Free Technology for Schools

• Organizes notes, references, photos, videos, and anything else that can be digitized.
• Amazingly easy to use, and simple to share information
• Students love the “cute elephant”
• I use it often for MYP criterion B: Investigating
• Students create separate ‘Notebooks’ for each project I assign
• Upon submission of the project, they share the Evernote “Notebook,” which shows me the entire process of investigation.
• Also highly recommended for adults!
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• Essential Apps: Drive, Sites, Docs, Presentation.
• Google Docs allows for real-time writing and editing collaboration between students and /or teachers.
• Google Presentation allows for real-time presentation creation between students and / or teachers.
• Sites is much more comprehensive with mind-boggling potential for both students and teachers (More on this later).
• Drive is the place where your google docs and presentations can be stored and easily shared.
• I feel I have only scratched the surface of what Google offers students, educators, administrators, districts, planets, galaxies, …

• Incredible collaboration tool. See this: http://elsaibhistory.wikispaces.com/
• All of the topics along the right menu bar were created by students working together, and editing each others work. This History Wiki functions as a student created interactive text. The students ASK to create new pages… Need I pitch this further?

• In terms of blogging as an educational tool, I’ve drank the kool-aid, I’m blitzed, and I want more!!
• In my opinion, one of the most underused, under-appreciated tools out there.
• If you have doubts, create one of your own, record your reflections, and see if you don’t evolve as a writer and graphic designer. See if you learn to locate relevant information more rapidly. See if you are able to convey this information to an audience in a more creative way than before you started the blog. Then, ask yourself:  ”what does it mean to be literate in the 21st century?” Then, ask yourself: “has blogging improved my literacy?”

• I’m a big fan of any technology that allows useful information to come to you, instead of you searching for it… 
• My students still associate Twitter with comments like: “Doritos for lunch, mmmm”
• They are surprised when I show them my own Twitter feed, the famous authors, politicians, journalists, artists, academics, think tanks, climate watch groups, design and technology gurus, all-star teachers, etc.. that share their latest ideas with me via Tweets. RSS feeds are even more spectacular in this regard, … I’ll come back to RSS in a later post.

• I’m new to this one. But as I am looking to “flatten my own classroom” ( get rid of the walls that separate my students from the world that awaits them after graduation) it seems face to face real-time global collaborations via Skype in the Classroom would be ideal?