This presentation is created for the purpose of providing information to teachersin the 21st Century about several tools they can use in their classroom.

21st Century Teacher Need

The tools that teachers can and should be using to integrate technology inthe classroom are changing. There are several web-based technologytools that teachers can use to increase their use of technology. Thesetools can be used independently, in collaboration with students, and/or incollaboration with other educators.

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• Once you have decided to create a Blog, you will easily start findingyourself reading other blogs. It happened to me. Google Readerprovides a way for you to store, organize, and read the blogs that youfollow. Setting up a Google Reader account is very easy. Adding Blogs isas easy as Copying and Pasting. For a quick tutorial, watch GoogleReader in Plain English

• When you are using Google Reader you are using a feature called RSS; orReal Simple Syndication. The idea behind RSS is that it “feeds” theinternet to you instead of you accessing the Internet and checking thesites you look at regularly for updates. To get a better understanding ofhow RSS works, watch RSS in Plain English. When viewing Blogs, you willwant to look for the following icon to get the link to the “feed.”

• Another tool you might want to think about starting to use isBlogging. There are several options that you can see above (Click onthe image to go to the site). Blogging is about sharing. You can shareopinions, thoughts, ideas, concepts, resources, links, activities,lessons, etc. The first step in creating a blog is determining the focusof your blog. What are you going to discuss? What are you going toshare? For a quick introduction, see the following video, Blogs inPlain English.

• Blogging provides an area for you to reflect. The great thing aboutsharing your reflections is it provides an opportunity for you tocommunicate with others about your personal reflections. Ineducation, discussion alone can breed some of the best outcomes foryou as a teacher.

• The best way to describe Glogster is to think of it as a Digital PosterBoard. With Glogster you have the ability to add/embed images,video, and audio into your digital posters. There are tons ofbackgrounds and text features that you can add to a Glog.

• Glogster also is available for Education. With an education accountyou can create a virtual class of students (up too 100 free studentaccounts) that you can monitor. As they make changes to their Glog,it shows their changes in your virtual class.

• Wallwisher has become one of my favorite websites to use andshare. The best way to describe this site is to imagine have avirtual bulletin board that you and others can post notes to. Withthe “post-its” you can link to other websites as well as YouTubevideos.

• Each post is limited to 160 characters meaning that responses willbe short and specific. Post can be made with a name or asanonymous. If using with students you can set it up so that postshave to be approved before they are posted to the bulletin board.What I like most about Wallwisher is the ability to create a URLaddress that you determine.

• Twitter is Social Networking. When it was created, that was itsintended purpose. But for educators, it is not about using Twittersocially, it is about using Twitter professionally. Using Twitter is thefirst step in the creation of a Professional Learning Network.

• There are teachers from all grades and subjects, professors,superintendents, and technology staff that are using Twitter toconnect with one another to share resources, information, ideas,concepts, and stories related to education. As one person said,“Twitter means that going across the hall has just gone global.”

• Dropbox will end up being one of the most useful sites you will use.Dropbox is an online file storage site. You can get up to 2 GB ofstorage for free. You can pay for more, but when you think about theaverage Flash Drive that we carry around, 2 GB is plenty of space forsaving Word, Excel, and Power Point Documents.

• You can access your Dropbox account from any computer that hasInternet access, therefore always having access to important files.You can even get the Dropbox iPhone App as well, so that you canhave your files on the go.

• Diigo is a site for Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is theconcept of taking your favorite websites, bookmarking them on awebsite, and then sharing them with other people. Many of theSocial Bookmarking sites offer the opportunity to join groups to shareyour links with. For a quick tutorial view Social Bookmarking in PlainEnglish (Note the video uses Delicious. For the purpose of thehandbook, I am discussing Diigo)

• There are several options for social bookmarking, but I personallyhave come to prefer Diigo. The reason is that there are severalfeatures of Diigo that are missing from other Social BookmarkingSites. With Diigo you are able to highlight text on a webpage andeven add post-it notes. You can create list to organize your links by.You can join different groups based on the type of links being shared.To learn more about Diigo, visit their page with a video tutorial.

• By now, we generally have all heard of Wikipedia. A great resourcethat sometimes can be a questionable resource because informationis user submitted. Wikispaces allows you to create your own Wiki; aplace to store links, videos, photos, and files. At the same time youare creating a place for other to upload the same information.

• Using Wikispaces would be a great way to organize resources thatyou use in your classroom with your students. It could be a privateplace for you to store what you use in class, or you could open it upto students and allow them access to the site to find your resources.It is easy to organize what you include on your wiki into differentpages, making finding what you are looking for easier.

• Many of you have either heard of Skype, but might not know muchabout it. Some of you might not have heard of it either, and that isfine. Skype is free video conferencing web-based software that allowsyou to teleconference with others in real time. I personally have nothad an opportunity to use Skype in an educational setting becausevideo conferencing is not available at my school, but there are plentyof opportunities out there to use it with your students.

• Prezi is probably one of my most favorite new tools. It is presentationsoftware that is web-based. They do have an education account thatprovides features and options that a standard account does not. Thebest way to describe Prezi is to think of it as 3D Infinite Canvas forcreating a presentation.

• Power Point is linear based presentation software. With Prezi youhave the ability to Zoom In and Out, as well as rotate objects 360degrees. The great thing about zooming in and out is it offers you theopportunity to focus on a certain aspect of an image, graph, or chart.It offers the ability to embed video and picture, as well as link tooutside sources. Since it is a web-based application, it is easy to sharewith students and other teachers without having to have a certainkind of software.

• Quizlet was one of the first Web 2.0 websites that I discovered whilestill teaching social studies. At the time, I did not know that it wasconsidered part of the “Web 2.0” movement. I just thought it was agreat site to use with my students. Quizlet allows you and/or yourstudents to create online flashcards.

• There are several other flashcard creation websites available, butQuizlet was the first that I discovered and have the bestunderstanding of. Plus, I think it offers the best options for students.The great thing about Quizlet is that students do not necessarily haveto create flashcards. You can search for flashcards containing thewords that you are looking for and use those to study.

• TitanPad is a website that allows you to collaborate with students orteachers in real time. The concept behind the site is called Back-Channel Chat. Through this site you get an area to discuss with yourstudents in a chat format. You can create your own URL address tomake it easy for students to find the site and participate in thediscussion

• Once you have started to use many of these great tools, the next stepis to create a webpage where you can share and discuss their usewith students, parents, faculty, and members of the community.Creating a webpage allows you always edit, locate, and retrieve whatyou have been doing in your classroom, as well as organize it in amanner that is easy to use. There are several options out there forwebpage creation, but out of all of them, there are my favorite andmost popular.

Objective

We at Impact Education India aim on providinginformation to teachers in the 21st century aboutseveral technology tools which they can effectivelyuse in the classroom.

What you find in this presentation is tools that willhelp you to become 21st Century Faculty.

Faculty Upgrade = Nation Upgrade

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www.impacteducationindia.com