Resource Corner
Donated or Deeply Discounted Technology Resources For Your School or Educational Nonprofit
With shrinking budgets and technology funding cuts, educators can sometimes feel like they’re braving the perils of the education frontier without the necessary gear, but a handful of nonprofits are serving as supply trains, outfitting schools for true pioneering.
The aptly-named Gifts in Kind International provides myriad products for nonprofits of all stripes, with a special focus on software grants from corporate partners including Adobe, Filemaker, and Lotus.
TechSoup Stock is an online product donation service that connects U.S. and Canadian schools, libraries, and nonprofits with more than twenty leading providers, among them Microsoft and Hewlett Packard. TechSoup even maintains an online library of articles to help users choose the appropriate products.
The nonprofit Digital Equity Service Center (DESC) provides digital equity discounts on a full range of hardware, smart boards, peripherals, and accessories, with partners including CDW-G, Dell, Gateway, Gov Connection, and Promethean. This hardware co-op (“Our Store” at http://www.digitalequity.org/), pools the buying power of educators to generate increasingly deep discounts over time.
The National Institute for Community Innovations’ nonprofit Virtual Library Co-op (http://www.vlibrary.org/) also pools educators and students’ buying power to minimize the cost of unlimited access to a vast array of digital instructional and professional development content across the K-12 curriculum.
All of these organizations provide schools with deeply discounted, sometimes free, technology resources at a fraction of market prices. So no matter how wild that frontier may look, educators never have to feel like Lone Rangers.
Our Top Ten Favorite Ed Tech Blogs for September 06
Here are some of our favorite education or ed tech blogs for the month of September.
New to Podcasting? Here Are Some Helpful Tips and Resources
As iPods and other digital media players have become increasingly commonplace, the term podcasting has popped up in the education field more and more over the last couple of years. Modern consumers, especially school-aged kids, anticipate media content will flow seamlessly and at will as a component of an “on demand” world, and podcasting is a popular new method of sharing these files. Simply put, a podcast is a method of distributing audio or data files over the Internet, in which you can download an entire broadcasted file, rather than simply connecting to it online. While it may seem intimidating to create your own podcast, the Internet houses many free and helpful resources to get your feet wet.
Karen Lemmons, a school librarian in Detroit, Michigan, and the president of ISTE’s SIG on media specialists (SIGMS), swears by podcasting as an education tool. “Podcasting can be used as a means of communication, teaching, learning, or everyday activities,” she notes. In the education field, podcasts help students virtually “attend” missed speeches or lectures, assist students with homework, and even provide tools for older students in tutoring their younger peers.
One popular way to jump on the podcast bandwagon is through Apple’s iTunes software, which can be obtained through free download on both Macintosh and Windows computers (http://www.apple.com/itunes/). iTunes has primarily functioned as an online music files store, but the software now sports applications that will allow you to easily browse and create your own podcasts as well.
Essentially, if you already have a computer with Internet capability, a microphone is the only other piece of the puzzle necessary for an audio-only podcast. Audacity is a free software for recording and editing audio (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). A great Web site with step-by-step instructions for how to create a free podcast is Podcast for Free (http://www.castwiki.com/index.php/Podcast_for_free).
But once you’ve created your podcast files, where do you go from there? Don’t worry, there are scads of free resources available for publishing completed podcasts. Two helpful and easy-to-use programs are CcPublisher (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher) and FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home).
Of course, the best way to get ideas for a new podcast project is to become familiar with available podcasts, and listen to different styles on a regular basis.
But for those of you who don’t have multiple hours each day to devote to Net surfing (we’ll leave that to the teenagers in your lives), we recommend six ed tech podcasts to help new podcasters familiarize themselves with the technology and its applications
Free Educator Resource Book: Parents' Guide to Computers in Education
ISTE Founder and University of Oregon education professor Dave Moursund has completed a new book free for download, the latest in a series of texts that examine the use of technology in education. Parents' Guide to Computers in Education is intended for parents of K-12 students, preservice teachers, and inservice teachers. Moursund advocates for parents and other caregivers to integrate school-age children’s familiarity with electronics such as MP3 players and cell phones into students’ classroom learning styles. He feels that many schools are slow to integrate technology into the classroom, and hopes that parents and proactive teachers can bridge the gap.
Moursund’s library of free downloadable books includes titles that address using games in education, computers in education for gifted students, and requesting funds and resources for a more robust technology education. He also maintains a blog for Information and Communication Technology in Education, and links to interesting news and analysis of technology in education trends.
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