At the beginning of the week I purchased Steve Dembo and Adam Bellow’s Untangling the Web: 20 Tools to Power Up Your Teaching. I was so impressed by Bellow’s ISTE 2013 Keynote that I had to read his book, and I’m glad I did!
Dembo and Bellow give a detailed description of 20 web tools that any teacher could use in his or her classroom. I was already familiar with a handful of the tools mentioned in the book, but I still learned a great deal about each one of them. This is an excellent resource for any educator, whether they are new to technology in the classroom or an experienced edtech user! Best of all, you get a great sense of what each tool can do without feeling like you’re reading the entire Twilight series; the book is a very quick read!
My favorite aspect of this book is the versatility of each of these tools. Scrolling through my Twitter feed and some of my favorite edtech online resources, I often feel like so much stuff is aimed at elementary and middle school students or iPad, Android, and mobile users. Students at my school (grades 9-12) use Tablet PC’s (basically a laptop that you can write on the screen), so I can count any tools that stop at a tablet or mobile app out of our repertoire. Every single web tool mentioned in the book can be used at any grade level and is intended for a computer, with many of them being mobile/app compatible!
This is the perfect book to read while you soak up the last of the summer sun before returning to school this fall. It will leave you with tons of ideas to immediately incorporate into your teaching next year. I’d love to hear what you thought of the book and how you plan to use some of the tools they featured.
Tech To You Later!
-Katie
Finding this review just made my day. Thanks so much for sharing!
Thanks, Steve. It’s an honor to have you comment on this post! Great work with this book… I hope there’s a second version in the works!