Twiducate is a free social networking tool that enables students and teachers to collaborate and work together online.  Twidicate allows for conversations, file sharing, and communication in a secure and safe virtual environment.  Through this “online classroom” teachers can promote higher order thinking, provide immediate feedback, and encourage collaboration.  Today’s students need to have social networking skills to  be able to compete in today’s highly technological world.    Why not let them learn this tool in an educational environment with curriculum at the core of the collaboration? 

 Why use Twiducate?

• Free
• Private
• Promotes collaboration
• Encourages higher order thinking
• Share ideas and thoughts
• Upload and download files
• Self-Publishing
• No login or email address required

 Click here to get started today!

If your school does not have its own website hosting service, Yola is a great choice for building your own virtual classroom!  It is quick, effortless, and free!  Yola’s free service offers photo and video uploads, numerous editable backgrounds, multiple page creation, form creators, HTML embedding code, and more.  For a small price, you can also customize your domain name.  Click here to get started today!

Need help finding images to use in your presentations?  Do your students need a way to find images in an organized and logical way?  Google Image Swirl organizes image searches into categories based on content and similarity.  Images are presented in a “swirl” and can be explored further through additional sub-groups within each cluster.  This is also a great tool to use on an Interactive Whiteboard!  Click here to get started.

It is great to be with you today at the Fort Greely Middle School. I am using my blog today as a simple way to host the resources and materials that we are going to share today. Think of this as my classroom web page. How do you use your classroom web page to connect with your students?

An opening “Hello to Fort Greely Middle School. Click here…

I am going to ask you a question using the back channel conversation tool called Today’s Meet. Click to begin our discussion…

Another great discussion tool is called Type With Me… Click here to join the Greely group

Review sample projects in the Drop.io drop box. Click here…

It is great to kick off the 2010 – 2011 school year in the Shawnee School District in Shawnee, Oklahoma.  Today we are getting to know each other and how we can integrate 21st Century skills into the classroom.

Describe a good teacher…

Shawnee web sites….

Safe search engines for students…

It is great to kick off the 2010 – 2011 school year at Homeland Park Elementary School in Anderson, South Carolina. Today we are getting to know each other and how we can integrate 21st Century skills into the classroom.

Click here to connect to our back channel conversation…

Safe search engines for students…

HPE web sites…

TypeWith.me is a great tool to create relevant, online conversations between up to 15 authors at the same time through one URL. The text is synchronized in real time so that everyone that is working together sees all of text simultaneously. Each author is assigned a different color so that you can see who is contributing what. Use TypeWith.me for pre-assessment, book discussions, reflections, and more! There is no logging in, no registration, and best of it, it it totally free! Click here to get started!

There are tremendous assistive technology applications available for the  iPod touch and iPad.  I have been sharing these applications with special education administrators the past few weeks. There are applications available for free or at a low cost that connect with students with disabilities.
Click here for the complete list and you can download it as a .pdf file.