Summertime Blogs

The summer can be a great time for reflection and planning for implementing new ideas for the upcoming school year. Teachers often use the summer months as the time to try out some new things and plan for how to integrate technology into their lessons. So as the school year begins to wind down for 2009-10, I'd like to suggest my Teacher's Top 3 Blogs for Summer Reading.

These are all blogs I've been following that I feel provide easy ways to incorporate technology into your classroom, whatever grade you teach.

• I've mentioned Richard Byrne's www.freetech4teachers.com before as a great blog to follow for reviews of tech tools and ways they can be used in the classroom. His blog posts are concise and often don't just discuss the tool but also ways it can be used for educators.
• Kelly Tenkely's http://ilearntechnology.com/ blog is another blog worth following. I think Kelly's Promethean Quick Tips should be required reading for teachers in our district who have activboards. But her audience is not just teachers with activboards. Her blog often highlights a site or tool that any classroom could use.
• Vanessa Cassie's blog moved this year to http://sharpsav.com/blog/ . She offers several posts for the SMARTboard users, but like Kelly offers a lot of tips for people using any interactive whiteboard or even none at all.

Again all these blogs are short reads that yield a lot of valuable content and would be great sites for those who are just starting to following blogs. There are several others I feel could be added to the list, but it's the summer after all, so I'll keep the reading list brief. Just a little extra education for that much-deserved vacation. :)