We launched #tlchat last night.  And wow.
Worried that we’d have to fill in the lulls with prepared tweets, our small group of organizers had a full page of them ready to go.
There was no need to worry.
In fact, the chat needed no nurturing at all.  Most of us struggled to keep up with the barrage [...]

Tonight’s the night.  Our first #tlchat runs live on Twitter from 8PM till 9PM Eastern time.
During this hour, feel free to contribute or just lurk as we discuss the topic you selected in our Twitter poll:
Collaboration: how to get it going and how to keep it going.
If it’s your first time in a [...]

I am kind of excited about the changes I’ve been noticing in academic search.
Subscription databases rock, no question about that.
And they will likely be the best starting point for the full-text needs of scholars young and old.
But new academic search options are appearing as real players, reaching beyond search as location and networking tools for [...]

My dear, very smart, and seriously good friend Angela Maiers asked me to help spread the news about Dot Day.  I am happy to oblige and I hope that you will join in spreading the word as well about a project that asks students to make their mark.
Angela shares:
Every year on September 15, innovative educators [...]

I’m getting a little bit hooked on RebelMouse.

A bit of hybrid–a little bit Pinterest, a little bit Paper.li, a little bit Flipboard, a little bit Tumblr–RebelMouse first squeaked this summer, and now appears to be breeding prolifically
.
Founder Paul Berry, the former CTO of HuffPo, calls this new curation/aggregation/newspaper publishing tool, your social front page.  But [...]

I asked Michelle Luhtala if she’d allow me to share her approach to high school freshman orientation.
For me it speaks volumes about the spirit of today’s library and where we all aspire to go in terms of intellectual freedom.
It speaks with student voice.
It introduces principles and responsibilities.  It emphasizes trust.  It emphasizes the role of [...]

We’ve been playing around with the idea of beginning a live focused conversation around the hashtag #tlchat for quite some time.  It’s the start of a new school year.  Why not now?
The goal is to get a conversation going on a particular evening around a focused topic, much in the same way that #edchat has [...]

Every couple of years I attach a list of alternate project ideas to my September faculty newsletter.  As I began to update those ideas this time around, it occurred to me that it would be a much better list if we built it together.
So here’s the document I have so far.  I invite you to [...]

August is Connected Educators Month.
I started writing this post on the last leg of a flight home from Australia*, where Gwyneth Jones (the Daring Librarian) and I met with the fabulous librarians of Sydney, Adelaide and Perth.
Sometimes it really hits you hard that things have changed.  It hit me hard on this trip.
We couldn’t have [...]

One of the things I am getting ready to do in September is to help a growing number of interested teachers flip.
Just in case you’ve missed it, many educators are thinking about flipping.
What is flipping?
Flipping the classroom changes the place in which content is delivered. If the teacher assigns lecture-type instruction–in the form of [...]

A couple of years ago, while our students were engaged in a Middle East peace simulation, we discovered that Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted.  In fact, we discovered that at least three folks who called themselves Benjamin Netanyahu were tweeting.
Once we distinguished the real Bibi from the imposters, the students representing him were golden. They were on [...]

If your kiddos are creating and publishing digital content at the rate mine are, you likely want to lead them to select a CC license to apply to those digital stories and posters and music videos and works of art.
Just as it’s important to teach about the value of using Creative Commons materials, we need [...]

It used to be I could type any equation into a Google Search box and right below I’d see the answer. (That is, if I could figure out how to express the equation in my search box.)  You now get way more than your result.  And you get some support for expressing your math problem.
Now, [...]

There’s a new digital storytelling kid in town.  And this one is just right for telling stories focused on time and place.
Meograph officially launched yesterday.  Kind of like a Google Earth tour, this free platform makes it easy for students to tell media-rich stories combining maps, timeline, links, audio and video–to tell stories in context [...]

You may not have seen it yet, but Google recently added a few powerful features to its image search. Look for the little camera icon on the right of the Image Search box.
Search by image allows you to drag in, upload, or paste a URL for any image and search the picture instead of text.
Here’s [...]

One of the new tools I discovered at ISTE was MentorMob, a tool for curating and collaborating on learning playlists.
I’ve since been test-driving the heck out of it as I develop the new online course I’ll be adjuncting this fall. Here’s a learning playlist for my Module on credibility.  (I’m going to be eliminating a [...]