These online resources empower educators and students from various locales and backgrounds to create Personal Learning Networks (PLN) in which they collaborate (Edmodo, Slideshare, Prezi), network (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+), video-share and image share (Youtube, Blip, Vimeo, Pinterest, Instagram), while communicating opinions, facts, and new ideas through blogging and micro-blogging (Tumblr, Twitter).
In addition to the numerable resources I have gathered, I have also learned new terminology that relates to technological philosophies that can be implemented in the 21st century classroom. For instance, in viewing the presentations available through the K12Online Conference, I came across Sarah Thomas who discussed "gamification" in her video entitled, "Five Steps to Level Up Your Teaching". I truly appreciated the topic of gamification because I am a gamer at heart and recognize how much my students, and my son, enjoy video games. Honestly, I was so intrigued by the term, gamification, I decided to "Google" it (another excellent resource for students and teachers alike), and I found a great deal of discussion by other educators. Tim Walker discusses the topic in his June 23, 2014 article on the National Education Association's website (http://neatoday.org/2014/06/23/gamification-in-the-classroom-the-right-or-wrong-way-to-motivate-students/). The article, Gamification in the Classroom: The Right or Wrong Way to Motivate Students?, much like Sarah Thomas's presentation, explains how gamification uses rewards, points, badges and other extrinsic motivators as essential components to using gamification in the classroom. Furthermore Walker continues to explain how, in 2011, The Oxford Dictionary listed gamification on it's short list of "Word of the Year". Although this is the first time I have been exposed to the term, I have experienced the process in the classroom and have also implemented the philosophy in my own classroom over the past several years.
Kahoot! is an example of this type of gamification resource that is discussed by Sarah Thomas as well as used in my own school. Kahoot! is a game-based classroom response system that enables teachers to create interactive questionnaires aligned with curricular guidelines while giving and getting real-time feedback based on student understanding. In using Kahoot! in the classroom, students are motivated by the idea of gaining immediate results while competing in a secure environment with peers. Additionally, Kahoot! is an excellent type of formative assessment for teacher's to evaluate student understanding in a dynamic, creative, and meaningful way.
Social media resources have become a way of life and educators must adapt this new way of life to the classroom in order to be aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Standards. These standards provide educators with guidelines, that empower us to provide instruction based on real-world scenarios utilizing social media resources in a positive and motivational manner. Tools such as interactive content map makers, Mindmeister, and word cloud makers, Wordle, empower students and teachers to "think outside of the box" in extending knowledge of curricular content. The ability to make learning fun and relevant is always a challenging yet rewarding aspect of teaching. Encouraging students to express and share ideas, images, and extend knowledge with students in the area and around the world in a safe and guided manner, seems to be a natural extension of true instruction and learning. In closing, I would like to share one more resource that I had the opportunity to use in a sustainability course, called Thinglink.com. Thinglink is a platform for creating interactive images embedding videos, music, articles, bringing the image to life, similar to the Bing.com homepage. Here is a link to an example of an interactive image I created for the sustainability course, The Whole World in Our Hands.