Thursday, September 23, 2010

Get Ready to Integrate!

This article in Education World offers 10 tips for integrating technology in your classroom. Developed by members of the Education World "Tech Team," there's some good advice here for teachers with goals for introducing technology in their classrooms during the school year.  My personal tip is to to take a chance.  Technology can be unpredictable, which is exactly what most teachers want to avoid.  But if you are willing try out a new technology, and let the students work along with you when there are unexpected glitches, you may find that the reward is worth the risk. 

Education World's Tips for Tech Integration
10. Gain perspective.
9. Get organized.
8. Take a course.
7. Network with peers.
6. Explore the literature.
5. Experiment with software.
4. Install timesaving technology.
3. Create a classroom climate.2. Punch up existing lessons.
1. Prepare something new.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Saving Your Favorites on the Web

While the Favorites Tool is a quick and easy way to save websites that you wish to visit later, it’s not ideal if your computer drive fails, or even if you want to access from home a favorite site saved on your computer at school. If you have ever wished that you could get to your favorites list from multiple locations, or if you want an easy way to organize, tag, or share your favorites with colleagues, you should consider signing up for a social bookmarking site. I use Delicious, and have really appreciated the expanded features it provides. Every teacher I’ve introduced to social bookmarking enthusiastically agrees…it’s one of the most useful and easy-to-learn web 2.0 tools, and the best way to store and find web-based information.


Basically, social bookmarking provides the ability to tag any website, and save it to the World Wide Web. You can assign multiple tags to your bookmarks, so they organized by categories, making it a snap to search for and find the sites when you want them. Once our bookmarks are online, you can easily share with friends or fellow teachers, and also search and view what others are tagging to discover popular, recently added, or specific categories of bookmarks.

Two of the most currently popular social bookmarking sites are Delicious and Diigo. Here’s a video that explains the basics of social bookmarking and demonstrates Delicious, and another video that offers an introduction to Diigo.

If you’re still not convinced, or prefer to continue using Internet Explorer’s Favorites Tool, you may benefit from this Ehow article, which describes how to organize your Favorites list alphabetically so that the bookmarks saved on your computer are easier to find.