a visual representation of the catalogue of bookmarks bookmarked by a del.icio.us user.

You can then access your bookmarks from ANY computer, since they are stored online. Plus, your bookmarks are accessible by others, which can be a great way to collaborate and share information/research.

del.icio.us should definitely be considered during collaborative student online research.

Student can share articles they  tag, and easily re-find sites that are useful. They can also look to see what others in their class or study group are saving.

No more searching for the scrap of paper with the indecipherable site name scribbled on it.

This is crowdsourcing at its simplest and most useful.

Diigo is a social annotation tool; you can highlight, clip and sticky-note any web page, and then share your findings with others.

With the use of diigo and the automatic export to del.icio.us you gain a great Social Bookmarking + Social Annotation tool – arguably the best way to collect, share and interact with online information from anywhere.

Diigo is a great ‘classroom’ tool – given the ability to sign on whole classes and the ability to not only bookmark and classify information, but to offer collaborative reflection.

It is another tool that requires very little adaption of the standard network in schools, nor does it pose any cybersafety issues, while still allowing teachers to effectively scaffold learning pathways for students working collaboratively.

Develop a real social learning community for your class or school online. These tools are free and filled with the capacity to build an interactive community.

Ning is a hosted service that lets you build a private social network – like a “personalized Facebook creator”.  Ning has customizable themes and templates.  Also, it offers a public or private option.

Ning enables instructors to create classroom communities, organizations to create viral interest groups, and informal learning through communities of interest.

It offers teachers K-12 free and secure (no ads!) social networking for their classrooms. It can be used by students to share and make a learning community. Great discussion features, embedding, videos, flexible and personal design. This is the future of learning!

As one teacher says … “We achieved more with Ning in 3 months than we could achieve in 2 years with Moodle. It has helped us bring about a genuine learning community among our students and has enriched their experience considerably.”

Elgg is another open source software that combines a number of tools – eportfolios, personal spaces, file storage blogging, – all on one platform. So you can have blogs, wikis, video, podcasts, RSS feeds , social networking tools, discussions forums, bookmarking etc etc – and all in one place.

It is a good foundation for students to build their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE), and also an e-portfolio. Its really  a web publishing application combining the elements of weblogging, e-portfolios, and social networking designed to promote learning through sharing of knowledge, conversation, and reflection in a social/academic setting.

You can read more here.