I was cleaning out my bookshelf and found some issues of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, a journal published by the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education. As I thumbed through Vol. 13 No. 1 from 2005, I reviewed an article by Ewa McGrail on the perspectives of English teachers on technology and change. I was struck by a passage in which she referenced a qualitative study by Peck, Cuban, and Kirkpatrick [...]

As announced yesterday on the Official Google Docs Blog, two new features have been added – shared folders and multiple file uploads! The new “shared folders” option should make facilitate collaboration by keeping all the documents in one place. Sharing one folder is certainly easier than sharing multiple documents, especially if it is a large project that requires lots of files. View-only access, just like with documents, is also available for the shared folders.

When I was writing papers in high school and college, citations were such a pain to do. I had to buy expensive and heavy reference manuals for both MLA and APA, depending on my instructors preference. Not so today. There are a number of web sites that make this process so easy today. Here are a few to consider for your professional or your students’ use. Bibme – The fully automatic bibliography maker that auto-fills. [...]

Having created a video Playlist, now we need to share it. The first step will be to create a custom video player to display your Playlist. To begin, login to your YouTube account. Click on your username and select Account from the drop down list Look for the More column and click on the Custom Video Players link On this page, we create a new video player and customize its appearance. Click on the Create [...]

I visit YouTube often. Sometimes for educationally related videos, and other time just for fun. In the past, when I found videos that I wanted to share with other teachers, I would copy the embed code that is usually provided to the right of the video, and paste it into my blog, wiki, or web site. Easy enough. But this process only allows me to embed one video at a time. What if I wanted [...]

WhenIsGood is a web tool that provides an easy way to see when others are free for a meeting or event. I needed this tool today when I was trying to coordinate a face-to-face meeting with five other teachers. As with most online services you have to create an account first. Since I had created an account last year, I was able to login quickly and begin to create the event. To create an event, [...]

I’m sure that most of us have visited YouTube at one point or another – to see the latest viral video, to watch cute animals, or, of course, to watch something educationally related. But did you know that there is a segment of YouTube dedicated to education? YouTube EDU provides free video clips from various colleges and universities. Looking for some specific content? Browse by category [Social Sciences]. Is your favorite college / university participating? [...]

Let’s start with a few questions: Do you want any easy way to share web sites with friends, family, or colleagues? Would you like to add notes to those web pages? Need to highlight important content? Do you need to organize those web sites for easy access? Well, then your solution is WebNotes, an online browser tool that allows you to create and manage online annotations. I just signed up for the free Web Notes [...]

Thanks to Dr. Scott McLeod for posting this video on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant. Worth watching and reflecting.

If you don’t belong to ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), you might have missed this article, Learning with Blogs and Wikis, in the February 2009 issue. Bill Ferriter makes a convincing case for educators to use technology to further professional development. Definately worth a few minutes to read. There are tips to get started with reading blogs, links to educational blogs that he follows, links to blog sites if you want to get [...]