J.P. Prezzavento - The Bits and Bytes of Education:

This week I have the opportunity to give a brief presentation to my school district's teacher technology team on tech tools to make teachers' lives easier. I am excited for the opportunity to speak to a new audience.  My presentation is below.  Please use the comments section to share some of your favorite tech tools.

For the past two years, I have maintained Facebook pages for both my Language Arts 1 and Language Arts 2 classes.  While I don't have 100% participation from my student and parents, the students and parents who do use the pages have found them to be very useful communication tools.  Like any tool, it took some experimenting for me to make the most of my page, but once I got familiar with the some of the features of Facebook Pages, my class pages have become very beneficial to me as a classroom teacher. Here are my 5 best practices for maintaining a classroom Facebook. 1.  Fan Polls One of my favorite features of Facebook Pages is the polling options.  I like using polls to get feedback on activities and to let students vote for future projects.  Not only does this let me get student opinions and feedback, but also it increases traffic to my Facebook page and gives students an opportunity to be engaged with the page. To use the poll feature on F...

Every time I attend a tech conference I always attend a session or two during which the presenter shares his or her favorite tech tools.  As I have been reflecting on #METC13 , I have been thinking about my favorite tools, the ones that make my life as a teacher so much easier.  Here is my list of 5 tech tools to increase teacher productivity. 1.   Dropbox Dropbox is great for me because I am forgetful.  I have forgotten my flash drive in my pants pocket, in my car, in my desk, at home, at Starbucks, well, everywhere.  My trusty flash drive walked out of my life for good at the beginning of last school year.  At that point, I was forced to find a new way to take files from home to work.  Then I met Dropbox.  Dropbox looks and works just like a file folder on a Windows PC.  However, when you save a file to Dropbox it syncs to every device on which you have Dropbox installed. Dropbox gives users 2GB of free storage, but  users can am...

One of my favorite type of activities to do with students in my 9th and 10th grade language arts classes is to incorproate social media into lessons.  I like to have students make Facebook pages for characters in stories, create Twitter feeds for characters and write blog posts that allow them to compare issues in a text with issues that are faced in our society today.  While this all sounds great in practice, I quickly learned that making my dream of seamless socian media integreation  into a reality was a little harder than I thought it would be. To combat the lack of technology and firewall issues that  have stopped me from incorporating Twitter, Facebook and blogging into my classes, I have come up with low-tech paper-and-pencil replacements.  Below are three sample low-tech activities I do with my students in place of their web-based counterparts.  Click on the name of each project to view the handout for each project. R+J 140 http://goo.gl/Q...