Five Things You Can Do This Summer to Integrate Technology in Meaningful Ways This Fall

It's summer! School is out! Teachers have just told their students to keep reading over the summer so they don't lose all the progress they made this year. And practice your math facts so you come back in the fall ready to move on to even more challenging math concepts. Have fun but remember to take time to practice your skills too.

And teachers this is my challenge to you as well, keep playing with technology over the summer so you come back in the fall ready to integrate technology in meaningful ways. Here are five things you can do this summer to be ready to help your students use technology to learn this fall.

1. Visit TechEDGE01 on YouTube to explore some tech tools for Mobile Learning in the Classroom. Select from over 250 short videos arranged by grade level and topic to learn some new tools and how you might integrate them into your teaching this fall. Some topics you will enjoy visiting yourself this summer before taking your students there this fall: summer reading apps, history apps, geography games, poetry apps, and online museums.

2. Subscribe to the FreeTech4Teachers blog by Richard Byrne for updates on what's new in technology. His short blog posts present a new tool and tips on how to use it. One idea I just got from his blog that I will try in the coming days is wideo.co to create videos with interactive embed buttons to take viewers to websites and other locations for more information.

3. Create a blog to organize your teaching content for fall. Take that paper newsletter and turn it into a blog post for parents. Include links to websites and apps you want to recommend. I suggest Blogger.com for an easy blog to create and post. When your students create multimedia projects you can easily link them here to share.

4. Enrich one fall unit with technology. Review the TPACK model and add technology knowledge to your content and pedagogy. What technology could take students' learning to the next level? How could technology help students learn the most current content? (Reproduced by permission of the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org)

5. Play with tools! Have fun! Explore! The wonder of mobile technology is that it works outside too! Take your device to the beach with you. Take pictures, video, then turn it into a multimedia presentation with the touch of a button. Two of my favorite tools to do this are Puppet EDU and Haiku Deck. Now that you know the procedure you can have students create one when they return about all the exciting things they did over the summer!