Go To Sites For Educators
Map of the Future Forces Affecting Education
This interactive site forecasts the forces that are likely to affect K-12 learning over the next decade and organizes them into five categories: drivers of change, impact areas, trends, hot spots, and dilemmas. The dilemmas category is particularly interesting as it addresses this question: How do schools maintain academic standards while also taking a more personalized approach to teaching and learning? Users can then participate in, or just read, discussion forums about these topics or see resources related to them. Run by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future, this site could be a useful tool for educational technology leaders to consult before writing or revising their districts’ strategic plans for technology.
UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education
This site is geared to the technology-related needs of school administrators. Created by the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, it offers a host of services, including a graduate-certificate program in school technology leadership, links to research and best practices, and a blog aptly titled Dangerously Irrelevant.
One-to-One Information Resources
The Consortium for School Networking and the One-to-One Institute, a national nonprofit organization that grew out of Michigan’s Freedom to Learn school laptop program, teamed up to build this site. It offers a directory of schools and districts nationwide that have one-to-one computing initiatives in place, as well as research about such initiatives. Visitors can take away ideas for use in their own schools after reading about how other schools have tackled—or, in some cases, failed to overcome—the challenges of making these initiatives work.
School Data Tutorials
Your teachers and principals have the data, but now what do they do with it? That is a question technology leaders are facing as schools collect and analyze more and more data and then try to use it to improve student learning. This site is intended to give educators the tips they need to analyze and use data intelligently. The tutorials highlight the Excel skills that are helpful when working with building- and district-level data, especially for use by data managers, principals, guidance counselors, and teachers.
PBS Teachers
Although not targeted at educational technology leaders and administrators, this site is one to pass along to teachers and principals if they don’t know about it already. It offers an array of free resources for teaching and learning as well as help for educators in finding services and resources from their local public-television stations. It also serves as a portal for a number of online professional-development courses for educators.
Davidson University Physics Department
Provides “physlets,” which are simulations of physics experiments that can be done online.
Serendip
A science site run by an interactive science initiative of that name funded by Bryn Mawr College. It provides links to technology-related activities for several levels of education and also rates their quality.
Physics Teacher Eric Koser
This Minnesota teacher provides links on his own site to several physics Web sites, such as Hyper-Physics and The Physics Classroom, which offer ideas for using technology to teach the subject.
We All Use Math Every Day
Based on the CBS television series “NUMB3RS,” the site provides technology-related classroom activities for math that are based on each episode of the show.
