Blog Post 8

Diigo seems to be a quite handy tool for teachers.  If you find a group and all use the tool, you can easily share articles and reduce the amount of time necessary to find and interpret them.  In addition, the ability to annotate the articles and post notes means that others can see the highlights of an article so they can know without reading the entire article whether it is of interest to them.  Anything that can save time for a teacher is greatly appreciated.  In the classroom, you can use it to generate a class discussion on an article.  Let the students go through and pick out their personal highlights from it, then discuss as a group.

PowerPoint is a handy tool for any level of Bloom's Taxonomy.
Remember - The simplest one, just provide the powerpoint to your students after you have used it for a lecture.  It always annoys me when a teacher refuses to distribute their presentation after the lecture.  It's not like this is top secret material, we're not going to run out and sell it, just let us study it!
Understand - The details that you can add to a presentation are pretty much limitless, the use of animations to show progression and the facts that can be incorporated help students better understand difficult concepts.
Apply - For me, as a history major and history nerd, I love applying situations and thought patterns both forward and backward in time.  I have a situation presented to me, how would someone 100 years ago deal with it, how will future students look back at our time period and problems and see them?  You should use questions like this in your presentations to try and impress upon the students that they are not alone, every time period has struggled with similar issues, use their experiences to help you.
Analyze - Linking information together in multiple ways is simple enough to do if you can fashion a complex enough powerpoint.  You can use hyperlinking to branch out your presentation similar to how wikipedia and other resources are hyperlinked.  Let your students go down the rabbit-hole by linking concepts together and letting them take them however they wish.  You can lose yourself in that fashion for quite a while and end up in a completely different place than you anticipated going, but it will still all lead from your basic idea.
Evaluate - As you've presented your lesson, include questions that enable the students to come to their own conclusions, lead them, not to where you think they should be, but to where their own minds take them.  Give them questions that involve taking the information presented and having them describe how things might change with different variables, or how certain actions caused different ripple effects.  Learning should be much more than simple memorization and regurgitation.
Create - You can have your students create their own powerpoint presentations in lieu of writing papers if they wish.  They will probably learn just as much about the topic, while also learning a skill that will benefit them in their future study and life.

The Teacher's Guide to Tech - Link Here, is a fantastic resource that is released annually for teachers that lists, describes, and gives you instructions on how to use each resource or tool, plus a glossary of terms and everything you need to learn about and implement those tools into your teaching.  It is released by Jennifer Gonzalez who publishes the Cult of Pedagogy site, another tremendous resource for teacher development.  This is one of the better examples of this kind of thing out there since most will list resources and maybe tell you what they can do, but not explain and show you how to get the most out of them.