Technology+Leadership+Blog+Summary

Free Technology for Teachers Blog Summary After reading, exploring, and analyzing the blog, Free Technology for Teacher, I am excited. The blog is a resource full of information that educators can access to help them in their classrooms. It has multiple authors who post information about Web 2.0 tools, better ways to use social networks, and software that can truly help educators prepare for their subject areas. The blog has really expanded my knowledge of how much free information is online for teachers to find and use in classrooms. A few examples of educational tools that may be found on the blog are Big Marker, Drop Mocks, and Lendink. Big Marker is an option for online tutoring or brainstorming sessions, and it also allows the user to create private or public online meeting rooms. Drop mocks is a simple way to share image galleries and is used to construct image galleries and slideshows. Lendink is a free service that allows eBook owners to lend and borrow copies of eBooks. This is a legal way to share purchased information between online users. Another example of a useful classroom applications are free online graphing calculators thru Microsoft mathematics 4.0 which would be a great alternative to buying expensive graphing calculators for district campuses. Many different subject areas are included in the blog such as geography and history tools. A couple of examples of these tools are wind and solar power estimation tools and the center for Civil War photography featuring 3D images. An educator can access this information and bring it to the attention of their students creating a more meaningful learning experience for subjects that may at times be very full of cut and dry material. For a journalism class the instructor may want students to find examples of creative articles, and if they can use the blog entry about 10,000 newspapers on Google maps, using this resource students can search for newspapers all over the world. This will broaden their journalism horizons way beyond their expectations and giving them more in depth knowledge on constructing newspaper articles. A few blog entries that can help educators to grade and prepare their lessons for classroom instruction are Voki, QuizGeo, and Plagiarisma. Voki is a lesson plan database that can be used by educators or students in order to create short digital stories. It also uses a talking avatar service so that students can create and embed their avatars into a blog, wiki, or website. QuizGeo is a tool that geography quizzes and be built using the Google Maps platform. A teacher can create their own quiz or use premade quizzes to assess the knowledge of their students. Plagiarisma is software that can help teachers and students check their work for originality. This is to ensure that student’s work is original and authentic. Sometimes students don’t even know or realize that they have used another person’s idea and thought in their submitted work. As you can tell Free Technology for Teachers is full of great tools and resources that can help educators to teach students in a more technological environment. The blog also offers new posts everyday to help teachers keep their classrooms full of fresh and new ideas so that students are consistently learning new ways to absorb information. This blog is high recommended by myself for any teachers that feel they don’t have the knowledge base to incorporate technology in their classrooms.