instructional technology network

Friday: Updates to Adobe Reader and introducing Evernote [Productivity tools] Monday: A different perspective on validating resources [Information Literacy] Today: Primary source political cartoons and resources for understanding bias and perspective [Information Literacy] Wednesday:  When to credit an image source [Intellectual Property and Ethics] The Library of Congress has continued to develop material sets to [...]

There are a handful of resources I’ve been sitting on, waiting for a moment to share here. So today begins the first of four posts sharing some useful tools and updates. Today: Updates to Adobe Reader and introducing Evernote [Productivity tools] Monday: A different perspective on validating resources [Information Literacy] Tuesday: Primary source political cartoons [...]

The hardest part of what follows is what to do with the classroom time that is now wide open. Read on, then talk back in the comments. Transpose the prevailing approach and make your homework classwork and your whole-class instruction homework. Classroom time is prime real estate in the student day. It was once necessary [...]

Doug Johnson at Blue Skunk Blog shares his Dozen Ways to Teach Ethical and Safe Technology Use. A notable takeaway is that these 12 items have little to do with teaching students to apply a lengthy district policy or specific technological skills and more to do with applying existing community expectations and modeling best practices. [...]

The value of search tools lies within the ability to do one thing: Find the resource you need. There are numerous ways to narrow those results, such as including more search terms, narrowing the timeframe, or a site-specific searches. It is also possible to narrow your results be reading level. While the accuracy of the [...]

If you’re looking for resources to help your students improve their information literacy skills and stay safer online, Google’s Digital Literacy Tool is a great resource to explore. I want to let you know upfront that some of this material is YouTube hosted, which will pose some filtering-related problems. Talk with your tech coordinator for [...]

One obstacle that clouds instructional technology efforts is an overly broad definition of what constitutes instructional technology. Taking a step back from the matter, one might be surprised to learn that instructional technology might actually be better considered within three separate, but overlapping subgroups or domains. Classifying our efforts into these three domains can bring [...]

Doug Johnson at Blue Skunk Blog asks “What are The Top Ten Social Learning and Educational Networking Competencies for K-12 Teachers?” and posts his top ten: Help students use educational networking tools to solve information problems and communicate digitally with experts, peers and instructors. Know the major Web 2.0 categories and tools that are useful [...]