Technology in the classroom, "talk techy to me."

ey guys, 

First let me say "hi" to all my teacher friends.  We should be networking even skyping with one another to exchange ideas or even in the classroom with our students if your site supports that kind of technology.  I wanted to share with you all some really cool things I learned in a speaker series with an author by the name of Alan November. 

TEXT POLLING: 

There's a website called www.smspoll.net that allows teachers to put in questions and question stems and allows students to text their answer. The data is captured in real time and allows students to see a percentage poll of the data that was captured.  Its really great and embraces the technology that students use daily.  

BOOK TRAILOR:

Instead of book reports, if your site based technology that supports it, why not have kids put together mini movies that explain the book rather than simply write a book report, or students can supplement what they write with the book trailor.  iMovie tutorials are available on youtube and are quite easy to do.  Kids get a kick out of it. 

GLOBAL EMPATHY:

Have you ever tried to search for opinions and views on a particular topic in History or literature from a non American viewpoint. A great example would be "What do the Vietnamese called the 'Vietnam War?"  They call it the "American War." All you have to is go to google, search for "internet country codes" and a full list of a country code for every country will show up.  With that code you can input it in the google search box to view sites from another country. 

So following our example, how do the Vietnamese view the Vietnam War.  Go to google put in "Vietnam War site: vm" (VM is Vietnam's country code.)  

Great for other books too like "Number the Stars, Diary of Ann Frank", etc... 

TWITTERFALL:

If you're on twitter, you can input different hashtags so you can see what professionals in our community are utilizing.  Go to twitterfall.com and input your twitter info, some great hashtags to look up are:

#edtech

#edchat

#hiphoped

#blackedu

This is more on a personal level. If you feel your students are mature enough, you can use twitterfall and input hashtags for a certain topic your students are researching. 

As I learn more, I will share more, but I think, again, we should all network more. 

OH, if you're not using www.wolframalpha.org as much as you're using google, you're seriously missing out.