As I sit and read Marc Prensky’s Teaching Digital Natives I am in absolute awe. I have done a lot of 21st century ED reading this summer but nothing has floored me the way that Prensky has. This book is written with such ease and exactness that it gives me hope that any educator that reads it will undoubtably begin to take the crucial steps to create a partnership in their classroom, not a dictatorship. I must tell you that I am only 30 pages in but from page one my only wish was that I could read faster and remember every single word!

Prensky argues that a partnership must be made in the classroom in order for students to excel in a globally connected, every changing world and if this does not occur we are not only doing our students a disservice, we are doing the world a disservice. It truly is that big of a deal. Prensky lays out the basics of what must be consistent in the partnering classroom for this to occur. He describes partnering as “letting students focus on the part of the learning process that they can do best, and letting teachers…

…

Hello, my name is Beth Sanders and I am a second year social studies teacher at Tarrant High School in Birmingham, AL. I am beyond lucky to have 1:1 Macbooks and iPod Touches in my classroom and have become known throughout our school system as the “techie” who rarely sleeps.

If I only had one word to define myself, it would be passionate. I am passionate about education reform, social justice, 21^st century skills, and purposeful technology integration, among several other things. I live, eat and breathe all things education and I am in constant pursuit of embedding purposeful and passion driven learning tools into my classroom. I am an advocate for problem/project-based learning. I believe strongly in the power of technology to support students in becoming independent, aware, empathetic, problem-solvers who cannot only live in, but thrive in an ever-changing globally connected world.

I am an avid supporter of Schoology and can truly attest to its power in the classroom in supporting all types of learners in maximizing their learning experience. If you follow my twitter handle, you know how serious I am about this; I truly cannot imagine my classroom without Schoology. As a…

As a techie and proud member of the Net Generation, I feel the need to keep up with the times, and even encourage my friends, family, and colleagues to do the same.  I admit that I exhibit some of the qualities that we worry about in this younger generation.  For example, I can’t go an hour without checking my phone.  I’d prefer texting, IM, and email over talking on the phone.  And as my husband says, before I even roll out of bed in the morning I’ve checked email, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe even played a word on Words with Friends.

While I can’t imagine going back to life without all of these tools, I’m also careful not to jump on the latest bandwagon.   A colleague recently placed an article in my mailbox titled “Forget the Fads – The Old Way Works Best“.  It was published in Newsweek in 2002 and includes a quote by Theodore Sizer, Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.  He was asked if he could name a single reform in the past 15 years that has been successful.  To which he replied “I don’t think there is one.”…

Schoology is happy to introduce you to our newest Guest Blogger, Mark Garrison.

Mark Garrison is the Instructional Technology Coordinator for White Bear Lake Area Schools in Minnesota. In 2002 Mark and his wife paddles 3,000 miles from the Minnesota border to the Arctic Ocean. They now live in Minneapolis where they are raising 3 children and finding adventure in everyday life. Among his many hobbies, Mark collects and presents interesting and innovative websites at GarrisonSites.com.

Mark is also attending the Google Teacher Academy and the first ever Youtube Teacher studio. Be sure to follow Mark on Twitter at @MarkGarrison and check out the Schoology Blog for Mark’s latest blog posts.

As I venture into the next chapter of my career I think about educational technology. I’m about to start a journey into the world of integrated dance.

How can technology benefit me and my future students in this field?

Students with whom I’d be working with will likely have some sort of assistive technologies in their everyday lives.

How can I utilize that in order to most effectively impact their education?

For many students with cognitive challenges, being able to use technologies can be extremely beneficial. So as I take my first steps into this new chapter of my life I will be also taking into account how educational technologies and software can be incorporated.

For those of you who have never seen a performance of integrated dance I recommend you check this video out. Hope you enjoy it!

If you have any suggestions or answers to the above questions please share below:

I will ALWAYS be a teacher first and a coach second.

Now that I have stated my disclaimer, I would like to bring up another fun way to use Schoology’s Group feature.

I coached middle school track and field my first two years of teaching and absolutely loved the connections that was created between the students and me in and outside of the classroom. 7th grade is the first time that these students are able to try the sport, which many are hesitant to try but end up falling in love with. Track and field offers students to progress at their own levels and experience success no matter what place he/she falls into. This confidence spreads into the classroom and students are willing to try new things and find motivation to work harder to achieve academic success.

As the 2011 Track and Field season was approaching I was unable to be a volunteer coach this year due to a heavy graduate school schedule. I wanted to be there and support these students, but didn’t know how.

Thank goodness for Schoology!

I created a Bucyrus Track and Field group page. My students helped me design a logo to use…

Google+ has captured the attention and curiosity of many people around the world. This is Google’s latest attempt at creating a social network to compete with both Facebook and Twitter. Google+ is currently in a beta test right now and it is a real beta test because invitations are needed to create Google+ accounts at this time (we all know Google never releases a product out of beta). I was fortunate enough to receive an invite from an EdTech friend who likes to use me as her personal guinea pig which I usually don’t mind. The concept is basically like both Facebook and Twitter, just enter whatever you want to share with your network. This can be links to articles to ever popular what you had for lunch on a given day. Right away the big difference is you can direct your message whatever group or circle you wish to see it. Circles are groups of friends, followers, or whatever you call the people you share your life with online. I like the circle concept Google uses because circles can be created for whatever purpose you need. For example, everyone has a everyone and public circle. Along with those circles…

When I consider possible career choices, one of the factors that always seems to be top of mind is my perception of something I like to call ‘the Sameness’.  The Sameness is what scares me about a vast number of jobs – the concept that what I’d be doing day in and day out, year to year, would be exactly the same.  That I’d be stuck inside ‘a small world’.  One example I stumbled across recently is the eye doctor.  I mean no offense to eye doctors, but my perception is that their professional life occupies a fairly small sphere, by which I mean they conduct the same set of algorithmic tests on dozens of patients in a windowless room every single day.  Though of course there are far worse fates, for some reason, the thought of this kind of life terrifies me.

And yet I can’t help feeling that there’s no way to have an up close and personal positive effect on the lives of individuals unless you surrender your notions of ‘big world living’ and settle down to make a difference in a given community.  Seen from another perspective, that eye doctor brightens the lives of perhaps thousands…

It’s raining; it’s pouring.  The old man is snoring…

You all know how the rest of this goes, and so does everyone in north west Ohio.  It has rained non-stop for pretty much the past two months.  Flooding, cold weather, and lots of canceled spring sporting events.  There is one thing that the rain didn’t’ ruin and that is my 7^th grade Language Arts Honors class.  Beginning in mid-April my students were studying the Renaissance Period in their Social Studies Honors class.  Nicole, the social studies teacher, has been as fascinated with Schoology as me and wanted to do a cross-curricular project.  Yes!

Nicole had selected the novel The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood, and had been planning on just reading it in her class and trying some how to squeeze in time to make connections to the novel and studying the historical references.  How would she have time? How could we work together while keeping the students organized? Schoology to the rescue!

Nicole found a WebQuest on elements from the Renaissance time period and I have always wanted to do literature circles in class.  I went straight to Schoology and created groups.  Each group was a different…