Webinar on Demand: Changing Role of Teachers

Tech & Learning, together with Edgenuity, offers the Webinar on Demand, The Power of Technology and the Changing Role of the Teacher. You can enjoy the webinar at your convenience. It features ways technology empowers teachers such as how digital devices can be used for routine tasks and how they can be used to allow teachers time to “mentor, coach, and build student relationships.” Also, covered in the webinar is how to use data to create personalized learning experiences for all students.

ALA Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2013

The American Library Association, always a trusted source for recommendations, provides a list of apps that it considers “of exceptional value to inquiry-based learning . . .”  These are apps that encourage students to be innovative and creative as they engage in collaboration with others. Categories on the list include: Books, STEM, Organization & Management, Social Sciences, and Content Creation. A few of the apps on the ALA Best App List are: Shakespeare in Bits, Got to Have Music, Operation Math, SimplePhysics, Tinkerbox, Dropbox, Evernote, Socrative, News-O-Matic: Daily for Kids, GarageBand, and Educreations. There are links to all the apps on the list.

Canvas App Center—App Library

Instructure’s Canvas App Center could be called an App Library, since it provides an open apps suite with over 100 apps and allows teachers and administrators to install other apps in the Apps Center, as well. With this system, your IT people will not need to install the apps you want because you can do it yourself. Instructure’s Canvas, for Higher Ed and K-12, is an open-source learning management system, which has garnered praise from those using it.

Ed Tech Award Winners

Each year the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) awards honors to what are considered by CODIE judges (tech-savvy educators) to be the best applications of the year. Selected were 128 finalists and 29 winners in categories such as Best Classroom Management System, Best Educational Game or Simulation, Best Educational Use of a Mobile Device, Best Reading/English Instruction Solution, Best Educational Reference Solution, and many more. Some of the winning applications were: Wowzers, Sokikom, Brain Pop, Pearson CourseConnect, and Discovery Education. To learn about all the winners in educational categories, you’ll want to visit the SIIA site.