A collection of some sites I found that I thought I’d share on a Friday afternoon, and some product/project ideas for moving us forward.

Elevating the Education Reform Dialog, Live on Monday

Between the NBC “Education Nation” Summit, Waiting for Superman, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark city schools, there has been a lot of media attention focused on the topic of education reform. Unfortunately, much of it has excluded actual educators, let alone students. Furthermore, and perhaps as a consequence, the dialog has become divisive, blaming, and ultimately counter-productive.

FutureofEducation.com and Edutopia are collaborating this coming Monday on a two-hour live and interactive look at “Elevating the Education Reform Dialog”–an online discussion with special guests and specifically for educators,  to help move past the bashing and to engage in a constructive conversation about the best way forward.  Connection details are at the bottom of this post.  Confirmed speakers include:…(finish reading on the blog)

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Learning In Hand.com

Take a look around and chances are you’ll see a mobile device. Phones, iPods, laptops, netbooks, iPads, USB drives, and handheld games seem to be everywhere. Combine these ever-present gadgets with educational and productivity uses and you’ve got mobile learning.

Mobile learning can happen anywhere: in a classroom, at the dinning room table, on a bus, in front of a science exhibit, at the zoo…anywhere! Portability is not as important as the ability of the learner to connect, communicate, collaborate, and create using tools that are readily at hand. Here are some examples: …(finish reading on the blog)

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The Innovative Educator

As the recipient of the National Silver Award for Best How-To Article for my article, 8 Ways To Use A School Wiki to Increase Communication, Collaboration, and Enrich Instruction, and as a wiki-aficionado who has helped countless educators set up their own wikis, I consider myself a Wiki Wizard. I was happy to learn recently that I was in good company as curriculum mapping guru Heidi Hayes Jacobs believes wikis are an essential educational tool of the 21st century. See her wiki here.

However, they still are a relatively new tool and the whole idea of collaborative writing, thinking, and learning is still new to a lot of educators uncertain about this brave new world of networked knowledge creation. When I suggest to schools that they can become more efficient, effective, and can grow their thinking by leaps and bounds, there’s sometimes doubt and trepidation about these uncharted waters. When I share they’ll never have to print another memo, school handbook, or lesson plan again and in general they’ll be able to save thousands by ditching the paper budget…(finish reading on the blog) This by the way applies to any and all online collaborative tools, not simply wikis.

—–Some Products we’re considering. Can you see yourself using these?——

Ipevo.com (The Elmo may have met its match…)

The Point 2 View USB Document Camera provides live image capture for documents, pictures, textbooks, and three-dimensional objects—all at hundreds or even thousands less than conventional document cameras and overhead projectors. And with its ultra-portable size and featherlight weight—less than a single pound—the Point 2 View is a perfect mobile solution for teaching, presentations, distance learning, and video communication of all types.

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Promethean ActivExpression

Students have amazing things on their minds, and very little of it fits the standard multiple choice format. ActivExpression turns question and answer into query, communicate and check comprehension. Full text-capability enables students to respond in full sentences as well as in numbers, symbols, math equations, true/false, Likert scales and more. Self-Paced Learning allows teachers to assign full quizzes of varying difficulty and gives students the opportunity to register answers at their own pace. Teachers can alter the assignment’s length of time to challenge learners.

Do we want to be “top ranked” when what we’re ranking isn’t the most important to be “top” at?

-Will Richardson

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let all of you know that I got a little ambitious downloading class lists from ARIS and was able to put together a complete enrollment list for our students…I then took that list rolled out @ms145.org email address and their accompanying Google accounts for all of our students. Yes, all of our students. There will be more information forthcoming, ie how to log-in and passwords/account names etc, but for now, I just wanted to give a heads up as many of you are establishing early year trends which may include having the students get their email information to you and start registering on Engrade, both of which require an email address.

Although many, if not most, of our students already possess personal email addresses, this will reduce the number of papichuloondablock@hotmail.com and da_baddessbitch@gmail.com email messages we have to receive from our youngsters.

I will provide a down-loadable waiver example you may edit to your liking, and passwords/account names before Friday.

Also…if you would like your previously assigned netbook back, please come see me in 442 during 7/8 period Wednesday, or anytime before Lunch on Thursday.

Now smile…

Hey everyone, I wanted to let you know that after careful consideration and reading through the great suggestions many of you had on how to move forward with our Educator’s site, It has been made clear that in order to foster true collaboration and sharing, we need varying viewpoints, methodologies and voices heard. A blog (this current set-up), where one person writes and solicits responses from the crowd, really isn’t that forum.  So, it’s in the spirit of sharing, and enabling all of our unique voices that I unveil to you our new Educator’s Group (Courtesy of some great free online software from the fine folks of Google).

Benefits of the Groups service

With our new Google Groups service, we get all of these benefits:

• View our Groups directory to find the email address for a group.
• View details about a group in the directory, including the list of members.
• View a group’s discussion archive, which includes all the messages sent to the group.
• Manage your own subscriptions to groups — that is, join or leave a group whenever you want
• Create your own groups to share content and resources with other educators in your fields
• Share content (Google documents, calendars, sites, videos, links, worksheets, lessons…) with a group address instead of individual addresses, even if someone joins later, access to your content is updated automatically

Where to find our Groups service and how to log in:

Getting Started Guide for Google Groups

For more information about Google Groups and instructions for using the major features, check out our Getting Started Guide.