The Ultimate Resource on Using Blogs and Wikis in Education

I found a site where you will find excellent information and resources on the effective use of Blogs and Wikis in education. This site is great for an educator that is unsure of how to begin using either a Blog or Wiki in his or her classroom.
There are links and videos that go along with the entire process which make the page very user friendly! Check it out and get more information about using Blogs and Wikis in your own classroom by following the link below!
http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Using_Blogs_and_Wikis_in_Education

Social Networking...it's in or should I say "outside" the classroom!

Julie Lindsay is the author of a blog posting titled Social networking in the classroom: Learning by Stealth where she explains that her class does not end when the students walk out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. Her students interact with each other, they interact with her, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of 'social networking'. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else she can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning.

Learning from the World

Educators can build young people’s knowledge of the world by looking online for international content. The websites of international news organizations, cultural institutions, and universities, to name a few, provide broad and deep resources on other countries and global issues. Some pioneering after school programs have begun to go beyond web research projects to connect young people to rich online global experiences. For example, many international organizations are starting to provide educational events for older youth in Teen Second Life, a virtual reality platform online. Global Kids, an after school program in New York City, implemented the “I Dig Tanzania” summer camp in 2008. In this program, high school youth in Chicago and New York followed a paleontology excavation in Tanzania led by a team from the Field Museum of Chicago, learning about Swahili language and culture along the way. Participants followed what the real researchers were doing through streaming video, asked questions over satellite phones, and then dug virtual fossils and assembled them together into an exhibit in Teen Second Life.

Check out my resource to find similar articles at: http://www.asiasociety.org/education-learning/afterschool/expanding-horizons-through-technology

The SOUND of a Classroom

Check out this article from the New Horizons For Learning site!

Listen Up!: Using Audio Files in the Curriculum

by Tuiren Bratina, Tom Bratina and Anthony Bratina

Technology and Academic Achievement in the Classroom

There is a need to prepare teachers to use technology effectively meaning schools and district's have to adopt new models of professional development. Too often the limited staff development available focuses on the computer, not technology's role in learning and teaching. Ninety-six percent of teachers reported that the most common training they received was on basic computer skills. Another survey of public school teachers found that while most (78%) received some technology-related professional development in the 1998-99 school year, the training was basic and brief, lasting only 1 to 5 hours for 39 % of teachers, and just 6 to 10 hours for another 19% of those trained. The results of this failure to prepare teachers to use these new teaching tools were predictable. In 1999 a survey commission by the U.S. Department of Education reported that two-thirds of teachers surveyed were not comfortable using technology. In this day and age that cannot be happening!
Recently, a growing number of researchers have published studies that provide substantial evidence that technology can play a positive role in academic achievement. Several organizations like Edutopia, the North Central Educational Lab (NCREL) and the Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology (CARET) are documenting research studies that link technology to increases in academic achievement.
Having first hand experience with seeing the benefits of technology in classroom settings, I can attest to the students being more involved in the learning process and taking ownership in the way they learn a new concept or skill. We as educators need to use the tools that interest the students and it technology is what gets the information threw to them, why are we not using it more to our advantage?

Visit my recourse, the New Horizons For Learning website and see other related articles.