YouTube has popularized the trend of individuals publishing video content to the web and children are now more tech savvy than any prior generation. However, a quick visit to YouTube leaves little doubt that a large portion of their content is either half-baked, innappropriate for minors or a combination of both.

SchoolTube provides a user-generated video portal with features to ensure that content is relevant and appropriate for students. All submissions to the site are moderated by teachers and by the site itself. When a user submits a video to the site, it will not be published until a verified teacher has approved it and SchoolTube moderators have confirmed that it complies with the school’s guidelines and the site’s content policies. As the name suggests, the site is designed around the need for a safe community for school-related videos. Video categories on the site include community service, speech & debate, sports, ceremonies and arts & entertainment. Students use the site to show off achievements to their friends and family, to publish school video projects and to compete in contests that the site hosts. Teachers use the site to publish their students’ work, to hear other teachers share teaching strategies, and to share their own. Additionally, the site maintains a channel specifically for teachers to learn how other teachers are using SchoolTube and similar technologies to improve their classrooms. Administrators use the site to share with the community videos of sporting events, school performances, graduation and other ceremonies. Parents use the site to follow changes taking place in the school and to see their children take part in school activities.

SchoolTube hosts contests in categories like journalism, health awareness, music and theatre performances, and presentations on history lessons and science experiments. Participants have the chance to compete and learn from other contestants on a national level. Contest winners earn money towards the school budget. With SchoolTube, it has never been safer or easier to showcase student talent.

One apparent drawback of this site is that they are advertising supported which can be an issue for schools since commercial messages are being directed toward students. However, this may be the only way they can afford the high bandwidth costs for streaming video. Similar sites like TeacherTube are also ad supported.

Alice is a computer programming software environment focused on teaching first-time programmers the basics of computer science. A decade or so ago, web design classes began popping up in high schools across the nation as a way to engage students in a viable future profession in a similar way that shop classes throughout the country have prepared students for carpentry and other manual professions. More recently, computer science and programming classes have garnered buzz. As typical programming environments geared toward students have always focused on relevant business principled uses, and as programming students have reached younger and younger ages, a need has arose to teach programming in a way that feels relevant to students that do not yet understand the business demands of most computer science professionals.

This is where Alice comes in. Alice focuses on building three dimensional game-like environments (with Lewis Carroll’s protagonist at the head) purely through code. The software, which can be downloaded for as many users as desired for free, is open sourced and has been designed specifically for computer science students desirous of learning the basic principles, grammar, organization and design elements of modern coding. However, in the beginning, Alice avoids the frustration the students often encounter with coding through a drag-and-drop interface. If the student sets up malfunctioning code, the program will run up to the point where the code is faulty, all of which is designed to reduce frustration and make the learning process as simple as possible. Alice can be used in high schools, but is also used in universities as an initial introduction to computer science across America. From Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to Ivy League Cornell University in Ithaca, NY to Duke University and California State University, Alice has graduated beyond the plethora of high schools already taking advantage of its benefits. A peer-reviewed IT journal published findings that in introductory courses to computer science, students averaged a grade B with Alice as opposed to a grade C with traditional teaching methods. Furthermore, after using Alice, 88% of students continued on to take a second computer science course after learning on Alice, whereas only 47% of other students continued on to another course. Alice can be downloaded for free at Alice.org. A plethora of teaching materials can be found there, as well as at http://www.aliceprogramming.net/.

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Microsoft has an academically rich education site at Microsoft.com/education. A wide range of free educational materials, including free lesson plans, are available for both the student and teacher to access, and numerous downloads and enhancements are available for either group to peruse. When landing on the main site at Microsoft.com/education, one will immediately notice that the site is very intuitive. Every clickable link is clearly labeled and adequately explained, which makes browsing extremely user-friendly and allows a person to find the materials they are looking for in as little time as possible. A teacher can access free lessons plans for Geography, History, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Social Studies with the click of a button. Several main topics are highlighted on the main lesson plan portal, but a search feature is also present. The search feature will allow an educator to search the free lesson plans and how-to articles for keywords and to limit the search to a specific grade level and subject heading. These lessons plans explore their topics through the use of computer programs and supplemental web-sites. Teachers can also access free clip art and media, educational templates, gradebook templates, academic calendars, newsletter templates, a professional development tool, and free posters for their classroom!

However, teachers aren’t the only ones who will find handy resources at Microsoft.com/education. Students can access a wide-range of materials to further their education, both at school and independently. A studies tab on the student section of the web-site presents a variety of well-organized tutorials, templates, and personal stories. These materials will help any student become a more efficient and organized learner, and provide them with handy tips and tricks to expedite basic tasks in Microsoft programs such as Word. The Microsoft DreamSpark section of the student portal provides access to numerous Microsoft program downloads for the purpose of education and personal enhancement. The software available will help students learn design and technology skills, math, science, and engineering activities. Any person who is enrolled at an accredited school and a verified student is free to download and use these programs. The Microsoft.com/education web-site provides a wealth of material for students and teachers. Much of the material presented utilizes a mixture of traditional education and technology, making it a real treasure for any teacher who wishes to expand the multimedia aspects of their lessons and for students who want to remain on the cutting edge of learning opportunities.

SmithsonianEducation.org is a valuable web-site that offers resources for educators, families, and students – all in one convenient and easy to navigate web-site. Whether you are a teacher, principal, Mom, Dad, or an eager child, an opportunity to further your knowledge exists at Smithsonian Education.

Teachers can access the educator page and find a unique search menu that allows them to search by keyword to find educational material targeted toward any grade level and school subject. The materials can range from lessons plans to videos.

This set-up makes planning a multimedia presentation on any given subject a snap, and ensures that all students will remain engaged in the learning process. The vast amount of printable documents will also provide excellent supplemental material to enhance both textbook copy and questions.

Another neat feature is the functionality of the Smithsonian Education web-site when planning a trip to the Smithsonian Museum. The site contains numerous features to make your next educational journey a snap. These features include tips on how to enhance a visit at three different times: before a trip, while at the museum, and after leaving. It also spotlights child friendly exhibits occurring at the Smithsonian and provides downloadable activity sheets to provide kids with new learning opportunities anytime.

The children’s section is a great resource for a young person to further their own education. The Idea Labs present on the main student portal feature information about presidents and walking on the moon as well as knowledge tests and facts about the Smithsonian. Additional main topic headings that children can explore include art, science and nature, history and culture, and people and places. Kids can also download and print their own fact sheets, ensuring that learning continues even when they are away from the computer! Anyone interested in improving their own knowledge or enhancing the education of children will find a great variety of resources available at SmithsonianEducation.org.

TED is an organization and a website with a collection of over 450 video lectures by some of the most notable academics, businesspeople, researchers, politicians, and scientists in their fields. Each lecture is only 18 minutes long. A small non-profit organization dedicated to getting the news out on the power of ideas, they have attracted such large names as Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall, Bono, Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics.

While each of the lectures, which can be streamed for free from the website, is educational, they are also inspirational. Since each of the lecturers is spending less than twenty minutes to describe their life’s passion, and because each of the lecturers is a superlative expert in their area of study, the lectures are as exciting and simply presented as they are educational and informative. For this reason, they might best be used at the outset of a curriculum, to introduce a topic, a theme, or an area of study. For instance, as a teacher begins a portion of a science curriculum on outer space, she could show Carolyn Porco’s TED speech, which asks the question, Could there be forms of life on one of Saturn’s moons? The lecture is fascinating, but also presented in simple enough terms for most high schoolers and certainly for college students. Alternatively, there are also many education-related lectures on TED that teachers or administrative staff might watch for their own edification.

Renowned mathematician Arthur Benjamin delivers a lecture suggesting ways to make math education more effective and less stressful. In two separate lectures, Sir Ken Robinson and Elizabeth Gilbert both discuss broad changes they would like to see made to the education system in order to foster students’ strengths. Whether for classroom use or for school staff’s personal use, TED lectures educate with the kind of gravitating and inspired videos that are just unavailable in most pre-packaged curriculum-driven video series. Find TED online at http://www.ted.com.

Ted Wujec on 3 Ways The Brain Creates Meaning

School calendars contain important events that should be integrated with the family or personal calendar. Calendar tools like Tandem for Schools allow parents to sync the school calendar’s events with a personal web calendar like Outlook, Google Calendar, Cozi, or iCal. This eliminates the need to manually enter events into a personal calendar for parents.

However parents can’t just buy Tandem for Schools if they like the convenience of a comprehensive web-based school calendar. It has to be purchased by the school or district administration. That is why Intand (the makers of Tandem) in partnership with Cozi have developed a site for parents to vote for Tandem if they would like their school to consider Tandem as a calendar management solution. Parents can visit the site to vote and learn more about web-based school calendars at http://www.schoolcal.org.

From the Cozi blog:

If you wish you could magically have school calendar dates appear in your family calendar, you’re not alone! In fact, that’s the top choice of most parents when asked what type of calendar they’d most like to integrate directly into their family calendars. Imagine how much simpler life would be if you could automatically add school vacations, teacher conferences and early dismissal days right into your family planner.

Some schools already make calendars available to do that, but most schools don’t yet. That’s why Cozi is eager to introduce you to School Calendars Now (www.SchoolCal.org). School Calendars Now is working with parents to encourage schools across the U.S. and Canada to publish their annual calendars as Internet calendars (known as iCals) that can easily be added to the calendar programs parents use most, such as Cozi.

In this interesting presentation from the TED Conference, mathematician Arthur Benjamin makes the case that statistics should be at the top of the pyramid of the high school mathematics curriculum. He argues that it is more useful in everyday life and he points out that if American’s understood statistics they may have avoided making poor decisions that led to the financial crisis. What do you think? Are his points valid?

Christopher D. Sessums discusses the paradox of learning in the digital era, which is that the internet makes learning both more individual and yet more social. For more on this see the following post from Christopher D. Sessums blog.

The World Wide Web is more than a collection of websites. “It is also what emerges out of the collection of and interconnections among the sites that constitute it, producing software or websites that re-imagine what is possible technologically and socially.” (Thomas & Brown, 2009, p. 37) This emergence of interconnections has resulted in what we might refer to as the digital era.

However, there is a paradox associated with learning in the digital era: Learning may be at once more individual, shaped to one’s own style, eccentricities, and interests, yet more social, involving networking, cooperation, and collaboration (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009).

Unfortunately, in an environment of standardized testing linked to school funding, the implementation of new digital media in the classroom along with constructivist learning principles may be considered too risky, thus the innovative aspects of new digital media becomes shelved if not ignored altogether (i.e., the relevance gap).

As evidence grows concerning the knowledge, skills, and competencies gained through engaging new digital media, conventional notions of “school as the ideal locus of the full range of learning” are being overshadowed (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009, p. 9).

“If schools do not take seriously the positive and negative potentials of digital media for learning, they risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to the lives students lead outside of school and to the future which they are being prepared” (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009, p. 14).

What will change schools?
If a successful learning practice depends upon “an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking” (Weigel, James, & Gardner, 2009, p. 10), then systemic change and widespread adoption requires

• informed leadership (Fullan, 2007);

• all stakeholders (teachers, principals, parents, community members) to be aware of and familiar with the innovations associated with digital learning (Ellsworth, 2004); and

• schools must adopt digital learning wholesale today (not tomorrow) (Christensen, 2008).

To those who read about and engage in the new digital media, what, in your opinion needs to be added to this list? What steps are you taking? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or in your own Web space.

This article was republished from Christopher D. Sessums blog and is licensed under the Creative Commons 2.5 license.

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A school office can often serve the role of customer support for the school community. When parents have questions the first option that usually comes to mind is to call the school office and ask. However, is this really the most efficient option for both parents and the school? Sometimes the questions can be very simple, like “what time does school get out today” or “is the softball game rained out?”. Although this might seem like a convenient way to get information, what about the alternative like having a central information source for the school that is available to be viewed online. Instead of having to call the school, what if parents could view the online school calendar instead? They wouldn’t have to wait on hold, which can save them time and also reduce the number of calls to the office for simple questions. For many corporations that have call centers, each call is estimated to cost as much as $20 per call or more. By reducing calls to the office, this could save money for the school or free up the school administration to focus on other tasks.

Our school calendar application, Tandem for Schools, can help your school reduce calls to the office by centralizing information at your school’s calendar website. Tandem was designed to help schools communicate effectively with parents. The calendar can be updated with the latest information almost instantly. Parents can sync a Tandem school calendar with their personal calendars like Outlook, iCal, Cozy, or Google Calendar, which will update them whenever changes are made to the school calendar. Parents can also subscribe to RSS updates with any RSS reader like MyYahoo or Google Reader. Finally, the online school calendar is available 24/7, so parents can access information at any time from anywhere that has internet access.

You can try Tandem for Schools Plus free for 30 days or use the limited free version.

If you are a parent, check out SchoolCal.org to request Tandem for your school.

You can contact Intand at info@intand.com or 1-866-685-3449.

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One way to schools can raise money is by renting out their school facilities to the community. They could rent out their school gym for local recreational sports leagues or the auditorium for company meetings in the summer. Many schools rent facilities to Boy or Girl Scouts or even weddings. However a paper-based sign up process could be too time consuming for both community members and school administrators.

Tandem for Schools provides a streamlined process for facilities requests that is completely online. A community member can fill out an online request form that is sent to the administrator in charge of facilities rentals. They can approve or deny the request and the requester will be notified via email. Once approved the rental time slot will be scheduled on the school calendar, to automatically prevent any double booking of that facility. A handful of event bookings can potentially pay for a year of Tandem for Schools and can start generating a positive cash flow that many schools desperately need right now.

Sign up for a free demo to learn more.

Photo by Heated Ground Photography