I follow these blogs

Hey guys,

This week I want to tell you about 3 interesting Technology in Education blogs I've decided to follow. I will cover them weekly, and let you know of any new and innovative tools, techniques or ideas bloggers share in them. I also advise you to follow them yourself as I truly feel they can enrich your knowledge and open your minds to new and intriguing ideas.

Now, the first blog I want to talk about is called BYOT Network and it's all about Bringing Your Own Thinking (BYOT). The goal is to get your students engaged with the lesson by letting them choose from a variety of sources. Although the blog is not about specific technological tools, reading this blog is a MUST. The blog will guide you in details towards designing your classroom to fit and accommodate the environment needed for meaningful learning. How to provoke critical thinking, What are the qualities of choice and How to provide choice, How important it is to encourage creativity, and moreover - How the integration of technology will benefit this factors. Read the latest post on confidence-for-personalized-learning to learn about the importance of building confidence and trust between teachers and students in the era of technological abundance. I can't wait to put these ideas in practice!!!

The second blog I recommend is called Class Tech Integrate. The is written and updated by elementary school educator Mickey McFetridge who has made waves with his platform how-tos. This guy will tell you all about what actually works in the classroom and is worth using. Furthermore, he will guide you how to easily use this technology yourself. His latest posts are about Accessing free eBooks with Open eBooks, My Maps in Google Drive: Create Interactive Maps and Student Response Tools for the Digital Classroom. The last mentioned introduced me to 4 unfamiliar apps : Answer Garden - that allows a teacher to ask a single question and makes a word cloud out of student responses, Nearpod - that allows the teacher to control what is on the screens of the students via WiFi, Poll Everywhere - that shows real time results in a bar graph on the teacher dashboard, and Socrative - which is an excellent site/app for giving tests/quizzes to students. All of these ideas are great and sure worth a try. I believe that Nearpod and My Maps would greatly assist the learning as well as the general fun!The last blog I want to introduce to you is called Edutech for Teachers where Educational technology specialist Jamie Forshey brings some color to the world of classroom technology solutions. The blog is colorful and inviting. It offers, for example, 16 Edtech Tools to Check for Student Understanding or how to Spark Creativity with the Plot Generator on its latest posts. I find the last one very intersting. It allows you to stimulate creativity for writing projects and/or to motivate reluctant or struggling writers. I would definitely use it in my classroom. Whether my students are going to write short story, film script or novel in the near future, the Plot Generator will help them do so with its varied features!!

That's all for today,

See you next week.