Friday, August 3, 2012

Blog 6 - Cited

I had never previously heard of CITEd and am thoroughly impressed. I occasionally teach professional development courses in my district on integrating technology in the classroom. I have often thought about having a tool exactly like this, one in which I can gather resources and information for the people in my classes. What an easy way to gather specific resources geared towards a specific class topic, specific curricular area, or specific group of teachers!

The idea of finding out how to integrate technology into your classroom, when you have never done it before, can be very overwhelming. Often administrators advise us that we need to start doing it, without giving us much support on the "how". Teachers can be nervous about venturing out to research on their own. CITEd offers an opportunity to gather an interesting, limited group of articles and websites from reliable sources to send to teachers who would like to know more.

As a teacher educator, I can have a variety of toolkits for varying levels of ability, familiarity, and interest among the staff. Even a teacher who had no interest in pursuing technology could like at resources about the Cultural Divide, for example, and perhaps find an interesting entry point into technology.

I love the organizational factor of this website and wide variety of resources that it provides! My plan is to share the small toolkit I created with the people registered for my next tech class, before the class meets. That way teachers can gain an understanding of some of the salient points and prepare questions so that the class can be more geared towards their needs. Below, take a look at the list of resources I chose to include. I picked only 7 because I don't want to overwhelm anyone and I wanted to gear the class towards using Web 2.0 technologies in literacy related classes and topics. Hopefully these resources provide a good springboard to get into some specifics!


Resources in this Kit