Upgrade your tech skills today!

If you are a regular reader of THSP I'm guessing you have some degree of comfort level with technology. Today's post is about a web site that will give you great ideas about how to use technology, both for yourself and in your classroom, and show you how to do it in a very easy manner.

Sue Frantz teaches psychology at Highline Community College near Seattle, and is an amazing technology guru. She has a new website at suefrantz.com but under the name Techology for Teachers this sit has been around for a while. I subscribe to her RSS feed and every week she posts something else that I am vaguely aware of but don't know much about, or she describes how she uses something that I know about but didn't really know how to implement. For example, here are some posts that she has done in the past month:

• how to use Google Calendar to set up your class calendar (and sync it with an Outlook calendar)
• using "around" in Google searches to help detect plagiarism
• how to bundle links - instead of giving students links to seven sites, just use one bundled link
• how to share your phone number with students (without sharing your phone number with students!)

There are many more examples here, but clearly this should show you that Sue is a genius. My advice is to learn from her and then nonchalantly display your knowledge to others at your school. They will think you are brilliant and you'll just smile knowingly. (Not sure if Sue has a tip jar, but she may want to add that feature!)

P.S. Still wondering what that thing at the top is? It's called a QR code and someone can use a mobile phone's camera plus a code-reading app to read the code and go right to a URL without having to know the URL. Cool, huh? The one above was generated for THSP and when scanned will go right to our site. (And yes, I learned about this from Sue Frantz!)

  --posted by Steve