Teachers end up collecting bookmarks on their internet browser, lots of bookmarks. And it’s quite frustrating when you know you have a site bookmarked, but it’s either at home, or at school, and you just happen to be exactly where the bookmark is not. It can also become an organizational nightmare when you start mixing bookmarks: school, finances, home, fun stuff, kids’ websites.

Here’s where Foxmarks comes in. It will not only allow you to synchronize bookmarks to all your computers, but will now let you synchronize just the bookmarks you want, to the computers you want.

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Someone wise once said, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future.” I’m not quite sure where time goes, but I do know it keeps slipping somewhere, especially in a class of 30 kids. Asking questions, talking to students, preparing for the next part of the lesson…all these things can create distractions and send time slipping off somewhere.

One simple way to keep students, and teacher, on track is to use a timer. The problem with conventional timers is that, while they do keep track of time, they don’t easily allow a class to monitor the countdown as it progresses. Some companies have realized this and have created timers that can be displayed on overhead projectors. For a cool $35, you can snag one of these. Or, you can do the same thing for free.

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Teachers are often asked by school districts to maintain a presence on the web. Which poses the question: Who is their primary audience? Meet Ima Parent, mother of fourth-grade Jimmy and seventh-grade Suzie. School has started and the kids are coming home with tales of woe of how much work they’re going to have this year. Ima decides to check out their teachers through the school websites they maintain. Firing up the ol’ browser she navigates to her daughter’s science teacher where she finds the class description and expectations. Surprisingly, it says nothing of the three hours of nightly homework and weekly exams Suzie has been describing. She also finds information on a more personal level which further dispels the image of barbed tail and horns painted by Suzie. Ima feels confident that Suzie will survive this seventh grade ordeal. She’s not so sure about herself.

Remember who your primary audience is: Ima Parent. She’ll visit your site frequently and sing your praises when it meets her needs. Update often!

A month into school and Jimmy casually mentions to mom that his teacher just sprung a project on him that’s due this Friday. It’s Wednesday. Jimmy also does not know much about the project as he has misplaced the sheet outlining the particulars. Thanks Jimmy. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I need to remember something and I don’t have an opportunity to write it down. Maybe I just don’t have a pen and paper at the moment. Maybe I’m in the car and it just isn’t convenient to write a note. Or maybe I’m just being lazy at the moment. But when I need to remember something and I can’t immediately write a note to myself, I just use this quick trick to tide me over until I can capture the idea on paper:

Grab a random item and let that be your idea placeholder.

Here’s how it works:

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People generally have a strong preference when it comes to their desktop computer. However, bulk purchasing meant to cut costs determine the platform educational institutions use. Microsoft and Apple have been notoriously unfriendly to the bottom line of school districts for years.

In the back rooms of many school districts sit servers that have worked uninterrupted for years. They’re veritable workhorses that rarely need maintenance or have suffered infiltration by some vicious hacker. It’s a good chance that some form of Linux resides on those machines.

With pressure to upgrade, Linux is beginning to venture out of the back room and onto the desktop. Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 could very well be the answer to the school system at an operating system crossroad. It labels itself as 90% the functionality of Windows Vista for 10% the cost.

With pressure to upgrade desktop stations, Linux is beginning to look good to many schools.

If that’s too steep try the completely free Ubuntu and its variety of sub-distributions such as Edubuntu (the educationally pre-packaged version). This system customarily installs in about twenty minutes and is fast becoming the wunderkind of the Linux world. They’ll even send you a fully bootable CD of the system at their cost if you don’t have the time or the connection to download a copy. Don’t want to install it over your current OS? Run the complete version from the CD!

To be sure, the choice is one for the future as districts begin to look at ways to save the almighty buck.

Here are six compelling reasons to consider Linux as an operating system in your school district:

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“The stapler’s jammed!” a student shouts from across the room. Argh! Now you have to stop everything, fix it for them, locate more staples, go ask the office because you are probably out of staples, and hope that the staple cache lasts to the end of the year. Staplers are one piece of classroom tech that is used frequently, but can oftentimes underperform, causing frustration and time wasting. But being able to staple papers together is an organizational must. So what to do about this little problem?

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Don’t get us wrong. At TeachClever, we’re all about using technology to make us better, more productive teachers. For the most part, we are faster, more efficient and effective due to technology. But Andrew Kantor from USA Today points out that technology can’t, or shouldn’t replace everything. Here are four things that technology doesn’t effectively replace and what it means for teachers:

Spelling. Sure spell check is a wonderful tool for editing, but it’s easy to become dependent on it. Rather than learn to spell words correctly, we just wait for the spell check to tell us we’re wrong. So we never learn to spell those challenging words, like dependent, which I spelled wrong typing this article and let spell check fix it. And I’ll probably spell it wrong again next time.

Teaching students spelling and word study are still valuable skills. Most students will create content digitally in their futures, but there will still be a place for writing by hand. And pausing to think about the correct spelling of a word is a waste of time.

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