Summary of Educational Blogs

I took a look at not only the educational blogs that I am following but also those of a few of my classmates. Josh is following a blog called Art of Learning. I was not that excited about the initial content or the format but I have an RSS to my iGoogle site so I can follow it and see if it is useful to me.

I am currently following three sites: Kathy Schrock, Free Tech for Teachers and Cool Cat Teacher Blog

Kathy Schrock's site has been useful and is mostly about technology. This week she highlighted technology to support teachers in creating documentation displays through electronically generated paper cut-outs of letters and images. If you go to Variquest Visual Learning Tools there are videos and templates to make it easy to get started.

The Free Technology for Teacher's website has been the most useful site for me on almost a daily basis. Today I found three sites worthy of review.

The first was a website that helps teachers help kids to make videos. The site Kidsvid has all the components for successful story writing from storyboard support, making tips, editing tools and video support. I bookmarked this site for future use.

I quickly bookmarked the next resource for free music. There is much more than music here, there are slideshows and movies and power points. There is a huge variety from sound effects to classical music to comedy. I will have to spend more time here to see how easy it is to use.

Next was a video and link to a site that teaches kids about Internet Safety with Garfield. I watched the video with my children and looked around at the information. It was enjoyable and informative for all of us.

There was a discussion of a new website called listhings.com which is another site for creating sticky notes. This one seems to be unique in that you can create more than one page of sticky notes and you can invite people then to specific pages to add ideas.

Lastly I found an article about the use of Lego in doing math. This was an interesting site with activities for kids that are all designed as competitions. You could use it this way or just as an individual endeavor.

I do not like the Cool Cat Teacher blog format. It is hard to follow and feels like it just moves me around from one site to another versus being an immediate source of information.