iLighter

iLighter lets teachers highlight websites up at the SMARTboard. Markings will be saved and can be organized into folders for different research topics. Highlights can then be e mailed or posted to blogs or websites.

Mountains and Mountains of Data

Nate Silver is known in baseball circles as the stat guru. He takes seemingly unrelated data and predicts hits and season records. He is taking his data analysis talent to political polling. His predictions of state results in the Democratic Primary were often very close to the outcomes. He often beat established polling companys offering a critique of them on his website fivethirtyeight.com. How does this relate to Educational Technology? I would argue that a skill needed for the 21st Century is the ability to analyze data. Nate wrote algorithms to make predictions from available data. This ability made him successful in the baseball and political worlds.

Read about Nate in Newsweek.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469

In a related story Bill James a life long Celtics fan is being credited with the Celtics playoff birth last year for his analysis of seeming unrelated statistics. Bill does statistical analysis of common stats but is also able to tag game footage to easily enable players to bring up all instances a player is at the top of the key to see if they go left or right. Bill's expertise in math and computers has made him a go to guy for the front office, players, and coaches.

Google Earth/Sky/SketchUp

Studying Architecture in Art class, bring up famous buildings in Google Earth. Why not have your students create their campus with Google SketchUp and place it on Google Earth.
Don't keep your feet on the ground, use Google Sky to study the stars in Science or Astronomy class.

Delicious Bookmarks

How do you implement web 2.0 right now in your classroom? Set up a Delicious Bookmark Tag of sites your students can use for a research project.

del.icio.us/MrPolizzi/Greece can be a bookmark of student websites for Greece research.

iGoogle for teachers

Any teacher should consider getting an iGoogle account. You can set up feeds of information relevant to your class. Teachers can put important bookmarks on the page. A constant stream of math and science do now puzzles can be displayed to the class. Never again will you have to scramble for a warm up.