Thing 8 - Free Technology Tools Blog

Purpose:  To explore how this one blog provides so many free educational tools for educators to use.  

Richard Byrne is a high school teacher in a rural school district.  As he says on his blog, “A limited technology forces me to be creative to incorporate technology into my teaching. The purpose of this site is to share some information about free resources that teachers can use in their practice.”

We have subscribed to this for awhile and Mr. Byrne has truly done a remarkable job setting up this blog and all of the tools he has shared are free and useful for education at many levels.

Discovery Activities

You will get a chance to explore the vast resources on this website, but, we would like to highlight several tools that are of particular interest:

• Childtopia – Online games in several different languages - http://www.childtopia.com/index.php?newlang=eng
• Math through culture - http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/csdt.html
• Interactive science simulations - http://phet.colorado.edu/index.php
• Google Lit Trips (to really see this, you need to download Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/  onto your computer.  We’ll learn more about this later in the program)  - http://www.googlelittrips.com/

Now, explore this blog and great websites yourself.  Identify at least five tools or websites that you can use.

Blog Post: Thing 8 – Free Technology Resources:  Write about the five tools or website you found that will be useful in your teaching.

Curriculum Connections - http://calcurriculum.pbwiki.com/. 

Add one of the free technology resources you found to the Curriculum Connections wiki.