Blogs on Technology Integration

For the first two months of school, "When are the iPads going to be handed out?" was a continual mantra from students and teachers. But finally, when we were able to tell them a day, frustration turned into anticipation. Southside High School's goal was to efficiently assign an iPad to each ninth- and tenth-grader, without seriously impacting the regular instructional day. Boy, was that off target!

In my last two posts, I detailed the iPad initiatives at Burlington High School. I talked about what we learned after a year of a 1:1 iPad environment and dispelled some myths surrounding iPads in education. Recently, I had the opportunity to connect with two of my elementary teachers at Pine Glen Elementary and Francis Wyman Elementary schools. This year, four first grade classrooms will be piloting a 1:1 iPad environment. The iPads stay in the classroom and are only used during class time. Two of the teachers involved, Irene Farmer and Erin Guanci, sat down with me and answered a few questions about their expectations of the initiative, how they are using the device at the moment, and how they feel it will work in an elementary classroom.

I spent some time trying to come up with a really scary post for Halloween, but I decided I would stay positive instead and share some scary good sites on educational technology. Get it? Scary? Anyway, here are four tried and true sites I always turn to when I need help with a tech tool or when I'm looking for something new. Warning: the puns you are about to read are also terrifying.

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." -- About Google

Google is the most powerful nonhuman teacher ever known to actual humans. Implicitly and ceaselessly, Google performs formative assessments by collecting the following data: the content, genre and media that interests you most; when and for how long you access your external cloud brain; what your hobbies and routines are; with whom you work and communicate; who will get your November vote; and whether you prefer invigorating clean mint or enamel renewal toothpaste. By continuously refining the nuance of your sociogram, Google has already customized your next web exploration and taught itself to teach.