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.

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...

http://learnthat.com/2005/06/employee-goal-performance-planning/ The summer is quickly winding down, so that means that it is time to start thinking about the upcoming school year.  I have spent a lot of my summer vacation reflecting on this past school year.  Last year was a big year for me.  I took on a lot of new responsibilities with professional development and started to implement Web 2.0 tools into my lessons for the first time.  While I am proud of what I accomplished last year, I know that I still have plenty of room for growth.  With that being said, here are my goals for the 2011 - 2012 school year. 1.  Make a personal connection with every student in my classroom. I think that making connections is half the battle in education.  I can always tell which students or classes I have a strong rapport with because they care more about me and my class, and they try harder and learn more because of it.  If I am able to make a connection...