Web Resources for Educators

Jott is a text dictation services that works via your mobile phone. You call up the speed dial and name who you want to Jott. The next step is to start speaking. Shortly after, Jott transcribes your voice into text and leaves you a note. You can send Jotts to your friends, family, calendar, or blog.

Jott was intended for a professional audience. But let's take a moment to think about Jott in the classroom. I'm a special education teacher by trade and when I first heard of Jott, a light bulb went off in my head. At the time, I was tutoring a student with a learning disability who struggled with writing. His writing problems made him completely adverse to even attempt to put pen to paper. Jott freed him from that fear and allowed him to pre-write his narrative by dictating it over the phone.

Could I have taken dictation? Yes, but that's not the point. Jott is a tool; I am a person. The idea is that we want to empower our students to take control over their own learning. We want to introduce them to resources that allow them to access life independently. I may not always be there in the room to take dictation, but tools like Jott will become increasing popular and advanced.

Jott also has implications for the professional teacher. Want to leave yourself a note? Jott it. You can even send emails using Jott. As a teacher with very little free time, Jott has allowed me to handle important business while sitting on sitting on a bus making the long trek across Manhattan.

You've faced this situation before. Your students are ready to begin the research segment of their project. You've decided to allow students to go online to conduct their research. You've scoped out the scene before hand and found some great sites amongst the chaos in Google.

Now what? You don't know how to create a page using HTML - and even if you did, you don't have any hosting. What is a poor teacher to do? You could create a Squidoo lens; this is an example of one.

It gets better. You can put polls, pictures, and other announcements. There are hundreds of modules. Even if you don't have a particularly good reason, go out and make a lens. Worst case scenario, you'll raise a few cents for charity.

I created my first lens on Squidoo as an experiment. I wanted to learn about how Squidoo worked and needed a subject I knew well enough to consider myself an expert on. What better topic than myself - albeit a little self-righteous.

Edublogs is the 800-pound gorilla in the educational technology world. For the most part, it is a Wordpress blog with all of the bells and whistles already set up and ready to go. Furthermore, chances are good that Edublogs won't be blocked by your schools firewall. There is one caveat. Edublogs can be rather slow between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. - I wonder why?

I feel the same way about Edublogs as I do about Squidoo. Go and sign up for a free account. Play around. Have some fun. There is a great unit designed by the iLearn squad over at the New York City Department of Education. They don't do anything there that you couldn't do with a Squidoo lens with a guestbook hooked up to it, but it's definitely an interesting take on it. Edublogs has done us both a favor and given us ten reasons to give them a try.

1. Post materials and resources

The web is a fantastic tool when it comes to distributing resources - all you have to do on your Edublog is upload, or copy and paste, your materials to your blog and they’ll be instantly accessible by your student from school and from home. What’s more, you can easily manage who gets to access them through password and plugin safety measures.

2. Host online discussions

If you’ve ever struggled to create an online discussion space - you’re going to love what edublogs will do for you. Students can simply respond to blog posts and discuss topics you’ve set them through comments of through our simple forum functionality - commentators can also sign up to receive emails when their comments are replied to and you can easily manage and edit all responses through your blog’s administrative panel.

3. Create a class publication

Do you remember the good old days of class newspapers? Well, they just got a lot easier with your Edublog - you can add students as contributors, authors and even editors in order to produce a custom designed, finely tuned and engaging collaborative online publication by your class.

4. Replace your newsletter

Always enjoyed photocopying and stapling pages and pages of newsletters on a Friday afternoon? Though not! It’s ridiculously simple to post class information, news, events and more on your edublog

5. Get your students blogging

It’s all very good sending your students off to blog sites, or even creating them for them, but you need to operate as a hub for their work and a place where they can easily visit each others blogs from. Your Edublog can be used to glue together your students blogs, and besides which, if you’re asking your students to blog… you should certainly be doing it yourself.

6. Share your lesson plans

We all love planning and admin, right? Well, using an Edublog can turn planning and reflection on classes into a genuinely productive - and even collaborative - experience. Sharing your plans, your reflections, your ideas and your fears with other educators both at your school and around the world using an edublog is a great way to develop as a teacher, and a brilliant use of a blog.

7. Integrate multimedia of all descriptions

With a couple of clicks you can embed online video, multimedia presentations, slideshows and more into your edublog and mix it up with your text and static resources. No cds required, no coding necessary - just select the video, podcasts or slidecast you’d like to use and whack it in your blog to illustrate, engage and improve your teaching toolbox.

8. Organise, organise, organise

You don’t only have to use your edublog as a pedagogue… you can equally easily use the tools to organise everything from sports teams in your school, to rehearsals for the upcoming production. You can set up as many edublogs as you like, so don’t be afraid to use a dedicated one for a dedicated event - your can even use it as a record to look back on down the line.

9. Get feedback

There’s nothing that says you can’t allow anonymous commenting on a blog (although you’re also entirely within your rights to put all comments through moderation!) but why not think about using a blog as a place for students - and even parents, to air issues, leave feedback or generally tell you how great you are.

10. Create a fully functional website

One of the great things about Edublogs are that they are much, much more than just blogging tools. In fact, you can use your edublog to create a multi-layered, in-depth, multimedia rich website - that hardly looks like a blog at all. So, if you’d rather create a set of static content, archive of important information or even index for your library - you can bend an Edublog to suit your needs.

WikiSpaces allows to create pages that can be edited collaboratively by friends, families, colleagues, and students. Here are some possible uses for WikiSpaces in your classroom:

• A page for online resources that any student can add to as they do their own independent research.
• A place for grade or school-wide announcements. Any teacher or administrator can update the page with minimal technological expertise.
  
• A place for students to collaborate and make group presentations from the classroom, home, or anywhere else!
• You could use it to start a site where teachers list different online resources they've come across - Hmmm...

I could give you a much longer tutorial about how WikiSpaces work, but why bore you with words, when WikiSpaces has a great video tutorial.

Allow students to collaborate on study guides for their guided reading books, textbooks, or any other content that could use some further digestion. Encourage conversation and initiate dialogue. This collaboration can be done using Google Documents, but it can also be accomplished, quite easily, using a wiki (such as WikiSpaces).

Through collaboration, students will have taken on the role of differentiating the content in question for those who may struggle with it in its previous incarnation. If you are concerned that everyone is pulling their weight (I choose to concern myself with whether or not the students are learning - by whatever means necessary), you can track collaboration from the administrator's page; but why not instead focus your efforts on making the experience more engaging so that student's want to participate?

Empower your students to create videos, podcasts, slide shows, or artwork on the topic in question. Encourage them to scour the internet, researching supplementary resources such as video clips, relevant websites, or BrainPOP lessons.

I noticed that most kids (in general, and kids with special needs in particular) have an incredibly hard time with typing in URLs. I would usually end up spending the first five to ten minutes trouble shooting URLs before we could begin an activity.

Lately, I've been using TinyURL to ease my troubles. TinyURL tidies up a website address to "http://www.tinyurl.com/" and then a string of 5 or 6 random alphanumeric characters. I will admit, sometimes the random string of meaningless characters can be difficult for students, but I'll argue that the net benefit is still greater.

TinyURL also has a few other cool features. You can use it to hide the URL completely when the student or other user visits the page. Your new TinyURL will always remain in the address bar, thereby cloaking the actual web address - this might have been useful when I linked a bunch of eighth graders who didn't know my first name yet to a resource held on this website!