Tips for a Techie Start

Being a teacher is not the easiest job you can have. You have to prepare lesson plans, manage different classrooms with different children with different abilities, you should also have the ability to teach different levels and you have to stay up-to-date with the current events and innovations. And now, there is the technology challenge for today’s teachers. There are numerous web tools that you can use, I think this is one of the reasons what makes the technology overwhelming and conflicting for some of us. So it can be a good start to have a look at the tools that you can use to improve yourself as a teacher. So; here are my suggestions for a techie career start:

Social bookmarking is a great tool to start. It allows you to categorize, access and share the websites easily. It’s the best way to collect the websites you like and keep a list of them and share it with others anytime. Delicious is my favourite social bookmarking tool. It’ specially designed for educators. You can access your favourite websites anywhere, anytime and share it with other people. Stumble Upon, Squidoo and Diigo are the other alternatives to delicious.

On the way of becoming a techie teacher, you are sure to follow many blogs from great educators but it’s difficult to check their websites every single day to see if there is something new posted. RSS readers can help at this point. Google Reader is my favourite feeds reader. You can easily organize one simple page to follow the blogs that you read every day instead of visiting them one by one. Netvibes, PageFlakes and Bloglines are other alternatives.

The most popular and social networking site is the Twitter. You can find amazing educators, teachers, writers on Twitter tweeting about different topics on teaching & learning. Twitter will help you to find new articles and blog posts to read, online conferences to join and to make friends with great people.

Wiki is a place to put text, pictures, links, audios, videos and collaborate with other. Wikispaces is my favourite wiki and it can be a good start if you want to do an online&collaborative project with your class, with other classes or with other educators all around the world.PbWorks can be an alternative.

There are many educational video hosting websites that you can use for professional development or to use in your classes. TeacherTube, EduTube,TeachersTV and SchoolTube can be the best places to start.

You may want to start your own blog to share your experience and knowledge with other people. Edublogs ,WordPress and Blogspot are the sites that you can start your own blog journey.

Of course, the technology will evolve and change every single day, so work hard, collaborate, get inspired and inspire others and be online.

Cross posted on TechLearning.