Opinion
Education Opinion

How to Access ’60 Tech Tools’ Info

By Tamara Fisher — July 13, 2011 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

For those who missed out on attending the “60 Tech Tools & Resources in 60 Minutes” presentation by Brian Housand, here’s how you can access the info.

Links to all 60 of the resources can be found here. Clicking on an icon will take you to the homepage of that tool or resource. BigMarker doesn’t seem to have saved the presentation (I don’t know if that’s an offered feature), so I can’t find any audio where you can hear Brian explain each of them, but you can certainly still poke around and discover them for yourself.

A few of the resources he mentioned are ones that I and my students have used. Some of my own highlights for you are as follows:

Scratch is a great tool to help students begin to learn about animation and game creation. Created by students at MIT, Scratch has all the tools to help a person of any age get started in creating computer games, graphics, cartoons, and animated stories. (Not on Brian’s list, but an advanced animation favorite of my students’ is Blender.)

DocsTeach gives you and your students access to thousands of primary source documents from the National Archives. In addition to having digital versions of the actual documents, this site also has a selection of ready-to-use activities created by educators that use documents from the National Archives.

BibMe helps in the creation of a bibliography (multiple formats available). Once the student has input all the information, the bibliography can be downloaded for printing.

SpiderScribe is an online mindmapping and brainstorming tool that helps organize your ideas by connecting various pieces (and formats) of information. Collaboration and sharing available, too!

LiveBinders is “your 3-ring binder for the web,” a place and way to collect and organize a plethora of resources that you want to compile on any topic.

#gtchat is a weekly, global twitter chat for parents, teachers, and gifted education advocates. Participants get to vote on each week’s topic and then interact with others interested in gifted education from around the world during the weekly chat (Fridays). Previous topics include “Organizational Tips for Gifted Learners,” “Why Gifted Education is Still So Misunderstood,” “Going Crazy? Why Parenting the Gifted Can Be Tough,” and at least 100 others. Transcripts of previous “gtchats” are also available.

I did attempt to attend Brian’s presentation as it was broadcast live via BigMarker, but my air card apparently couldn’t handle the streaming audio and video. I caught about 50% of the audio and a slowed-down, skippy version of about 50% of the video. Others who attended via their computers (there were about 15-20 of us online) didn’t seem to have these issues (other than a few who couldn’t figure out the audio right away). (On-site, in-person attendance was 98!) So I’m chalking my “half” experience up to air card usage (which I usually love). Or, rather than it having been the fact that I was using an air card, it could’ve been the fact that AT&T doesn’t seem to think Montana (or at least the part of Montana that I’m in) is 4G worthy. Maybe if I had access to 4G technology speeds I could’ve caught the 100% version. Who knows. But I might get a second chance if he presents it at Edufest in a couple weeks. Anyway, I hope some of these tools and resources prove valuable for you!

The opinions expressed in Unwrapping the Gifted are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.