Dov Emerson's Blog (45)

Wow – YouthCon 2012 was unbelievable. What a great conference! It was such a thrill to see the culture of sharing and collaboration spreading across our field. My presentation was titled“The Connected Educator: Tech Tools for Growing as Educators and for Effective Teaching in the Classroom.”

My presentation focused on two elements of being a “Connected…

As you are hopefully aware, YU  2.0 is hosting a webinar next week, on Thursday, March 22, at 8:45 PM,  that we are really excited about, on the implementation of Google Apps in the classroom. Rabbi Dr. Aaron Ross will be presenting…

A few weeks ago, I had an incredible opportunity, that, while very much a ‘real world’ experience, had as much to do with the online world of social media connections as it did face to face…

Dear YU 2.0 Community:

                One of few negative side effects of the incredible privilege I have of spending time online with all of you on our CoP, is that I sometimes forget just how many educators there are out there who have not yet ‘connected.’ I look at YU 2.0, and I am truly inspired. At over 350 members (with over 25 new sign ups in the last month!), we are a real community. And with close to 500 total blog…

“That just won’t work here.”

“The teachers don’t want it!”

“Ha! They wouldn’t even be able to the find the power button!”

How often have we, as EdTech leaders and early adopters in our schools, heard lines like these before? It could be after coming back from a really cool conference and being incredibly…

Any student of film history knows that before the big budget blockbuster, and even before the various “golden ages” of Hollywood, there were silent movies. These black and white movies were made up of short scenes, and, because technological limitations prevented the use of audio conversations, there were short notes on a…

#EdTech Roundup: All The Hype About Pinterest

Lately, everyone seems to be talking about Pinterest, the graphic based social network that allows users to collect, or ‘pin’ images and links to virtual boards that are organized by topic, or however you’d like them to be set up. Pinterest takes the social bookmarking…

A valued member of my PLN, Tony Baldasaro (@baldy7on Twitter), recently shared a video that was at the same time incredible powerful and hysterical. Entitled “Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL,” it presents a parody of the common missteps taken by presenters at conferences and the like. Not surprisingly, much of the video’s critique focused on the ways people misuse the ubiquitous presentation software Powerpoint (and keynote, and Google…

Check out this wonderful post by my friend and member of my PLN, Ken Royal: "All My Teachers Have Tech, But No One Uses It!" This is one of many great posts in Royal's blog, "Royal Reports."

In this post, Royal discusses the pheonomon…

Shavua Tov! I hope everyone who is on vacation has been enjoying it. YU 2.0 has been hopping with activity, and I hope you take some time to check out some of the new posts and resources shared. As many of you are aware, the North American Jewish Day School Conference recently convened in Atlanta. While I was unfortunately not able to attend, I was able to follow along on the Twitter stream, and I also heard first hand…

Through my PLN, specifically, through New Milford High School's tech trailblazing principal Eric Sheninger, I came across this news feature from CBS 2 New York on NMHS' success at integrating mobile learning devices into the classroom. They have a policy they call BYOT (Bring…

Check out this blog post, entitled 4 Ways to Maximize Your Flipped Classroom Videos. 

While some of the suggestions may seem obvious, I think it is important for us to recognize that the simple act of putting content in video form (or audio, for that matter), is not enough for it to be something that students will utilize and be excited…

Today I had the pleasure of attending an event in the Scholastic Administr@tor “Live Tech Series.”  The event focused on iPad implementation in schools and the Common Core set of academic standards. The…

Whew! Was I tired! It was hard to believe that I could have been suffering from post conference exhaustion when I spent the day sitting at my dining room table, but it’s true. Last Wednesday, I spent the day conversing with 400+ people from around the world and expanding my mind at Edmodocon. The online conference, run by and about the education social network platform Edmodo, was really quite the marathon…

Check out http://reformsymposium.com/ and the hashtag #RSCON3 - its a live Edu/EdTech conference with tons of excellent presenters going on all weekend (today through Sunday), free.

It uses the Elluminate (webinar) platform. Very cool!

I had a conversation last night with someone who was asking me how I might respond to school stakeholders who question the need for integrating educational technology in our schools, especially if I did not have any empirical evidence that “any of this stuff helps.” While I had some of my own answers to that question, I happened to come across an excellent blog post this morning by Lyn Hilt (@l_hilt on twitter for those of you with a…