I’ll be showing teachers how to use Scratch at the 2010 EdTech conference at Randolph-Macon College next month on the 3rd. I had fun co-presenting a similar hands-on session at VSTE this past December.

This is my first attempt at trying out Prezi. If you like it, I’d recommend picking up one of their free Enjoy EDU accounts.

When you bookmark a website in your browser, it’s a convenient mechanism for keeping track of that site in the future. Using Safari or Firefox, you can organize these bookmarks in folders and be ready to call up any number of your favorite sites.

But more often today I’m sending my favorite sites to a social bookmarking service. The two I like are delicious.com and diigo.com. Both urge you to install a special link into your bookmarks bar in Safari or Firefox, which is about the most complex thing about the process. It’s easy.

After it’s installed, you click on this link whenever you get to a site you like. It sends it to the service, and keeps track of it for you. But better than folders, it organizes the bookmarks by keyword tags. So if I find a site on education that deals with math, I might tag it “education” and “math.” I can always return to the site to later find all the sites I’ve found that deal with “math,” and sure enough, it pops up.

The process is also cool because of the social aspect. As with Facebook, it’s about who you know. If you know my username, you can see my public bookmarks – sites I like to visit or have saved. It’s a really great way to find new sites of interest.

Diigo has one feature Delicious lacks – and that’s annotations and highlighting. It remembers what you liked about a particular site when you bookmark it, and if you signup for a free education account, you can share these sites with students. Imagine – students arrive to a bookmarked page with the important content already highlighted and annotated.

If you’d like to get started with social bookmarking, let me or one of our ITRTs know!

One of the main themes I wrote about in my book was the over-abundance of content online today. It’s both a blessing and a curse. We need better tools to be able to filter and get to content that matters to us.

One such tool is an RSS-reader. These news reader applications allow us to subscribe to changes on a website or blog. By creating your own collection of content sources, you can more easily browse through what’s new, read what you want, and dump the rest. One of the better RSS-readers out there is Google’s own Reader.

They recently added a new feature in Reader that allows you to track changes to your favorite site, even when there is no RSS feed! To use Reader, you need your own personal Google account. Next, just tell it which websites you like, and it will automatically collect new content. Add a colleague’s blog, the RSS feed from our front page news, and now, any site!

It’s the best way, I think, to stay on top of news, changes to wikis, and more. If you want to teach your students about RSS readers, we have one installed on our laptops called NetNewsWire. Instead of running in a webpage, it’s an application that you can launch from /Applications.

UVA’s project called Primary Access is an online media-creation tool for teaching social studies using primary source material.

I think it’s a great tool (and research based!) for upper elementary and middle school students.

Let me, Amanda, or Bea know if you’d like to get started using it.

Simulations are visual, and they move. They’re often touted as great modern-day manipulatives for learning.

Check out the simulations for science & math for elementary, middle, and high school students at the University of Colorado.