The
Cool Cat Teacher Blog
The first educator blog
that we are commenting on is the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. This blog is written and updated by a women named Vicki
Davis, who is a teacher, IT director and co-founder of the Flat Classroom Project(s). Her blog is dedicated to providing teachers with “inspirational, innovative content that you can use to
stay motivated in your personal and professional life.”
This website fully embraces the idea
of 21st Century teaching, with a greater emphasis being placed on the
integration of technology into instruction. There are literally hundreds
of posts detailing effective ways to incorporate technology into teaching,
various tools and websites that make online learning fun and engaging, and an
entire section about digital citizenship and the responsibilities of both
educators and students in regards to safe use of the Internet. What we
really liked about this website was that she provides a daily post dedicated to
education and technology news for schools. After looking through several
of these posts we discovered a lot of great resources that teachers can find on
the Internet to help develop an effective blended learning classroom.
Her professional Twitter
account is: @coolcatteacher
The Link to the Creative
Commons Liscence for this website is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Always
Learning
The second educator’s
blog that we are commenting on is called “Always
Learning: teaching technology abroad.” This blog is maintained by a teacher named Kim Cofino.
Kim describes her blog as “a place to reflect on my teaching and learning
as a Technology and Learning Coach in international schools.
What is unique about this blog is that Ms. Cofino shares
her experiences in education that she has acquired from her multiple years of
teaching in International Schools all around the globe. What we really
liked about this blog is that it demonstrated the universality of technology.
By this we mean that whether she was teaching in Europe or Asia Ms.
Cofino was able to seamlessly integrate technology into an engaging and
responsible 21st Century classroom. Throughout her various posts
about her experiences with technology, she details a vast array of useful Apps
to help students. One of these Apps allowed the user to handwrite or
print sentences, on an Ipad, in their native language and have is translated to
another language. We think this would be a great tool to have in a
classroom to help ELL students become more proficient with the English
Her professional Twitter
account is: @mscofino.
The link to the Creative
Commons Liscence for this blog is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
High Techpectations
The next blog that we
are commenting on is entitled “High Techpectations: ideas and resources for modern educators.” This blog is written and maintained by a
woman named Lucy Gray. She is a former teacher and now a technology and
educational consultant. She is the founder of the Global Education
Collaborative, which, as she describes, is a “network
for educators interested in connections, collaboration and project-based
learning.”
Similar to the other blogs that we
have commented on, High Techpectations has hundreads of posts related to the
field of educational technology and the usefulness of the Web 2.0 is a 21st
Century learning environment. What we really like about this blog is that
many of her posts seemed to be written for an individual who is not very
familiar with many Web 2.0 tools, specifically in relation to education.
For example one of the tag clouds, on the blog, is Web 2.0. Under this category she provides, detailed
yet simple instruction of the various Social Media tools that are available to
educators and how they can be incorporated into your classroom. We think
this is very helpful for teachers who are just beginning to make the transition
from a traditional learning environment to a more blended one.
Her
Twitter page is @elemnous and the link to the Creative
Commons license for her blog is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
The
Open Classroom
The “The Open Classroom”
blog was written by an educator who started her career out as a science teacher
and then went back to go school to become a English and Literature Teacher
which got her involved in blogs and Web 2.0 tools. When exploring “The Open Classroom”
I came across a post on Effective 1:1 Programs. We were unaware of what the program was so we
read the post and then looked at the links posted on the program. The program
is basically for students to have their own laptops another name for the
program is “anywhere, anytime”. We liked that name as it describes basically
that the students are able to learn and study with their laptops all the time.
By giving the students a laptop they become independent and self-initiating in
their learning. We can see how this program can be beneficial for the students
as their learning can become individualized and they can progress their work at
their own pace. We can also see a con for this program is the cost and training
for the teacher. Personally we don’t know if we would feel comfortable to have
a classroom basically do the majority of their work on a personal device. Also,
there is the cost of the device, programming/ software and maintenance. With
these cost the program may be limiting to only certain demographics.
Her
Twitter page is @jomcleay and the link to the Creative
Commons license for her blog is:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Moving
at the Speed of Creativity
We started looking at
this blog and we couldn’t stop looking at all the posts. The first thing we looked
at was the “Cool iPad Art & STEAM Apps & Hacks” post. There was a App that is mentioned called
Singing Fingers and a video to demonstrate it. The video showed how you could
paint a picture and then put sounds to go along with it. We are definitely
going to be putting this on my ipads as it seems like a fun way to make music
and play with sounds. This App we think allows for the students to get creative
and is engaging for all age levels. Wesley Fryer the author of “Moving at the
Speed of Creativity” we think provides educators with many helpful tools and
ideas for the use of technology in the classroom.
His
Twitter page is @wfryer and the link to the Creative
Commons license for her blog is:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US
Name: This Week in
Education
This
Week in Education
We liked the idea behind
Alexander Russo’s blog “This Week in Education” as it keeps the teacher informed about
everything in the news about what's happening in regards to education. However,
this site is based on news in Education in the United States and not Canada so
it isn’t relevant to us. If anyone knows of a similar Blog that looks at the
News in Education in Canada please share with us.
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