A few thoughts for the new year…

So, I’ve been on break now for about a week, with another week to go and I’ve had some time to really look closely at my RSS feeds that I’ve subscribed to over the past few months. There are several that I’ve found incredibly useful for finding the Web 2.0 stuff I’d love to get the teachers at my school to buy into. I LOVE makeuseof.com and killerstartups.com. Both of these blogs review and describe many useful sites that I can help to implement in my school. A blog that is especially geared toward education that I have really come to enjoy over the past couple of days is a blog written by Larry Ferlazzo. Larry does a nice job of taking the information from these other blogs and applying them to educational scenarios. Although his main focus is on ESL kids, I’ve added many, many bookmarks to my del.icio.us account from the items I’ve found at Larry’s blog. Thanks for the help Larry! You’ve created a bunch of work for me when the 2nd half of the year starts up.

I’ve become particularly fond of a couple of sites in particular. HippoCampus is tremendous. They describe themselves on their site: “We are dedicated to bringing you great multimedia and course materials that can help you with your homework and studies.” The amount of information available here is unreal. All of the lessons are beautifully put together. This one is a no-brainer for the teachers to implement in their daily lessons.

The second site that I have really enjoyed playing with is SoundTransit. I’ve messed around with this site for several hours today and it’s great. In my opinion, this would be a great way for a teacher (mainly geography teachers) to immerse their students in the lesson. The idea behind the site is interesting. You “book a transit” in a fashion similar to booking a flight. You can then specify how many stopovers you would like your trip to have. After selecting your source and destination, you are presented with several “itineraries” to choose from. After selecting your trip, you then listen to great natural sounds from those cities that have been recorded by people simply setting up microphones around town. I’ve heard sounds from a bird market in China to kids playing football (soccer) in Indonesia. I think it would be a wonderful way for teachers to just create a great atmosphere for learning. You can listen to a soundtransit here. This trip takes you from Madellin, Colombia to Auvergne, France to Sierra Nevada, Spain, then arriving in Cairo, Egypt.

Do you have any other suggestions for me? Please let me know in comments. I’d love to hear from everyone.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

Thoughts from a tech specialist… | Proudly hosted by Lunarpages Web Hosting | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice