Click It: A Web Roundup

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CoSN Broadband Knowledge Center
Created by: Consortium for School Networking
For: District-level ed-tech leaders
Features: This special feature on the CoSN site helps school districts address their growing bandwidth needs, such as how to prepare for higher volumes of online traffic on their computer servers. The site points readers to “must read” articles and reports about bandwidth issues, provides links to webcasts and online tools to plan and measure bandwidth, and hosts discussion forums several times a year about topics relating to districts’ bandwidth. The site is still evolving, but it has the potential to be an excellent one-stop resource for chief technology officers hoping to solve the problems that arise from the increasing volume of traffic on district networks.

New Technology Foundation
Created by: New Technology Foundation/Napa New Technology High School For: Educators interested in technology-driven project-based learning
Features: This is a useful destination for educators interested in technology’s role in project-based learning. Such education emphasizes collaborative, often technology-driven projects as an alternative to traditional teaching and testing. Among other features, the site provides a drop-down menu for viewing the New Technology Foundation’s network of schools, which is worth visiting to see how those schools are incorporating project-based learning with a technological twist. The network includes 42 high schools in nine states. The site also includes a lot of background material about project-based learning, so it’s a good place to go if you want to shore up your knowledge about this kind of teaching and learning.

TeacherTube
Created by: Educator Jason Smith
For: Teachers
Features: TeacherTube is a YouTube-like interface for teachers to share videos of class projects, lesson plans, and other educational videos. With dozens of new videos being added each day, the site is growing quickly, and just like YouTube, it requires visitors to dig through a lot of material to find the gems. Each video can be ranked and commented on by participants, and to make searching easier, the videos can be sorted by the number of views they have, the number of comments they have received, how recently the videos were added, and their quality ratings. Videos can also be browsed by channels, which group videos into categories such as “high school” or “reading.” To take advantage of most of the site’s features, participants must first sign up, for free.

Vol. 02, Issue 02, Page 16

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