Useful Webtools for Teachers

Here's a list of useful webtools for teachers. All of them are free of charge. (Some require you to create an account and log in, but the basic tools on these sites are free.) I know many of you already have lesson plans in place, while others may be looking for extra material to direct towards our students. I encourage you to investigate them and use as you see fit.

Library of Congress: Check out the teacher page. This one is completely free! A related site is on flickr (teacher override required) with historical photographs with no known copyrights making it a great source for students and teachers.

For Language Arts and History: shmoop It looks real cool and not just for you, but also with your students. Description: Oh, just look at the website for a good description... no point in me restating what they are all about.

With all those netbooks out there in out LA classes how about a web-based quiz program and instant grading system? Have the results emailed to you instantly. Give ClassMarker a try. Upgrades cost $24.95/year, but the entry-level quiz taker should be fine for most of us.

Concerned with plagiarism? Are kids just copying and pasting text from Google then calling it their own? Use the DOCCOP, a powerful engine that will flag plagiarized student work. Easy to use and totally free!

Lastly, just for students take a gander at these 15 tools. I like #10 etherpad, could be real cool with our netbooks! I've not tested if all of these are filtered from school, but you're only one click away from discovering that so just give it a try and pass them along to our students.

Creating a Voice

I'm up at TIE - Copper Mountain - this week and having a great time. There's a lot of learning going on, tons of smart people that care about learning, and it's a wonderful experience to be attending this conference.

Back in April I posted about leadership at all levels with our school walls and came to the conclusion that every student can and should be a leader. Now I've hit upon a bit of a snag in this idea and it's what I want to discuss in this blog post.

The problem I'm having with this fine idea is HOW to you get kids to create their voice? How do we as educators get a student to be a self-leader?How do you get them to care about their education and life-long learning?

Maybe I'm missing something? Perhaps our students are already "there" and just waiting for an opportunity to prove themselves to us? It actually wouldn't surprise me and it might be an approach to address this question of mine - just let them show us basically. What tools (tech tools?) can enable this style of learning for our students?

So rather than asking more questions I'm hoping a few of you who are reading this post will comment back and let me know what you think...

The Networked Student 2.0 aka "Collective Intelligence"

Okay now. This youtube video rocks for several reasons. While I don't suggest we have our middle school students ONLY using tools like this, I do think it is vital that we start preparing them for this kind of life. Today's successful college student needs to have these skills available to them - believe me I took a Chemistry course last semester and I was using these tools to extend my mastery of the chapters we were covering.



It is within our "charter" to get our kids started on this journey. I believe that middle school is not too early to get started in modeling their skills. For example, a 7th grade LA curriculum requirement is to write a research paper: how many middle school students even know how to validate a web source? Do they know how to write a research paper using web sources - ones that are valid?

At about 4:25 seconds into this video you'll see how you, teacher, can assist in this learning process - even at the young, tender age of our middle school students.

Now the one thing that I struggle with is that our students often lack the rudimentary skills to even form a sentence (subject-verb, capitalization, tense, topic sentences... the list goes on!) That's the focus of your teaching because it's part of what's handed to you, but now there's good reason to teach those basic skills within a 21st Century framework - use blogs, wikis, the web to reinforce those skills and you'll be prepping the students for what comes next while your teaching and honing the LA skills that they should have learned before even entering our school.

[Rant follows] And yes, I'm getting really tired of the whole "web2.0" tag. A better term is "collective intelligence" - one that's used in the more refined circles of elite intelligentsia. Oh yes, there's a "web3.0" term that's been tossed around for several years too. It's also called the "Semantic Web" - something my wife has centered much of her research around as a PhD at UCD. Ok, I'm done ranting!