Bradley Hall's List: Technology, Web 2.0, and 21st Century Learning

This is an article on schools leading their classroom instruction from the 19th and 20th century methods into the 21st century technology techniques. It lists an abundance of authors and links for teachers to look at and learn about opportunities that are out there. The article explains thoroughly the reasons why teachers must start teaching with these technology tools, and how to start using them.

This is a tremendous website for any teacher wanting to mold open-source software into their classroom instruction. This site offers fifty open-source tools that can replace their commercial counterpart’s educational apps. The great thing about this website is that it is very organized and easy to navigate. The fifty open-source apps are numbered and have brief descriptions about them beside their number.

The setup of the site seems to hint that teachers from all over have contributed resources to the website for other educational professionals to utilize. The objective of the website is to provide technology resources to teachers to use within their classrooms. Some of the technology tools linked to the website is Quizstar, Rubistar, Think Tank, Web Poster Wizard, Academic Skill Builders, among other links.

Common Sense Media has created a website and video revealing statistics of children that go online and ways parents can keep their children safe while surfing the web. The video gives thorough details on adolescents venturing into online videos, online games, chat rooms, wikis, social networking sites, and blogs. The details present the risks children potentially could face by using these technological innovations.

In this video Mark Barnes (2010) has created an example/tutorial on a whole assignment being done through Web 2.0 tools. Barnes (2010) is a Language Arts teacher. He has setup a webpage that presents an assignment to students, and offers collaborative properties for his students to interact with him and each other. Additionally, he has used blogging, wikis, and webpages to get his students the necessary experience with Web 2.0 tools, but he has offered different options to the assignment based on students reading levels. He has color coded the assignments in order to differentiate the instruction for the novice, moderate, to excellent readers. He also has made himself available to answer student questions on the assignment through email within his created webpages.

This is a video about Professional Learning Teams. Professional Learning Teams is just another moniker for Professional Learning Community (PLC). Within this video teachers are shown enacting teaching strategies learned from their PLC meetings. Within the meetings one of the goals of the groups is to learn how to differentiate instruction to meet all learners' needs. All of the teachers at this school in the video meet for one hour after school. Sometimes they meet as a grade level, other times they meet by academic discipline. The objective within the meetings is to collaborate over topics that are being taught and learn from each other what is working in the classroom and what a teacher may need to try differently to instruct the students that do not understand a lesson.

The premise of this video is to explain the benefits of project-based learning. Humans in their everyday lives are constantly involved in projects such as home improvements, financial budgeting, wedding plans, etc. Therefore, this video expresses its belief that education in school should be more consistent with everyday life. This is where the teaching concept of project based learning becomes an opportunistic strategy within a teacher's classroom. By utilizing project based learning techniques in the classroom teachers are helping students relate to the real world.

Kathy Cassidy (2010), an elementary school teacher, makes an exceptional video of how to implement technology into elementary students' instruction. Throughout the video the viewer gets to see elementary students use Web 2.0 tools in their education. These technology tools included blogs, webpages, wikis, video, Skype, and Nintendo DS. Each piece of technology was used for a different educational purpose.

This is a video showing a Professional Learning Community (PLC) at work. All the members of the PLC are interviewed about the process of working together and how being a part of PLC has benefited their teaching and the students.

This is great video for elementary teachers looking to implement technology into their classrooms. The students acting in the video are as cute as cute can be. Watching them use the iPad to review vocabulary words is a great pictorial to see technology at work.

This is a webpage on connectivism that is the most thorough explanation of what learning with technology usage in the classroom should look like. Within this webpage the history, examples, and application of connectivism is presented for teachers to learn how to infuse the connectivism philosophy into their instruction.

This website is run by a team of education gurus that makeup the company named Education World, Inc. The authors that run the site choose to remain anonymous and recognized just by their company name. The rest of the website is contributed by the Professional Learning Network (PLN) that chooses to be a part of the lifelong learning resources offered on the site. This website is extremely user friendly and easy to navigate. There are opportunities for learning teaching strategies, professional development, lesson plans, technology, among many other resources.

After viewing the video, I believe the video is directed at the veteran teacher that has anxiety over changing their traditional classroom instruction to meet a more modern student. Numerous technology ideas are presented to the older animated character in the video, and he continuously points out the potential issues with each idea. However, the younger female character offers solutions and positive reasons to the older male teacher to network technology into his instruction.

This is an extremely interesting video about being addicted to social networking sites, particularly facebook. It takes a little while to get to the meat of the video but once you get there the video is very powerful. Josh Gunderson (2010) is being taped in this video doing a presentation. He covers many topics to help educate naïve students about internet safety and potential poor decisions while using facebook that could change their lives forever. He discusses specifically sexting and cyber bullying.

Within this blog/article/website Jeff Utecht (2012), an educator consultant and author, discusses his ideal classroom for the 21st century student. He believes administrators and teachers should strive to provide the 1:1 program for students. He believes the 1:1 program is the only possible to way to effectively prepare today's students for the future. He wants students to gain experience with the ipad apps, in order to bolster student creativity and collaboration with other learners.

The objective of this video is social networking sites safety. This is a great video to teach children what they should and should not divulge to social networking sites. I really like that the video is a cartoon and very visual. Students will be entertained by this type of video, while still learning the objective set forth by the video.

Kim Peacock (2012) developed the Web 2.0 for teachers' webpage to offer a resource of ideas for teachers to access and use within their instruction. The website has tags at the top that link to different Web 2.0 tools ideas. Some of these tabs on the webpage are technology tools, research tools, productivity tools, organization tools, text based communication, among many others. By clicking on one of the tags a teacher is taken to an abundance of links of the free Web 2.0 tools that can be used within their instruction.

Jose Picardo (2008) writes a blog known as www.boxoftricks.net where he shares his knowledge on 10 different teaching strategies that work in the classroom. The 10 tips are: video streaming, music, teleconferencing, interactive exercises, interactive whiteboard, podcasts, blogs or wikis, social networks, internet tools, and student gadgets.

The whole premise of Robinson's (2006) message within his presentation was that education is destroying creativity and innovation in today's students. The facts that schools are so consumed with teaching to the test teachers miss out on nurturing student's true talents.

This website is all about the history of American public education. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has created a thorough and user friendly website experience enlightening teachers and students alike on the history, leaders, classroom evolution, photographs, and educational documentaries of American public education.