About+this+Site

If you're like me, the notebook background I chose for this wiki feels familiar, comfortable. When I was in college in the 90s all of the notes I took for my classes were written in spiral notebooks. Powerpoint was the new, exciting technology my profs were using in my education classes then. (Although, we were also still trained in how to use the then-ubiquitous overhead projector.) If you're like me, you're what [|Marc Prensky] calls a digital immigrant.

You didn't grow up with current technology, but you're inquisitive enough--and enough of a risk-taker--to be willing to try it out in your classroom. You see technology as a way to connect to your students, who are--for the most part--digital natives, like my colleague's daughter, a college sophomore who composed an entire research paper on her smart phone on their last family road trip.

So, I'm creating this wiki as a sort of digital passport for those of us who fall somewhere in the middle on the technophobe-technophile spectrum. I hope that it will be utilized as a brainstorming space to share ideas and information about the online tools (Web 2.0) we've been trying out in our classrooms.

Please feel free to add pages and content that you think other teachers will find helpful. Web 2.0 refers to websites that allow users to create, collaborate and share online. Therefore, the sites included in this wiki should be web-based rather than requiring a download (with the exception of add-on tools). We also prefer to include sites that offer a free version of their basic services.

Thanks for joining me on this journey!


 * ) Shannon

* Special thanks to Stephanie Krajicek, whose Bureau of Education & Research (BER) seminar, "Making Best Use of Podcasts, Blogs, Wikis, and Other Cutting-Edge Technology Tools to Strengthen Classroom Content Learning," inspired me to create this wiki.