Tabs I Have Open 1-20-14

My Small List of Tabs

Each month I want to talk about "Tabs I have Open." So here is what I had open on January 20th 2014:

Starting in the middle I had BIE.org open. (Full disclosure, I am on the BIE National Faculty.) Their new website design really makes for a great place for every level of PBL instruction. Are you new to PBL and want to know more about what it is? Go to their Resources Tab. Want to see what services are available to you and your school or district? Go to the Services Tab and select either Teacher, School, or District.  Already a veteran PBL teacher then you've probably already been here. Take time to see how things have been rearranged to see your favorite spots such as the Project Search.

While there are over 15,000 people who are members of The Educator's PLN(the tab to the right of the BIE tab), the next site, Classroom 2.0, boasts nearly 80,000 members! (I'll say more about The Educator's PLN, below).  I would join Classroom 2.0 and get on their notifications for the Saturday Classroom 2.0 Sessions. There are great topics and interesting guest speakers. If you have a free Saturday morning and you have nothing to do - well, you now have something to do! Give yourself plenty of time to explore this site.

Need a "One Stop Shop" for learning, in general?  How about Edutopia?  There are tons of great videos to watch but, even better, is the impressive list of bloggers who write for them. Check out the Blog tab and you'll see headings from Administrators and Assessments to Game-Based Learning and PBL. I subscribe to many of the blogs so I never miss what gets posted.

My last tab belongs to Discovery Education. I was an early member of the Discovery Educator's Network (DEN) and, to be honest, I came back to check this out because I have several friends who are very active DEN members and I know they have incredible resources. Check this site out for great resources with STEM-related course and other awesome stuff.

An extra tab I had up is The Educator's PLN. This Ning site has been around for a long time and therefore has some great educators who have some vast experience and knowledge.  I joined it in August of 2010 and, to be honest, lost it off of my radar screen. I, just recently, went back over to check it out and discovered that there are still some things you can check out over there (although there really isn't much new activity on there any more). One thing I like is that people use this site as a place to meet up with friends to discuss specific topics.

Looking below my address window you'll see that I have Dropbox, Symbaloo, Livebinders, Diigo, and Edmodo ready for quick access. These are all life savers for various reasons. And,if there are any of those that you haven't looked at before, then get hot! They are all websites that have been around for YEARS and there are great educators using each of them for their own reasons. I would select one of them and make it your own. I dabble in each of them and, because of that, none of them are things I use frequently.

Tabs I Have Open (1-2-14)

New Year resolutions can take many forms and, as I said in my recent post, I just want to get myself healthier so I can take care of myself, my family, my friends, and my teachers.

But a goal I have decided to set for 2014 is to be less worried about what I put into a blog post. I have worried that my posts have to say awesome and inspiring things. Few people actually open up my posts so I shouldn't be worrying about such silly things.  This will be the first post of 2014 with stuff that you might find interesting - or you might not.

The first type of post I want to use this year is one I just made up - "Tabs I Have Open". There are days that I wake up and open my laptop and I see 15 or 20 tabs open from the night before. Today would be one of those days. After closing a bunch of tabs I now have 15 tabs open. Twitter will always be open and so I shouldn't count that one. And, of course, the tab for this post shouldn't count. Then there's the in-boxes for 2 of my GMail accounts, a Google spreadsheet I was working on, and my shared Google doc for the book I'm working on. So when the smoke clears, there are seven tabs open with things I haven't read or want to re-read to pull out stuff.

Looking left to right, I have a post from Chris Lehmann's Practical Theory on "We Still Need Arts Education."  I clicked on this link because I really like Chris and I usually agree with whatever he writes about. But I also clicked on it because I'm still getting my head around incorporating the A into STEM education - giving us STEAM education.

Next up is KQED's Mindshift blog post entitled "What's Our Vision For the Future of Learning?" I always try to keep up with the Mindshift blog.

My third is Andrew Miller's Personalized Learning Starts With Personal Relationships .  He's a great guy, a fellow BIE National Faculty member and just writes really well. If you don't already follow him on Twitter do that now with @betamiller  or look for him on #pblchat.

Fourth tab from the left? The Engaged Education blog's post (by David Price) about "Why Are We So Divided on The Purpose of Education?" Can't remember if I opened it before the KQED post or after but they are related and the KQED post mentions David Price's book, Open.

The next tab leads us to the Apps in Education post from December 19th entitled Rolling the Dice With Teacher Professional Development.  I'm always a sucker for reading about ways to engage teachers in professional development.

The next to last tab made me laugh when I clicked on it to see what it was. It is a post from last July about using Snapchat on the iPhone and Android.  My wife, Sheila, has been experimenting with ways Snapchat might be used in the tourism world and we were making sure we had all of the ins and outs of this app. She loves sending Snapchat photos and videos to our daughter testing various features. Of course I like to stay on top of it because so many of our middle schoolers (my own son included) use this app all of the time.

Last tab is a post about using the Personal Hotspot on iOS7. I'll be getting my first iPhone today and I wanted to know about whether it is worthwhile using that feature with my current data rates and if I would need to change anything with T-Mobile.

This is a very link-heavy post but you could see each of tabs I mentioned if you went to my Diigo account.  I don't save everything I read there but for this post I made sure I had saved each of them so you could go to Diigo and check it out. I love Diigo for saving things I find interesting so I can quickly reference them later.

I'll try to not write a Tabs I Have Open post more than once a month or so. But if I wake up and I see a bunch of great stuff in the tabs I've opened you can count on me whipping up a post. Of course in between posts check out my Diigo and you'll see the good stuff I've book marked.