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Learning can be fun, creative and fascinating! Parents and teachers will benefit from author and friend Vanessa Van Petten’s article. Parents are included in this article because you are and will become your child’s best teacher. You will not only have the opportunity to team with professional experts that directly work with your child in schools, but you will have the opportunity to become educated on teaching techniques and strategies shared in this article. Keep an open mind. As always, when your child is using a computer in your home, keep a watchful eye to ensure your child’s safety and appropriate use of the Internet. Have fun while you learn!

7 Ways Teachers & Parents Can Use Online Tools To Keep Students Interested

Can schools keep up with their net-generation, text-savvy students? A lecture and a white board pale in comparison to online videos, cell phone games, interactive virtual worlds and 3-d animation. Already, schools have been incorporating more high-tech technology such as smart boards and projectors in the classroom. My old high school uses ipods to test and record listening comprehension. This is great–and really expensive.

I plan on writing a few blog posts on this topic, but I first wanted to review a few free resources teachers (and parents) can use in the classroom or for homework to keep kids interested in learning. Most of all, by employing new technology you will be speaking in this generation’s language, appeal to what already interests them and therefore make school really relevant to their lives.

Here are some easy and free ways to get teachers more informed about what we are doing online, and how they can adapt to it!
1) Parent & Teacher Communities

The very first free teacher resource I am going to mention is something that you cannot directly use in the classroom, but is something that will be a continuing source of inspiration for new tools. New websites, blogs, applications, software and trends are developed everyday that you can use to capture student’s attention, but there is no way you can teach and keep track of all the new updates at the same time. This is why it is important to join other teachers online and share ideas, support each other and communicate. I am huge fan (as you all know) of collaboration. So, the first tip is to join some of these communities and just start browsing and talking:

Teacher Lingo.com is a great website for teachers to write helpful articles for each other. Parents can check these sites out too! Teacher Vision.com I like this website because it is all about saving time for teachers and providing free resources.
A social network for teachers is NextGen Teachers.com.

2) Blog’s

A blog is: “A website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries.” (Wikipedia) Of course, you can use blogs to communicate with other teachers, but blogs can be a great way to allow kids to express their personal ideas on what you are learning. The classroom only offers limited opportunities for students to talk about their opinions on classroom topics like the revolutionary war, cellular respiration or To Kill A Mockingbird. For those who are shy, or need more time to articulate their ideas. Building a class blog is a great way to let kids informally (not as formal as a paper, not as terrifying as expressing an idea in class) think and discuss something academic in a personal way (from their home computer).

Building a blog is shockingly easy and simple to moderate. Blogger is a great free website for blog building, I use Wordpress. We love when teachers have a flexible assignment such as “post one blog post a week discussing one topic from the week and your perspective.” It just gets us thinking and participating, then to take an hour on a friday to read some of the posts and have little discussion groups.

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