If you teach Current Events, this online tool might be worth checking out.

TimeSpace: World by the Washington Post is an interactive map that allows you to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. Discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered. Use the timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, and customize your news searches to a particular day or specific hour. (Many Washington Post stories appear at midnight; others are published throughout the day as news happens). Click the ? in the upper right for help.

I’m in Chicago (St. Charles, Illinois to be exact) for the ICE (Illinois Computing Educators) Conference and all of the sessions so far have been winners! Dr. Yong Zhao (yes, Michigan’s Dr. Zhao) was their opening keynote. His presentation, “Never Send a Man to do a Machine’s Job: Reconstruct the Relationship between Teachers and Technology” was engaging and interesting. He had the standing room only crowd laughing thoughout his presentation. I’m hoping the ICE team has this archived for us.

One of the sessions I knew I couldn’t miss was Steve Dembo’s presentation “Extreme Makeover: Education Edition.” Steve will be doing a version of this at the MACUL conference in a couple of weeks. This session is really geared for Web 2.0 beginners although there were a couple of tools that were new to me

Many times when showing new tools to teachers, the response is, “I don’t have time to learn that” or “my district can’t afford any new technology” or “that’s too hard for me.” Steve showed several free tools that educators can use immediately, without the steep learning curve that accompanies a lot of software.

• Blabberize
• Edublogs
• crappygraphs (you might not be able to use this at school)
• Twitter
• Let Me Google That For You
• embedding video
• Plodt
• Poll Everywhere
• Prezi (You can apply for a free account but it’s in beta and might not get approved for a while.)

If you have a few minutes try these out. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see Steve share this at MACUL, I hear he’s looking for audience participation

Blogs are a great tool for educators. If you are thinking about creating a blog or are one of the hundreds of educators in Muskegon County who have just set up a blog and aren’t sure how to use it – the next free webinar on October 22 is for you.

Janni Black, an educator with 18 years experience in curriculum and classroom teaching, has spent the last decade incorporating technology into all content areas of the classroom. A strong advocate for the importance of digital literacy, she shares her enthusiasm for technology with other educators by leading hands-on presentations, serving on leadership technology committees and penning her blog,Transitioning to Web 2.0. Janni’s writing has even won her the distinction “Geek of the Week” by Women of the Web.

See the previous post on this blog for more info, including how to register.

Muskegon Area ISD has subscribed to a Season Pass for Technology in Practice, ISTE’s continuing Webinar Series. This series features thirty highly engaging Webinars over the course of 2008-2009. Each Webinar will feature a Web 2.0 tool or innovative technology of wide appeal to educators. Each session will be at least 60 minutes in length, with 45 minutes of presenter content. The balance of the session will feature interactive elements such as audience Q&A and polls, and previews of upcoming ISTE Webinar events.

Except where noted, all ISTE webinars take place at 4:00 PM at MAISD. Except where noted, all ISTE webinars take place at 4:00 PM at MAISD. Registration is FREE. You may sign up for any or all of the webinars in the series. For information on how to register, click on the Professional Development link on the ISD web site
(http://www.muskegonisd.org).

Click on this link iste-webinars.pdf to see the listing of all of the webinars in the series.

Vicki Davis has created a free online workshop, Seven Steps to a Flat Classroom, that is being offered through Atomic Learning for a limited time. What’s a Flat Classroom? According to Davis, creator of the award-winning Flat Classroom Project, it is “the expansion of your classroom to include global communities and different forms of communication like blogs and wikis.”

The workshop consists of over 70 short video tutorials to help you understand what a flat classroom is and how you can connect yourself and your students, create “prolearners”, and communicate. There are also videos addressing online ethics and character, citizenship, safety, and choice.

Wordle is an online tool (toy) for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.The Wordle below was created from tags in my delicious account. Wouldn’t this be fun in a Language Arts class? It could also be used in a computer class to demo tag clouds and how the words appear smaller or larger depending on how often they’re used.Try one youself at http://www.wordle.net.

The other day, I briefly mentioned the social networking site called Classroom 2.0. There are several resources on the front page alone to keep yourself informed, but in particular, I found the Resources Wiki link to be the highlight of the site.

Because it is a social networking site that depends on input from people all over the world, there are sections that are not yet completed. However, there is still plenty of information to get started and the categories are relevant to classroom situations. Note on the left column that there are 32 categories, including links for blogging, collaborative resources (documents, idea maps, spreadsheets), Google Earth, photo sharing and social resources such as bookmarking, networking and note-taking. Each category includes information to the same basic questions:

• Uses For (category) In Education
• What (category) Does For Students
• Lesson Plans and Ideas
• Active Discussion Page
• Specific Program Links (found some new web sites here)
• (Category) Resources
• Wiki Resources (related to category)
• Podcast Resources (related to category)
• Other Website Links
• Article Links
• Books
• Videos, and
• Additional Resources

While reviewing these resources, I was introduced to the concept of Collaborative Web Trails. There may be a lot of potential with this idea in the classroom. 

Among the numerous online tools for sharing documents is mynoteIT. There are some similarities to Google Documents, but some unique characteristics that make this tool something worth considering. On the front page of the web site, several benefits are listed, including:

• ability to keep track of upcoming assignments (and for teachers, perhaps keep track of what needs to be done in preparation for a class project),

• create classes to keep notes separated,

• create “groups” in which peers can be invited for sharing the notes, and

• upload Word and OpenOffice documents, images and audio notes.

Google Tools for Educators are a great way for students and staff to collaborate on documents, presentations or spreadsheets. And now, there are simple tutorials from Atomic Learning available to help learn how to use Google Tools for Educators. The godo news is, while Atomic Learning usually charges an annual fee to use their tutorials, these are free. Check them out at Google Documents, Google Presentations, and Google Spreadsheets.

Dena Faust has compiled a resource that lists some common Web 2.0 tools (such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, discussion boards, voicethread, and social bookmarking) and shares ways to integrate these free tools into the classroom. In addition to some general ideas for integration, she lists some of the best web sites on these topics.

If you have the time, consider exploring the Classroom 2.0 social networking site that contains this resource. You will find numerous topics relating technology integration.