In the June/July issue of the magazine, the result from this poll was published: Although the responses did not surprise me, it did force me to ask, “What would adequate support for integrating technology into the classroom look like?” Would it be… The presence of coaching support / modeling? Access to technology resources? Planning time to modify instructional plans to integrate technology? Timely support for technical problems, such as software installation, wireless access, etc? What [...]

According to CrunchBase, “Storybird is organizing the world’s most beautiful narrative art to make it simple for families and friends to create short, visual stories together that they can share and print. We’re part ETSY, Flickr, and Blurb—optimized for a world of PoD, iPhones, and tablets.” I stumbled across this site by accident in a magazine. I went to the web site and looked around and it does seem very simple to create. I had [...]

David Kapuler put together this list of sites for creating digital art. Which ones do you use? Art Pad – A great painting site that records a picture while it’s created to create a time lapse effect. Slimber – An excellent site for drawing & painting with some beautiful examples. Bomomo – A fun site where users can create unique pictures with different templates (ie, Pixie). Doink – A great site for creating animated art [...]

I just heard the sad news… Xmarks, my favorite bookmark synchronization service, will be discontinued in January of 2011. This has been one of my most important and reliable add-ons for several years, and am not looking forward to searching for a replacement. To learn more about this decision, please read the Xmarks Blog » End of the Road for Xmarks. If you find a replacement that you like, please share it here!

Most of my time is spent helping educators with instructional technology support, but there are times when I am asked to trouble shoot a hardware or software issue. A colleagues sent this to me recently, and this graph just validates what I believe to be true. Of course, it doesn’t work all the time but it is a very good first step…

A colleague passed this web site on to me today: DocsTeach This is a web site sponsored by the National Archives and features eady to use tools for teaching with documents in the classroom. So if you are interested in bringing history to life for your students, then check out this site. In addition, there is a community to join, a way to bookmark documents and activities to build a portfolio, as well as a [...]

Dropbox is a free  online back up service. You can synchronize files, share files with others, and it works on Macs, PCs, and Linux. Listed below are some links to learn more about this service. Dropbox Sharing and Saving with Dropbox Top Tips for Using Dropbox at School

From the Library of Congress web site: “The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge [...]

“I want students to mark up grammatically incorrect sentences on my interactive white board. What’s the easiest way to do that?” My answer was “PowerPoint.” When you use Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to display presentations, or in this case sentences, you can annotate right on the slide. This option appealed to me because we did not have to launch the board’s software to annotate on the slide. We could accomplish the same task within just [...]

Need an online site to create survey for students, parents, colleagues? I happen to prefer using Google Docs to create mine but there are other resources available. Check out the list created by David Kapuler and see if any of them will work for you.