I wrote about Twitter.com last year. This is a GREAT place to start. I know some folks will say, “What? Why on earth would I want to know what other people are doing during all hours of the day, every day of the week, and in 140 characters or less?!?!” Well, the key is in WHO those other people are. In Twitter you “follow” people with similar interests and backgrounds. They, in turn, “follow” you. It may sound like one big stalkfest (I know stalkfest isn’t a real word. But this is a blog and not even remotely close to anything resembling literature), but Twitter has proven to be the most valuable online tool I have used during the past year. After logging in to Twitter, within minutes tips, tricks, and resources come flying in.

If the key is in who to follow, how do you find the people? Twitter4teachers provides lists of educators on Twitter by subject area. Once you find folks that post information that you find useful, check out who they are following and follow them, too. If you know of others in your field, you can search for them on Twitter. It’s amazing how many people are tweeting–authors, professors, politicians (and, yes, Ashton Kutcher is tweeting, too, if you are into that sort of thing). Or, you could check out who your friendly-ITRT is following and start there. You will find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tekkieteacher.

Once you have started setting up your online PLC, the next step is to actually post something. For those of you who are a bit shy, try “re-tweeting”, or just re-posting someone else’s post that you found useful. Be sure to include the “RT” indicator and attribute the post to the original person with the “@” symbol like the example below:

When working within an online PLC, you will get more out of it if you are a contributor to the conversation rather than just a bystander. Before you know it, people will start following you, too! I recommend always screening your followers and blocking anyone that you aren’t sure about. However, I have to admit that it was also very cool once some of the big names in the the Ed Tech world who I was following started following me, too!

Our PLCs are about helping and learning from each other to improve ourselves and the instructional process. There are 195 people in my Ed Tech PLC and I am much better at what I do because of them. Come join me!

 For those of you who are interested in one of the 10 SMART Boards we are purchasing, here is a great site with resources for SMART educators. This might be a nice place to start for your lesson ideas!

Smart Educator Resources

For those of you interested in learning more about this assessment tool, check out the website at http://www.achievementseries.com/!

To get started, I recommend copying/pasting your favorite poem or a couple of paragraphs from your favorite book to see what kind of Wordle is created!

For the past year, the Tech Team and I have maintained Hylton’s webportal at http://guest.portaportal.com/pwcs. However, I recently moved all of our links (and added lots of new ones!) to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs. Both PortaPortal and Delicious are online bookmarking tools. However, Delicious has proven to be much more user-friendly. It is easier to create bookmarks, and it is also easier to search your bookmarks. Once you have over 100 bookmarked sites (we currently have 297!), the search capabilities become very important!

Hylton’s Delicious site hosts a collection of bookmarked sites for teachers, students, and parents. Just go to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs, and use the tags listed along the right side to find tons of links to online tools for virtually every subject. We will continue to add bookmarks, so check back often to find out what’s new! And, if you know of a site that you would like included, forward it along to your friendly ITRT.

Hylton’s PortaPortal site will remain “live”, but no new bookmarks will be added. Instead, everything new will be posted at http://delicious.com/hyltonhs.

Here’s an example of what you can do:

There are some very good educational uses of this application–in our art classes and with any of your students presentations–but mostly it’s just fun!

http://delicious.com/hyltonhs/study_tools

There are links for educational games, practice tests, and test-taking strategies. Take a gander, and if any seem appropriate, please share with your students.

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/

Click All Productions in the top left to see a complete list of everything they have. Most of the games are for Science, but there are also some that might be good for Language Arts and Social Studies.

http://www.shmoop.com/teachers/

The mission of the site is “To make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age”. While the focus is on literature and poetry, there are also nice resources for social studies, too. Check it out and let me know what you think!