Discovery Education is sponsoring another webinar for students with Animal Planet’s Dave Salmoni on Wednesday, October 19th at 1:30pm ET. Content will focus on grades K-5 and feature information about survival needs for animals and plants, ecosystems and interdependence in habitats. An excerpt from the Discovery Education website follows: Dave Salmoni, Animal Planet’s apex predator [...]

This coming Thursday, October 20, 2011 is National Day on Writing. The National Writing Project is encouraging everyone to participate in a variety of activities to support National Day on Writing. The urge to write can be a mysterious calling. There are so many different ways to understand not only the why of writing, but [...]

Welcome to my new domain and blog! This blog will focus on educational technology and hopefully be a treasure trove of resources, new tools and strategies for integrating technology into instruction. I tried a similar blogging venture last November but I don’t think I went about it correctly. This time I started a new blog [...]

  Classroom 2.0 LIVE! will return this Saturday after a brief hiatus for October due to health reasons for each of the co-hosts. We are excited to return this Saturday at our regularly scheduled time of 12pm ET/11am CT/10am MT/9am PT. We appreciate all of the wonderful comments, emails and best wishes from our friends [...]

On January 7th, Classroom 2.0 LIVE will be having a ‘2011 Reflection Smackdown’ sharing favorite web tools from 2011. Peggy George attended a ‘Library World Smackdown Open Mic Night‘ and we decided to borrow this idea from the innovative, creative group of librarians at the Virtual TL Cafe of Gwyneth Jones and Joyce Valenza and crew. [...]

This past year, a national effort has taken place to improve instruction that includes technology. The year long national awareness campaign will conclude with a culminating event of the first ever Digital Learning Day. Digital Learning Day will be celebrated on February 1, 2012. Digital Learning, as defined on the website as, …any instructional practice [...]

With the start of a new year, most people set resolutions to lose weight, exercise more or to eat healthier. Those are all great goals to set but at the start of a new year, which is most appropriate to set: a goal, resolution or vision? In the past, I probably considered all three one [...]

Today is the last day to nominate an emerging ed tech leader as one of the ’20 to Watch’ recognition program honoring educators that use technology to improve K12 instruction. Do you know educators who are passionate about using technology to transform teaching and learning; who can inspire their colleagues to embrace new tools; and [...]

This past week when President Obama delivered the State of the Union address, I didn’t bother to listen to a speech filled with more unfulfilled promises just to get re-elected that would fall by the wayside in IMHO. I believed him once and had no intention of doing so again and fulfilling that typical adage [...]

Next week, Feb. 6-10th is the Texas Computer Education Association’s Convention in Austin, Texas. I will be presenting two presentations. The first is on Wed., 2/8, in Room 19 B at 5pm titled, "Check this Out!" on QR Codes. I chose the title because cashiers have to scan bar codes on items to ‘check out’ [...]

Ever heard of the app ‘‘Snapchat"? The app claims that you can take pics and set a time limit that the image is visible to those that you send the picture to. This isn’t exactly the case as anyone can take a snapshot or screenshot of the image and keep the photo permanently, share it [...]

Classroom 2.0 LIVE will not meet this Saturday, April 20th so that everyone can attend Discovery Educator Network (DEN)’s free online Virtual Conference. You can register at http://virtlivecon.com and find out more about the presenters and schedule for the day. The theme of the conference is ‘Connecting Communities‘ and the schedule begins at 9am EST [...]

As technology use becomes more ubiquitous in classrooms around the globe, the need for professional development and enhanced infrastructures to handle additional devices comes into play. Quality professional development that helps teachers feel comfortable taking risks, try new hardware devices or software applications with students and positively impacts student achievement is essential to implementing successful [...]

Edmodo is a great secure learning environment and network for use with students. Teachers and students can communicate with one another in an environment that is password protected and safe for students of all ages to use. Edmodo sponsors a free virtual conference called EdmodoCon and the call for presenters has just gone out. Anyone [...]

Glide, created by Transmedia, announced an all new app/service for use on a Windows 8 or Android device. According to Google Play, Glide, Glide connects your devices and cloud services so that you have access to all of your files no matter where they are stored. With Glide you can easily share and publish files and [...]

Recently a comedian, Nathan Fielder, challenged his Twitter followers to text their parents that they ‘got 2 grams for $40′ and then send a second text apologizing for texting the wrong person. Although the responses from the parents that were alarmed by the text messages they received were hilarious, many parents freaked out and were [...]

Awhile back, Steve Hargadon put out a request for authors to write chapters of a book that would be curated and compiled in a written anthology called, "The Classroom 2.0 Fifth Anniversary Book". The project was put together by three leaders in education, Steve Hargadon, Richard Byrne, Chris Dawson, and the Classroom 2.0 Community. The project was completed in [...]

Below is the recording for the latest webinar I presented for The Learning Liaisons. This webinar was hosted in Adobe Connect instead of Blackboard Collaborate so that took me awhile to adjust by working with the pods prior to the webinar. If you have time, I would love feedback on the content. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L_i_VofkXg

The National Council on Teacher Quality released a study on the quality of undergrad and graduate teacher preparation college programs at colleges and universities throughout the United States. There has been some discussion on Twitter and blogs about the validity of the study. According to the article posted at Inside Higher Ed titled "Teacher Ed […]

Wednesday, July 10th at 10am is my presentation for the Conference for the Advancement of Mathematics Teachers (CAMT) 2013 in room 006C. My presentation is listed as a secondary program but can apply to a variety of grade levels and mathematics topics. Although labeled as Curriculum and Assessment, there are many more uses that cell […]

The webinar series that I co-host with Dr. Peggy George and Lorna Costantini called ‘Classroom 2.0 LIVE‘ was nominated for an ‘Edublog Award‘ in the ‘Best Open PD/Webinar/Unconference’ category! We are so honored that people thought of us, nominated us and have already voted for us! I KNOW we have the BEST webinar participants on […]

Many educators teach students how to code and program using Scratch. Scratch is a coding program created by MIT for students to use to create a variety of applications and programs. I don’t understand programming that well and did not excel at it in my college courses. Although programming isn’t my forte, I was able […]

Filemail is a new service that I just read about on MakeUseof.  Filemail allows you to send very large files for free to anyone via email. The free account limits files to 30 GB, if you can call that a limited file size! There are two other account types that allows you to send more […]

As each Christmas holiday approaches, bittersweet memories arise of holidays past, Christmas breaks when I was teaching, and the special homemade gifts I received from students. As Christmas is a time of lights shining brightly, I get that same feeling when the ‘light’ comes on for students academically as well. This has been an especially […]