Monday, August 25, 2008

Make A Digital Wish


Birthday candle, originally uploaded by PappaJack.

I spoke with Heather Chirtea, Lead Staff Development Trainer from Tool Factory earlier today and she told me about a very exciting website all teachers should know about. I called Heather to tell her about involving Tool Factory in the Storychasers project. Storychasers is a multi-state educational collaborative founded by Wesley Fryer and Kevin Honeycutt that has been created to empower students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists.

I asked Heather about linking Tool Factory’s Flip Video Mobile Lab and Mobile Podcasting Lab to the Storychasers website. The Flip Video and Podcasting Mobile Labs have everything in one case for podcasting and video production for classrooms. Teachers interested in Storychasers should definitely check them out.

Our conversation turned to funding sources for technology in schools and Heather told me about Digital Wish. Digital Wish is an online community of educators sharing resources and digital lesson plans. I addition to teacher-created digital lessons, there are also fundraising for creating a technology fundraising campaign and grants resources to help teachers and schools obtain technology tools for their classrooms.

Digital Wish encourages teachers to create a profile and a wish list of needed technology products for their classrooms. Donors can then access the site looking for schools needing technology and either buying items from teacher wish lists or by donating money directly to a school. Contributing vendors include both hardware and software companies alike. So, if you are a teacher who is struggling with a dried up technology go make a digital wish. It just might come true.

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DISCLAIMER

Karen Montgomery is the author of Gomeric Hill. The opinions expressed herein are mine and not necessarily those of my employer.