The My eCoach team and the Oakland USD Instructional Technology team are working together to support Madison Middle School teachers. Language Arts and History teachers and students are preparing for their exposition Thursday, January 27. Students worked collaboratively and used their netbooks to research and design their posters and presentations. Two of the project-based activities include 8th grade students creating songs and skits about the pros and cons of the Bill of Rights amendments and 6th grade students selling their tour to their Egyptian city as Ancient Egyptian Travel Agents...   more...

• Educon 2.3 in Philadelphia Jan. 28-30 and online 
• Free online conference CO11: Feb. 4-6 
• Flat Classroom Conference in Bejing: Feb 25-27
• CUE Conference in Palm Springs March 17-19
• ISTE Conference in Pennsylvania June 26-29

Teaching online can work even if you have only taught face-to-face. The first few times you set up an online class, you may wonder if your students are listening or even present. Here's some tips that might help you manage your online class:

• Take roll: If you are using webconferencing tools, you can see who is online. However, many of your students may not use their names for their login. You can set up a discussion board called "Roll Call [date]" with your students responding "I'm here".
• Protocol ...   more...

Articles

• How we use technology in education is more important than which technology we use
• The Computer ate my Teacher
• From Toys to Learning Tools: 5 Questions with Gail Lovely
• One Oakland School Closing the Achievement Gap
• Subjects Matter: Why Students Fall Behind on History
• Amid economic uncertainty ed tech leaders do more with less

Contests & Challenges

• Free Rice Challenge - for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to fight world hunger
• Google Global Science Fair for ages 13-18 
• Learning4Life Student Video Contest
• ThinkQuest Global Competition 2011...   more...

Our new text editor means that now you can use any browser with My eCoach. This text editor is different than our older text editor so you may have some questions about some of the new features. This is a quick overview of some of the features.

Some of these features are pretty intuitive like the first row. There are more fonts and options plus whatever font ...   more...