Websites for Instructional Technology Resources

Best Practices of Technology Integration
http://www.remc11.k12.mi.us/bstpract/
Access K-12 lessons that use technology. Written by practicing teachers and "kid-tested", the lessons encompass Fine Arts, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Special Education, and Technology.

The Instructional Use of Learning Objects:

http://www.reusability.org/read/

This is the online version of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a new book that tries to go beyond the technological hype and connect learning objects to instruction and learning. You can read the full text of the book at this web site for free. In addition to reading the book, at this website you can participate in discussions of the book's chapters with the authors and others, and discuss other issues related to learning objects, instruction, and learning.

Technology Integration: Unit Planning
http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/curriculum/tech/proj_plan.html
What does the research say about using technology effectively? This site reviews how to design an effective technology lesson, construct the assessment, identify instructional resources, and plan for classroom management.

Edutopia Online: The Big List on Technology Integration
http://www.edutopia.org/techintegration
The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) offers courseware modules, articles, interviews, professional organizations, and resources to show teachers how to weave computers into the curriculum.

Select Right Technology for Right Class

I really enjoyed what I learned from this course. It’s good to know there are so many useful software and web resources for classroom use, like the Microsoft Office series; the Brochure Publisher, Inspiration, Blog and Webquest. Before this class, I only used very few of these new technologies. Hopefully, after learning how to use these new technologies for the classroom teaching, I will be able to make more use of these technologies in my class.

Now that there are so many new technologies you can choose for your classroom use, one question I have been thinking is how to select the best media and technology for a specific class. Obviously, you will not want to use all the available technologies in your class because that is going to confuse your students if this is a technology class or a class about the subjects you are going to teach. You also don’t want to use no technology in your classroom since you know the use of new media and technologies can help increase the efficiency of teaching and learning. So you will need to think what technologies are appropriate to be used in your class.

In my opinion, the answer to the question goes back to what you are going to teach. That is to say, you will always select the type of media and technologies that suit best for your teaching subject and student’s learning style. For instance, if you are teaching a history or social study class, you may want to teach your students how to use webquest to find online resources. For another instance, if your class involves a lot of in-class and after-class group work and discussions, you may want to set up a blog for your class so you and your students have a very good communication platform.

Copyright Law

In the Chapter 10 of our textbook, the most important issue is the copyright law. Personally, I think teachers must be very careful and clear about this issue in our teaching career to avoid copyright violation.

In nowadays, it is very easy for a person like a teacher to get a lot of teaching and learning resources from the internet. On the one hand, this makes resource sharing easier. That is to say, we can simply "copy and paste" and then get what we need from the internet. On the other hand, it's very easy to break the copyright law by doing this because you may be taking resources away without the permission from the author of the website. Therefore, it's very important for a teacher to understand and be familiar with the copyright law and know how to avoid copyright violation.

In order to do this, before we plan to use any resource from other people’s websites such as blog, wikipage or webquest, think about the following questions first:
1. Can you directly use the resources you find on those websites in your teaching? Do you need to notify the author of the website you are using his materials in your teaching?
2. How can you use this resource in your teaching?
3. Can you find a good way to transform those resources into something you understand so that you can teach to your students?
4. Have you referenced or given the credit to the author or website from which you get the teaching and learning resources?

Similarly, for the original work done by yourself as a teacher, you may also establish copyright for it. According to the textbook, it's very simple to implement. We just need to provide a notice of copyright with a notation as in the following form: © 2004 John Doe. For example, for me, I can use the copyright notation: © 2007 Fang Zhang.