Forgive me for not being more active on this great NING. Wherever teacher-librarians gather I find valuable resources and deeply caring people.
I'd like to add to the resources by sharing by new online magazine. This is a curated publishing effort that is just getting started. I think the content will appeal to this audience.
Digital Magazine: Information Fluency . If you like what you see, just click follow so we can stay connected.
~ Dennis
We are nearing the end of the Flat Classroom Project 2011-3 and students are finishing their multimedia artifacts over the next several weeks. Now is the time to sign up to be a judge! We invite all interested educators and observers to come and learn more about the project by volunteering to be a judge.
Please see my blog Thoughts from a LiberryGurl
The cornerstones of exceptional educators continue to be collaboration and communication. Technology has simply expanded the methods educators can successfully collaborate and communicate. Using digital tools such as Skype, Google docs and ePals, educators can stretch far beyond traditional classroom walls in order to provide their students with truly 21st century learning skills.
However, you must be able to distinguish between collaboration and communication. As defined at Dictionary.com, communication is the interexchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs. Collaboration, on the other hand, is defined as working together. The core difference is that while with communication, people are sharing information; with collaboration people are creating something together rather than separately. Technology has made it so that people may collaborate across vast distances and learning abilities in a way that has never been possible before.
While I teach Internet Safety to over 800 students every school year, I do not compartmentalize Internet Safety into one or two discrete blocks. Instead, Internet Safety, digital ethics and etiquette compose a portion of every Media Center lesson. However, before reading K. Walsh’s blog entry on special needs students and Internet resources for educators, I will admit that my Internet Safety, digital ethics and etiquette lessons did not have enough information for me to model effectively for my students with special needs. I am reviewing materials and incorporating as much as differentiation and accommodation into my lessons as possible. Communication and collaboration for all students should take in the needs of all students and technological tools, used appropriately, can effectively allow educators to introduce new resources and avenues of inquiry to all students equitably.
