Moving Beyond the Tools:

This is also cross-posted on Speed of Creativity

My name is Beth Still and my blog is Nebraska Change Agent. I was honored when Wes invited me to guest blog during his absence. This post is cross-listed on my blog, but I wanted to increase the
audience since this is a project that can help so many of us. I hope you
will help by adding your ideas to the wiki.

The number one complaint I heard about sessions during ISTE is that there were too many sessions which focused on the tools, but not nearly enough that discussed how to actually implement the tools into the
classroom. There is a large segment of educators who are familiar with web tools and have even tested them out with their students, but they are ready to move to the next level which is figuring out how to use these tools effectively to improve communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity in their classrooms.

I created a wiki that I have named Web Tools in Action. As a community of educators we need to build it together. If all of us take a few minutes to add something or ask some of our colleagues to
share their projects, we are going to have one heck of a great crowd-sourced resource at our fingertips. The idea is to add links to projects that exist all over the web and write up a short description of them so others can see what it means when we say things like we use blogs and wikis in our classroom. Many of us have our students do things like take digital picture of create podcasts, but where do teachers begin who want to do this? While this wiki is supposed to be about how to implement web tools we cannot help but talk about individual tools
and that is OK! But we all know tools come and go so if you discuss a specific tool you might want to add several other similar tools in case one of them goes away. (Most recent example I can think of is
ScreenToaster and for different reasons, Ning.)

If you know of any examples to share that are not yours please contact the teacher to see if they would mind if you shared them. I am looking to fill this wiki with examples from all grade and subject levels. So what are you waiting for! Let’s fill this thing up. And don’t be shy about being the first to edit a page. There are no specific
rules or format when editing. Click here to see an example that I included. As you can see it does not take much time!