Tech Briefs : Tech in Edu

[last updated 11/2012]

There are many excellent technologies that are at a teacher's disposal. This page started as a distillation of these. Since then, I have realized that technology use in education suffers more from fragmentation than from lack of familiarity with what is available and which are the best tools. What do I mean? Fragmentation is the usage of too many tools for the same tasks within the same school. If a high school student has 5 subjects and each teacher picks his/her own favorite blog platform, website builder, social bookmarking, microblogging, etc -- the student may need to juggle dozens of different platforms (and logins and interfaces, and so on). In this situation, no matter how easy and wonderful each individual tool may be, the collection as a whole is a hindrance to the student's learning, not an enhancement. I now believe it is more important that a school choose a single common platform, and the teachers channel their creativity into finding interesting and learning-enhancing ways of using the platform. With this preamble, below are examples and resources for creative use of technology in high school education. Big thanks to Dominique Jones for evaluating many of these. This sampling does not include tablet apps -- visit the "iPad Apps" page of this blog for that.

A plug for another collection -- Bunn Library's LibGuides list best Web resources by subject/discipline.

SUBJECTS: Art English History Humanities Languages Math Science

TOOLS: Blogs Bloggers Wikis The Rest

Art

English

Book Drum: books enhanced by teachers/students with multimedia materials, "bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music."

History

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - a truly inspiring educator; his TED talks are a standout even within TED
Last 100 years of history in 10 minutes of video
History teacher brings a couple from 1913 to life using profiles [from NspireD2 blog] and Facebook's response as reported by Wired Campus
freetech4teachers blog post on Museum Box
Kathy Schrock's Guide to History Websites - many links but of mixed quality; ok if you need the "lay of the land"
archive.org - "a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form"
AwesomeStories - history "stories" with focus on primary content; very well done
National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) - "help liberal arts colleges integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and technology"; case studies and reflections, e.g. "Plato²s Allegory of the Cave in Second Life"
Immersive history of Ancient Rome from AppsInEducation blog
Hans Rosling's Gapminder example in classroom (3 mins)
BestHistorySites.net - best online history resources organized by topics and time period; unfortunately, not subdivided by level, although many resources are for high-school level
Library of Congress primary source

Humanities

EDSITEment - National Endowment for Humanities site with great resource covering 4 areas:

Art & Culture
History & Social Studies
Foreign Language
Literature and Language Arts

Languages

The Mixxer Language Exchange Community - using Skype to practice language with native speakers
Guide to wikis in edu (in Spanish)

Math

TED talk Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover great how-to of one teacher making HS math more meaningful using technology (much applies to other subjects)
Hans Rosling's Gapminder example in classroom
TED talk Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers
Making Math Meaningful initiative
Gizmos! online simulations
Technology-Rich Learning Experiences for High School Math
Nice listing of math blogs by subjects
interesting teacher blogs

Kate Nowak's function-of-time.blogspot.com
Dan Meyer's blog.mrmeyer.com
UntilNextStop

Science

Shout - "invites educators and students to take an active role in global environmental issues." [Smithonian and Microsoft behind this]
The Concord Consortium - dozens of neat software simulations/activities for science at high-school level (e.g. Molecular workbench - an interactive computational simulator of molecular behavior). Requires java; has tools for teachers to create their own simulations.
Physics-animations.com - physics animations for many physics, engineering thermodynamics applications, including animations of top 10 experiment/discoveries in science (gallileo, focaults pendulum, newton's decomp of sunlight)
SMALLab - motion capture application that projects images on the floor and students interact with simulation (e.g. atoms in physics simulation).

Blog examples

On-going course blogs of high school classes: Biology, AP Eng Lit, Global Problem Solving, Theory of Knowledge, Spanish
Edubloggers - large listing by grade and subject (mostly earlier grades, but good as examples of what can be done)

Bloggers to follow for ideas on using tech in school