12 Essentials for Integrating Technology

Richard Byrne, a high school History teacher from Maine, also runs a blog about technology for education. His blog, Free Technology for Teachers, is a great resource for any teacher to use.

He recently completed a booklet entitled "Twelve Essentials for Technology Integration." This booklet, provided for free by him on his site, is a great primer for teachers looking for some basic technology they should use when getting started with technology integration.

The booklet looks professionally done, even though he did it on his own. It gives a sort summary about 12 different technologies for classroom use.

I highly recommend this site and booklet to all educators.

Great Advice from a movie!

I just watched "Generation Gap" this weekend with my wife. It is a Hallmark Channel original about a teenage boy who goes to live with his grandfather, played by Ed Asner, for the summer to learn some lessons and turn his troubled life around. The movie was very enjoyable to watch, with a great cast. I highly recommend the movie. Hallmark Channel replays it every few weeks.

There are two great lines in the movie that I think all teachers should share with their students.

"Here are the rules:

1. Be on time.

2. Do what's right.

3. Treat everyone with respect."

"It doesn't matter how many books you get through, it does matter how much of a good book gets through to you."

I am posting the rules on my classroom wall and explaining them to my students on the first day of class next year. I think that those three rules are perfect for all students, especially if they are taught what the "right" things are.

Bing - Microsoft's New Search site

Microsoft has launched a new search site, Bing. This site is different than Windows Live, Google, and Yahoo, in how it presents search results.

When searching the internet, the results are displayed not based on relevance to the search term like the others, but based on how popular a site it is. Some early reviews and comments show a split among people, with some liking it and some hating it. Like anything else, it is personal preference.

The layout is similar to other search results, but you can click on an icon to the right of the result and see the first parts of that site.

In image search, you only get the images themselves in the results. However, hovering over an image brings up more details, like the source web page. This allows for a clean appearance, but I like Google's way of showing the source site because I use that as a guide for evaluating the image.

Video search will play a thumbnail view of the video in the search page when you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. There is a problem here though. If a user changes the filtering settings for Bing they can see ANY video in the thumbnail, even if there is a filter on the system that they are using. This means that a student could search for videos and watch them in thumbnail version, even if the source site is blocked by the school's filter system, so teachers beware.

Overall, Bing is a nice, different way of searching the internet. I suggest that people should try it out with the same search that they do on their normal search engine and see which they personally prefer, or which one gives them the best search results for them.