This should be a great discussion!!! Participate live – Thursday night.
Join us tomorrow on the Future of Education at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day) when Joyce Valenza leads a discussion on the future of librarians and their role in education. Special guests: Buffy Hamilton, Cathy Nelson, and Carolyn Foote! See the full event details at http://www.futureofeducation.com/forum/topics/panel-discussion-is-there-a
(via email from Classroom 2.0)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=81881e73-8a58-4a24-b66e-ddcc4d624ce8)
I love it when I find a great new resource, only to realize that I bookmarked it in delicious account months ago! So much for my memory. In any case, here’s one of those resources that I re-learned about today. 
Teacher Training Videos “were created for teachers to help them to incorporate technology into their teaching.” These screencasts step you through how to use a wide range of desktop & web based tools and include ideas for using them in educational settings.
Tools covered include: delicious, Bubblr, YouTube, RSS, SecondLife, iTunes, Twitter, BlackBoard, Photoshop, PowerPoint and many many more. And there’s a special section of screencast for ELT/ESL. I could spend all day watching these and learning about new tools and new tips for ones I’m already familiar with.
Scratch, from the MIT Media Lab, is a programming tool “designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.”
This demo video is all kinds of wonderful. It not only shows the process of designing and creating a game with Scratch, but also illustrates the thinking and learning going on while creating the game. And the narration and flow of the demo video are terrific too. Great job. I yelled hooray at the end!
An Introduction to Scratch Programming with Theo & Kyle - Feb 19, 2009
There are more than 300,000 projects on the Scratch site! I had fun playing with this one – Mi’s Puzzle Demo
Quote from the 2009 Horizon Report on Will Richardson’s weblogg-ed.
Information technologies are having a significant impact on how people work, play, gain information, and collaborate. Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world — online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, and more — teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time.
Interesting discussion in the comments on weblogg-ed.
(Thanks to Linda for pointing me to this.)
New York State’s School Library Systems are taking quite a financial hit in the current economic crisis. There will be cuts to many of the important support and training services they provide to school library media centers throughout the state.
I received this from Linda Fox of the Capital Region BOCES SLS today:
The Capital Region BOCES School Library System joins all other SLS’s in the state in concern about the state’s fiscal crisis. At this writing, funding for systems is at a standstill. Part of the funding has been received, but there is no indication that the remainder of the approved funding will arrive any time soon. This has a direct impact on staffing and programs. (more…)
Judi Repman of Georgia Southern University wrote a great post a few days ago on the Georgia Library Media Association blog on starting conversations with educators about “21st century skills”. She’s gathered a wonderful list of videos to get those conversations started. One of these (shown below) builds on the Kansas State video A Vision of Students Today.
A Vision of K-12 Students Today
Her post prompted me to gather videos I’ve used for school workshops into one wiki page. And I’ve added a few news ones from Judi’s selections. Thanks Judi.
Looking for a great WordPress reference book? This is one of my favorites. Digging into WordPress by Jeff Starr & Chris Coyier
