The Digital Camera Reconsidered for Classroom Use

 
At the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) conference this year I caught the tail end of a workshop about using digital cameras in teaching, given by Brian Gross, Mike Kittel, and Brian Heeney (all from Delcastle Technical High School in Wilmington, DE). They had some terrific ideas for using digital cameras in the [...]

Using QR Codes in the Classroom

Raise your hand if you know what that funny looking black and white thing is on the brick wall above.  That is a QR code. What, you may well ask, are QR codes?  QR = Quick Response.  A bit of an unknown here in the U.S., but they are all over Japan (and have been [...]

What’s Happening in Second Life?

Virtual worlds – what a concept, eh?  If you haven’t yet visited a virtual world to have a look around, I urge you to give it a try. What’s more, I strongly encourage you to go in with someone knowledgeable. The first time I went into Second Life, I went in alone, and have to [...]

Chris Lehmann FCC Talk

Here’s a UStream video of a wonderful presentation from Chris Lehmann, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA. He gave a talk at the FCC National Broadband Planning Workshop yesterday (8.20.09) in Washington, DC. Here’s his blog entry about the talk (which includes a draft of his notes). Inspiring. [...]

Vlogging

You may have already started a blog but here’s another idea to consider – a vlog.  As you can guess from the squished-together way these new technology terms are formed, a “vlog” is a “video blog”.  That is, a form of blogging in which the medium is video.
As a teacher, you might set up a [...]

Blogs? …Wikis? …Social networking?

One of the most challenging things to grok in this wacky, new, web 2.0 world is when to use what tool for which thing.  When is a blog the right tool for you to use with your students?  Or is that something you should just do yourself?  What about wikis – when do I use [...]

Web 2.0 Literacy and Learning: Why Should I Care?

With all the pressures of teaching — too much information/too little time, slashed budgets, unmotivated students, highly variable student backgrounds, and over-stuffed classrooms — why should I bother with all of this new media technology? Afterall, throwing a few new, web 2.0 tools around in my classroom will not solve the complex teaching and [...]

What Does This Have to Do with Teaching?

I recently sat in on a departmental staff meeting at a high school.  I was there to talk with the assembled group of teachers about the use of the web in their teaching and how best to prepare themselves, in order to more effectively use web 2.0 technologies and social networking with their students. At [...]

Who’s Reading?

A recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year.  Oh my.  And yet, in 2007 an astonishing 400,000 books were published.  And that number has been going up every year.  Publishing industry analysts chalk these staggering publication numbers up [...]