Become an ed tech ninja with your friends

Technological change evolves much faster than institutional change can keep pace, so we need a way to learn in a way that fits our busy lives.  Your teacher feedback has shown this to be the case, and you are looking for a way to quickly collaborate and share ideas in an organized way.

This video will show you how to use Bedford's Ed Tech blog the post and comment on your ed tech successes and challenges.

Your posts do not need to be formal.  The idea is that you have a place to quickly share thoughts and ideas when it is convenient for your schedule.  You are extremely busy and getting everyone together for a regular meeting may not be realistic, so a blog like this is ideal in this situation.

Using video, images, audio and links can greatly enhance your ideas.  Most people agree that face-to-face collaboration is the most desirable way to work as a team, but adding something like a short video explanation can get us pretty close.

If you can think of Blogger, Youtube, Facebook, Google, etc. as the modern versions of the slide-rule, abacus, pencil, paper, etc., we can accomplish great things while keeping pace with the way the world works today.  

Our students desperately need us to help them navigate the wide open world of technology.  If we can help our students to avoid getting lost in all of the garbage out there, we can show them how to use technology to love to learn...to become creators of information instead of consumers.

A great place for us to start would be to sign up to follow this blog from the "Follow by email" box in the upper-right corner of this page.  Then I would recommend finding a couple of other blogs that interest you to follow by email.  In this way, you will get frequent updates of other teachers' thoughts and experiences which can provide great motivation and inspiration for your classroom.

Here are a couple to start with:

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/

http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/

All Bedford school teachers have been invited to be an author on this blog.  If you can't find it in your email, send a request to support@bedford.k12.ia.us.  If you are not a Bedford school teacher and would like contribute a post to this blog, contact our tech team at support@bedford.k12.ia.us to be added as an author.

Tools used to create this post:

blogger.com

Screencast-o-matic (free)

iMovie

youtube.com

update: it appears that we are only allowed 100 authors per blog, so if you didn't receive an invitation and would like to post, let me know and we'll make it work.  :)

Use Gmail as an RSS Reader

Many people would like to subscribe to RSS feeds to get news and updates from sources they find on the internet, but don't know how to use an RSS reader, or would rather get the updates in their gmail.

This post addresses both issues.

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Excerpt:
One interesting alternative to Google Reader can actually be found right within Google’s own services — one that you know won’t be going anywhere: Gmail. With a few easy steps, you can turn part of your inbox into an RSS reader, accessible on your desktop computer, mobile phone, or just about anywhere you can access your Gmail account.

How to Access Your Yahoo Mail with Gmail

Do you have an email account with Yahoo or some other POP webmail provider that you want or need to access through your Gmail account?  Don't let the man slow you down.  Get all of your email in your Gmail inbox. Here is how

Improve Student Writing with Google Docs

Teaching in the Cloud: How Google Docs are Revolutionizing the Classroom

WBUR
Nov. 12, 2013
by Mike Kalin

Any experienced English teacher knows the drill: on the dreaded due date, students bring printed copies of their essays to class, where we collect them, take them home, jot inscrutable comments in the margins, bring them back to class, return them, and then watch students promptly toss them in the recycling bin on the way out of the room. The whole cycle borders on farce. Students pretend to spend many hours writing their papers, teachers pretend to spend many hours grading them, and we all pretend like repeating this process over and over again leads to something we in education like to call “student growth.” But teachers can finally put an end to this exercise in futility, thanks to an unlikely hero sometimes condemned for its unrelenting pursuit of profit at the expense of the public good…Google.