You may recall that I mentioned a super-secret surprise? It is mostly completed, so you get to be among the first to see it. It is a brand-new website that pulls in RSS feeds about online high schools, online colleges, and educational technology.

The name? Online Synthesis.

I hope that you will consider taking a look. I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Since these seem to be the three areas that I do a great deal of reading — online high schools, online colleges, ed tech — I decided that there are likely other folks out there just like me. Scary thought!

As some of you know, I teach graduate courses in the School of Education at Fresno Pacific University. Specifically, I teach in the online Library Media program (and soon in the online Educational Technology program; more on that later). Of all the things that I do, I really enjoy working with these students. It makes me better at so many things.

The course I teach is called LIB 705: Digital-Age School Library Technology and it’s a lot of fun. We learn about blogs, wikis, podcasts, making movies, YouTube, technology standards, and much more. This course is part of the Teacher Librarian Services Credential. Most of the students are working toward becoming school librarians (as I was at one point not that long ago), but there are often one or two students from other programs who need a technology course. This is the first course in the program, so it is part technology and part orientation to the rest of the program.

I have also been working on taking this same course and developing it into the first course in a new Educational Technology program. Similar topics (if you know anything about modern school libraries), so just some modifications.