I am very excited about this tremendous opportunity to be work and engage with a dynamic group of educators from across Washington State who are deeply committed to integrating technology with standards-based curriculum, instruction, and assessment.  The purpose of this group is to develop assessments for the Washington State Educational Technology Standards that went into effect December 2008. Representatives from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) will lead this work.

One reason you may want a YouTube alternative is that many districts have blocked access to YouTube. Within my own district, access is blocked to everyone during school hours because of bandwidth issues but it opens to staff before and after school hours. Nice, but doesn’t help me during class although the tech department will download YouTube vids during off hours for use the next day. If you also have access issues, here is a great post that gives 30+ alternatives to YouTube that may work for you.

Another post gives another YouTube alternative called Vidque, a new service that aims to help users curate their own collections of the best videos available on the Internet. Vidque allows users to grab videos fromvarious sources such as YouTube, Blip.tv, TED, and Vimeo and put them into collections that they can share and it even uses the videos you grab to help you locate more videos.

There’s gonna be some celebrating this weekend in the O’Flynn household.

• I’m installing Geogebra as I type. I haven’t used this software much yet and am looking forward to digging in.
• Our school has a site license for Apex Learning math courses. This should be a  great resource and supplement for my face-to-face classes.
• Of course, I’ll be focusing on getting more teachers in our district to begin using Moodle!

More to come, stay tuned…

The Moodle User Group Northwest in partnership with NCCE holds a summer Moodle Bootcamp for both system administrators and instructors. This multi-strand event will allows participants to focus on either installing and administrating a Moodle environment or teaching and learning using one of the hottest online content management systems available.

If you’d like to see my course, just click the pic above. If you are interested in any of the activities you see, just let me know.

• k12cellphoneprojects is a wiki where teachers share their ideas for integrating cell phones into their classroom and curricula.
• From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning is a blog that highlights uses of cell phones in the classroom.

Please share the ways in which you use this technology in your own classroom.

As I look at ways to improve my use of Moodle next year, I’m inspired by this article at the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:

• Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time. So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum…

I will be teaching three sections of Algebra-Geometry 2 next year and think this may be perfect! I guess now I have my summer project.

Excerpt:

Karissa Snow won $5,000 in scholarship money just by blogging and winning her peers’ approval. She’s among 40,000 students vying for tuition cash every week on CollegeNET, a web site that lets current and prospective college students post blog entries on a myriad of topics. The student who receives the most votes from CollegeNET members every week wins thousands for college.

Click here to view the full article.