If another article on what to buy at Christmas is just too much, consider the taxpayer or perhaps even the students. Yes, I'm talking about school technology purchases of which I've been doing my share lately. I'm looking on cyber Monday at deals: Chromebooks are on sale for $299. That is an amazing price for a machine that really uses class time efficiently, (8 seconds to boot up) slims down the learning curve (one browser, one interface, no complex operating system) and from an IT standpoint is a dream. But until recently, schools were expected to go with the lease option that is still at a whopping $20 per machine per month. (keep in mind that includes summer months) Google has recently offered a purchase plan that, well, just can't touch the deals online. Currently, schools can purchase a WiFi Chromebook for $449 each with 1 year support. Additional support for years 2 and 3 come at a price of $5 per month per unit. The math is elementary. $449+($5x24) =$569. That is almost twice the price of an Acer Chromebook I can purchase right now as an individual.
So what is Google giving us as educational institutions we can't buy elsewhere? The appeal for the leased model is the management of the Chrome browser using SMS and of course continual support. From what I can tell, IT can lock down the homepage and deploy Chrome store apps with the Chrome deployment and use current Active Directory users profiles. After a quick browse of Chrome Apps in the Web Store I found I could accomplish these tasks with a few apps on each Is Google's expertise worth the high price tag? I'm willing to view this device as I tend to do with my own home tech purchases. It will be obsolete in 3 years so i'd consider it a consumable item. Either that, or petition Google to bring the price in line with other mobile devices for students.

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Share a Google Spreadsheet - 21 Ideas for Your Class
As I venture off to the Google office to become a Google Certified Teacher, I thought this list of how I have used spreadsheets in the past in my teaching would be a useful one. Spreadsheets are so underutilized in schools and are yet so versatile. Many of these ideas were spur of the moment in my classroom - such as signing students up for specific projects or tasks. I didn't even realize that sharing a spreadsheet and allowing students to fill it in was a unique use of technology, it just facilitated what I was doing. You are welcome to add to the comments any other uses you have for shared spreadsheets. There are many more but I have always thought 21 was a good number.




https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AXy343L_u9RsZGZjeDN4NzZfMzI2Zzkyc24yaGM&hl=en_US

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Why We Love Apps
I found an app the other day that does one thing and it does it well. I like to listen to a particular podcast but the process to subscribe and then move it to my phone was very tedious. The app has a single purpose and it delivers my favorite podcast, no other, to my phone. Fabulous.
Yes I'm an AppAholic. (here's the link to a UK blog) It is important to me to understand my addiction and determine what caused this craving for specialty programming. I am of a generation that has lived through all of the transformations. The operating systems with the green text where we as consumers had to learn long strings of commands to create a process that only did a portion of what we really wanted. I've also been privileged to teach the Microsoft Office Suite - going on 8 years now. If anyone has ever opened MS Office with a group of 1st graders you will immediately have that recognition reflex. It is like sticking a 1 pound steak in front of a kitten. They poke at it but don't have any idea how to attack it. MS Office is a behemoth. It does far more than any of us will ever need to do. In fact, most of the software of today is the same way. All of the big companies want to be everything to everyone and we are overwhelmed.
Let's talk about education as well. I am heading to a curriculum development meeting to develop lessons that go with the new online textbook. Another behemoth is the textbook. Every teacher knows they rarely use a tenth of what is available to them as resources and finding what they really want to use takes years. At that point a new text is out and the process starts over. This online text is the same way. Luckily, I've taught with it and can bring some insight. So I am the guide through the forest. Just as I was when teaching MS Office.
Back to our apps now. As educators, we are desperate for lessons that are on target for what we need to teach. We love the online flashcards that we can easily program for chapter 10's list. That is why iPad/Android apps are so appealing. Do one thing and do it well. Don't give us a timeline maker. Give us a timeline maker for the Depression that only leads students to age appropriate materials with a simple interface. Web 2.0 has been a great start, but we want these activities to be student driven. Hence the apps rule.  

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I am an avid Voicethread fan. Even though I only used it for one year in my history class, I found it engaging to students and really made me think where my lessons were going. So I'll outline below how I used it and how I should have used Voicethread which I just found out at ISTE yesterday.

My students were taught to work in 3's. Not just in groups, but in Voicethread, they were asked to comment 3 times, on 3 slides, and to collaborate by combining three separate concepts into 1. I'll elaborate. I created something called a PSI or Primary Source Investigation. The students were asked to figure out how the three primary sources related to each other. The whole concept was to take them to a higher level of thinking. So we did several things like the American Indians, Wild Bill Hickock and the Carlyle Scholl in Pennsylvania to help them figure out how assimilation worked or didn't. We tried the 3 dictators from WWII in order to find similarities and differences. I monitored the comments and had just one rule: every comment needed to add something new to the discussion. If it did not, it would not be accepted. Moderation helped with that rule.

Now with the new iPad app and the html management available to teachers, I can image a teacher visiting a museum and creating the tour in Voicethread. Using just an iPhone, a teacher could walk around the museum and comment on how what he/she was seeing relates to the curriculum. Once at school, students can experience the field trip through the teacher's eyes, answer probing questions and interact with the teachers footsteps through the museum rather than a canned virtual tour.

Today I learned how one school district is using Voicethread as a student portfolio system. If you have never worked with Voicethread before, it is a beautiful archival option as well because it accepts MS Word Documents as well as Excel Spreadsheets and of course PowerPoint. You can also upload movies. Any photo, including screen shots works too. The ability of the teacher to leave Voicecomments is tremendous. And now when uploading student accounts, a Graduation Date option is available for easy tracking of school year and their progress. Each year, students can upload their best work with included teacher comments

If you teach foreign language you've already heard of the magic of Rosetta Stone. I've envisioned Voicethread as a custom Rosetta Stone - like environment for students if a teacher is willing to put in the time to create the exercises. Rosetta Stone harnesses it's power through visuals and voice, I think Voicethread has that down pat.

If you have any interesting uses for Voicethread in the classroom, leave me a comment.

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We have the capability to instantaneously acquire a student's understanding of nearly anything taught. Here at ISTE 2011, vendors abound with clickers, forms, surveys, exit tickets, computer graded writing, peer assessment, class exchanges and so many other options to grade on the spot. I was particularly fascinated by the Virginia SOL tests this year. Being computerized, these high stakes tests are administered en masse and results delivered within days. The flurry of teachers who flocked to get their results surprised me. I always understood assessment to be what the student had achieved. But teachers see these tests as a measure of what they achieved. The results are not provided to the individual students until much later and have very little meaning to them except a pass/no pass message.

Ok, I may have my formative and summative assessments confused you say? I'm not the only one. Teachers are frequently calling their end of the week quizzes as formative and the on-going project as summative. And they love the instantaneous gradebook fillers that come from the computerized world. Spreadsheets are easy to import. In our district we use these online tests as formative sometimes and summative other times. Not only are students confused as to why they are assessed every step of the way, but there is no rhyme or reason for the assessment in their eyes. Based on observations, students see these online tests as a collaborative game to beat a score. Teachers do use them occasionally to pad the gradebook too. Either way, I think as adults we would resent our employers evaluating us on 5 or more skill areas every 15 minutes, especially on a Monday. There are a lot of student response systems here at ISTE. I personally think they are wonderful uses of technology. I see them as a method to deliver and focus instruction, not really an assessment device. So with that perspective, they are excellent advances in the classroom. But technology doesn't always have to be instantaneous to be an advancement. We should look at the other alternatives available to us in a digital world. I like to think of it in medieval terms as the "masterpiece." Remember that in order to learn a trade in the middle ages there were steps along the way such as apprentice, journeyman and then master. In order to obtain master status, a final culminating project defined their very best efforts. How does technology aid in this type of assessment. Students can produce many masterpieces over the period of their school career. These are collected digitally and represent the student's attained level of mastery. I'm advocating cloud based digital portfolios but with more student control. It is only fair to notify students when they will be assessed and to give them the best optimum chance to succeed in that assessment. Students should be the owners of their portfolio, given lessons on good portfolio presentations and rubrics for what to include. As they progress and move from school to school, the portfolio should follow and evolve as technology changes. Let them put their best foot forward and take the time to show us something outstanding.

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Everyone of my generation (and that means old), in the techy world (and that means geeks) is on Twitter. I've tried to feel apart of the community but I'm still an outsider. So today I took the leap and joined Twitter Feed to move this blog onto the yuppie social network. Yes, you folks on Twitter are suppose to be the more elite class, educated and thoughtful bunch. However, what I can't understand is why everyone simply copies other people's ideas. The retweet is more popular than the original. And most of what is tweeted is a link to someone else's web content. That is great if you want some person to aggregate content for you. However, Google feeds, customize searches and Google Alerts will do nicely without judgement or political agendas.

Therefore, I feel this will be a refreshing take on that copy other people's ideas theme. I will tweet what is written on my own blog. Of course, what is written on my blog is usually a collection of other people's ideas and content. So much for the intellectual side at 10 o'clock on a Sunday. 

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Trying to bundle these ideas is a bit of a challenge for me. Yes, I like to read a bit about upcoming theories of education. Yet, how can we discuss good ole fashioned research at the same time. They do go hand in hand, just infuse a bit a technology and it all flows smoothly.

Social Studies: SweetSearch has been around awhile and a student search engine and I may have even mentioned it here, but sometimes if another person pulls together the topic, it is a bit easier for students (and teachers) to get started. So pull together a directory of class resources, a bunch of how to articles for lessons and tons of fun tidbits and that is what you'll find at the SweetSearch Social Studies site. I loved the article called, "10 Reasons Students Shouldn't Cite Wikipedia." The left is a column of more list type sites and the right is the Today in History items so the page itself is dynamic. You could spend most of the summer getting great anecdotal material here.

Science, Civics, Math, and Economics: Any time you have data you have a graph. That is the way of the internet but I'll bet you never saw such a collection of different types of graphs as at Many Eyes. This visualization website hosts over 188,000 data sets on all topics from sports, energy, government, internet, and so much more. Graphs include basic bar, pie, and line and also histograms, treemaps, tag clouds, matrix charts and others.

Searching for Students: In general, most students pull up Google and away they go. That is fine for a savvy searcher, yet Google is overwhelming and only good if you want "popular" information. It also won't tell you what answer the teacher is looking for. SchoolWax is a homework help site that pulls in all the searches most students will need: Dictionary.com, Answer.com, Google Translate, Quizlet, Essay Topics, Citation Builder... However, if the student gets bored during their homework, there is SchoolWaxTV with loads of videos on academic topics. Educators can find videos on their curriculum topics too.

Videos: I'm lost when it comes to YouTube because there are too many videos when I search. Today I stumbled across Classroom Clips and low and behold they are categorized by SOL standard. That is time saving!

Teaching: The Marzano Research Labs are always working on collecting data on the latest trends in education. They study the effectiveness of everything from interactive white boards to providing feedback to students. The latest study at their site shows the gain achieved by using a variety of teaching strategies. Ever wonder if incorporating more cooperative learning techniques is worthwhile? Or what would happen if you focused more on vocabulary? The stats are revealing and worth a look.

Tools to Whittle Away: Richard Byrne is one of the best bloggers for educators because all his ideas are FREE. No one can surf the web anymore, it's just too big. The best way is to learn more about online Social Bookmarking and RSS. This blog entry titled, "Keeping Track of the Good Stuff" explains, using video, the two concepts and why they make learning more a bit easier to manage. And how to avoid waisting time watching those cat videos too.

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What Did a Hard Drive Look Like in 1956?

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They are great tools and obviously, I'm an advocate, but what in the world would you do with one or many in the classroom? This list will grow with time and I would love to hear more ideas through the comment section.

1. Book Blogs – students give synopsis, comment and rate their favorite books and/or characters.
2. “Who am I?” or “Where am I?” or “What am I?”Activity – teacher provides clues and students can guess or students can group and provide clues to the class.
3. Multiple Answers – teacher asks open-ended questions that have multiple answers, and students provide their answers on the blog.
4. Cartoon Critique – political cartoons are analyzed.
5. Add an Idea – begin with a big picture concept, such as “Capitalism,” and require each student blog something new about the concept.
6. Peer Assessment – provide a rubric for comments and use groups or partnered students to assess each others’ work
7. Sequence – any process or list where the student must blog “what comes next.”
8. Mind mapping - students add drawings, PowerPoint Smartart, Webspiration, Bubbl.us, or any online mind map and then explain the flow.
9. SMART Notebook- teacher posts a notebook for student use and questions to view (students will need SMART Express to do this). Students can ask questions through the comment option.
10. Homework Help - open the blog as a homework help forum where students and teachers help each other.
11. Create an Ending - teacher provides writing prompt and assigns students to create their own ending.
12. Graph and Explain - using Excel or Create-a-Graph or any online graphing tool; students create a graph based on figures, an experiment, or survey and post it with an explanation.
13.  Survey - teacher or student led. The topic can be an interest inventory, can examine learning styles, or gather information about a topic for which you need data or a decision.
14. Current Events – students blog about a current event topic or choose their own.
15. Podcasting – students create an audio (with Audacity) or video podcast program and deliver/publicize by uploading/embedding it to the blog.
16. Categorize – using the table feature and ask students to categorize words or pictures.
17. Digital Dropbox – use blogs as a method to turn in homework.
18. Delivering a Presentation – rather than using class time to present, students post/embed their PowerPoints in the blog so peers can view and assess the project.
19. Collaboration – create groups for a project so they can post group planning, design, and share files. (better suited to a wiki but this works too!)
20. Exit Ticket – students must write a personal reflection on the lesson before or after leaving class.  This activity can be provided as an open topic or can be used with a more focused approach
21. Embed Anything – teacher or student can embed code for interactive website, links, YouTube video, flash files, photos, etc.  This allows for the user to easily share resources with the class.

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Internal/External Conflict - A PowerPoint designed by an English 9 teacher to cover extensively the topic with quizes.

Characterization Through Adjectives - a lesson designed to introduce through an activity the concept of literary characterization.

Analogies: This game by Sadler-Oxford is a great individualized option for practice. Quia offers a two player game to make the learning competitive. For a complete list of lesson plans and activities, look at the State of Missouri's eThemes page on analogies. Another great list of lessons and interactives is at Internet4Classrooms site.

Context Clues:  The Longman Vocabulary Website provides 3 categories of exercises that cover punctuation and word context clues. For a basic read and learn lesson, What Are Context Clues is an interactive option for students to self study. EThemes also gives a full range of options for lesson plans although for lower level than middle school.

Myvocabulary.com covers a huge variety of decifering techniques using Greek and Latin root words. Hundreds of exercises and puzzles that are self graded.

Larger grouping of activities at TV411.org. Offers reading, writing and vocab lessons and activities.

Making Inferences: BrainPop offers a free video that covers the concept and a lesson to go with it. Quia has an individualized quiz game called What Can You Infer?  There is also a theme at eThemes that is geared all the way up to 8th grade.

Point of View: Begining with Read Write Think, there is a whole unit here with lessons, literary selections and assessments. eWorksheets is a place to find a simple lesson either interactive or printable. This one is a 5 minute video lesson followed by a worksheet.

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Finding resources for these lessons are more difficult online. Students always need guidance when introduced to literature but these activities can be wonderful for supplements or lesson ideas.

Name that Literary Element - a Glencoe game that really is fun to play. The student goes on a futuristic mission.

Quia Short Story Elements Quick quiz based on parts of a story.

Interactive Literary Elements Handbook - Glencoe offers this online "dictionary" with some videos included.

My Literature Lab - offers a Glossary and interactive readings for students. Designed by Pearson.

Handbook of Rhetorical Devices - Many words here that are defined; each with an example.

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You just completed an amazing Smartboard activity with about 10 students in class. But what about the other 16??? They were passive learners. They observed and hopefully retained the content but as we know it is best if all students participate. So why not offer that notebook file for them at home? Now you can with the SMART Express viewer. Student can utilize this free version oneline from express. Express.smarttech.com allows students to view and interact with notebook files. Post the link on your Blackboard account for students.

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Video instruction is turning into the one of the easiest methods of differentiation. Sure a teacher may need to develop lessons around the video or provide the practice that follows, but having another delivery mode never hurts instruction. This list is geared for Math but a few will cover other topics.

The Khan Academy has been covered at this blog before but it is definitely getting lots of press now including promotions by Bill Gates. I include here an article titled "What Khan be Done With It?" that describes 12 ways teachers can incorporate the Khan Academy video instruction into their curriculum.  

MATHCASTS from Digital Learning Commons. This is simply a collection of lessons on video. They are slow, methodical explanations of problems but could be just the right pace for certain students.The tab at the top categorizes for Middle School.

Hippocampus has been around awhile but the design is phenomenal for algebra review lessons. The lessons are based on a handful of popular textbooks and they use the sequence of the texts to teach. Students not only hear and see but interact with the lesson and receive feedback. Each lesson starts with a warm up then gives instruction followed by practice. Students can read the text of the lesson as well.  Don't miss the math mini site located there too. You'll also find fantastic US History and American Government lessons.

MathLive is mainly for elementary lesson but does have a couple relevant for Middle School including interactives on Probability. Worth a bookmark.

MathTV is a YouTube channel and a website. The link is for the website. Basic Math and Algebra are covered. The best part of this resource is the number of people who solve the same problem. In other words, you'll get 3 or more explanations how to do the same thing. Different perspectives for different learning styles.

You may recognize Math Tutor DVDs from those annoying commercials to sell learning DVD's during late night TV. However they offer a few free samples online. If you download with RealPlayer and use the trim tool, you can produce a few mini lessons. If you are not sure how to do that, ask your local SBTS.

Math Definitions by eHow is truly just a teacher repeating a how to. The extent of the topics is good, however, so worth a look.

MathVids is yet another option with Middle School as a category. Still these are basic problems being solved by a teacher using a screen capture video. You may wish to preview the various teachers. For example, the user YourMathGal starts every video whispering, "Math is cool and you can do it."

Teacher Zone claims it is the largest compilation of math video on the planet. You will need to create an account to find out. That could make it problematic if you want to flip your classroom since students may have to log in to see the videos. However, they are definitely covering a variety of topics.

Math Train TV is a collection of videos mainly produced by students. There are also audio podcasts for teachers and students. The variety with music intros is intriguing. Be sure and preview so that the explanations are clear for students.

Other Math related resources: Interactives, puzzles, online quizzes and magazines all help. Here is a list:
Quia interactive lessons
Math Goodies puzzles and online activities
Interactivate Online activities
Plus Math themed magazine with puzzles
Yummy Math real world math problems based on current events
AAA Math online quizzes with lessons

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If you missed the Tech Tuesday demo, this is a recap of how one portion of Adaptive Release works.

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Science: I used to think EdHeads was perhaps a bit too elementary but not anymore. These are very high level thinking activities like Hip Replacement, Create a Line of Stem Cells, and Deep Brain Stimulation. I tried the Simple Machines thinking that would be easy but I had a tough time identify all those simple machines in my kitchen.

Math: It is basketball season and what could be more appropriate than learning how to play Math Basketball from a well know Algebra/Geometry teacher. Take a look.

Civics: I am somewhat of a voyeuer. I look at other teacher's, other school districts, and even other states standards. Well, here is a site from Ohio Able Research Center that gives loads of Civics lesson plans developed for their standards and to help ESOL students as well. Since it is by standard, you can easily find new ideas to presenting similar standards for Virginia.

English: This one is a repeat but so worth looking at. Shmoop has loads of peotry and literature lessons but best of all, this site answers the age old question, "Why should I care?" If you don't have that grand justification as to why this is part of the curriculum, take a look at Shmoop and see if they can't put it into words.

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The topic today is using the various forms of assessment you'll find in Blackboard such as the Hot Spot or Jumbled Sentence options. These can be very simple formative assessments but also a change from the normal multiple choice so many students see. How can that be bad.

Worthy Websites:

Social Studies/English: We really want to have "cool" assignments and nothing is cooler than texting on an iPhone. So now you can ask students to create a text dialog between two famous people and it will look just like the real thing. Fake iPhone text does not require a log in and produces a printable page or an image that can be captured with print screen and uploaded via Assignment Manager. Do the same with the Fake Tweet Builder page as well. A few more options but any creative teacher will find a use for these.

ESOL and Special Ed: Is internet research daunting to your students? Have no fear Qwiki is here. This is the best search engine for students to make research fun and easy to understand. Type any general search term in the engine and watch how it aggregates a wonderful multimedia experience just from webpages and images. Best of all - it reads it aloud. (this site previewed at EdTech 2011).

SMARTboard users: Folks are always looking for a great resource for notebooks. This one combines the methodology of Marzano AND loads of free downloadable notebooks by subject. Educational Services Unit #3 provides this wiki with all the bells and whistles. They've posted even their workshop's files so take a look.

Civics: Time magazine is the epitome of current events however, they can build a case for the study of history as well. Their photo essays are stunning and emotional every time. As an example, this collection called the Top 10 Protest Symbols groups together some brilliant photo journalism and a teachable topic. Be aware that some photos can be disturbing so you may want to use only a select few.

Blackboard option: Placing a pdf in Blackboard is ....well.....dull. But if you use Embedit it becomes more interactive and usable (OK interactive may be stretching it a bit). Embedit is a free service that creates an embed code for your webpage. You can use the red pen as I have done to highlight areas on the page. And if you ask me, it just looks snazzy.



All Teachers: More than numerous blogs to follow, there really are too many. So what is a teacher to do? According to this Ning, it is all how you develop your PLN. PLN stands for Personal Learning Network and if you're a career teacher you really should have one. Keeping up with it is another story. I really feel there are some worthy thoughts at the EduPLN and I'm sure you'll find a great video to watch when not grading.

For these and many other resources visit mrsbrown's diigo library!

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Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Foreign Language Resources to Try in 2011 | Diigo

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10 Tips for Teachers Using Evernote - Education Series « Evernote Blogcast | Diigo

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There is no Tech Tuesday this week but you are not forgotten. I have published a very simple quick sheet to help you hook up a SMARTboard to a laptop cart. Some of the basic trouble shooting is included and helps walk you through the the steps.

Resources:

Reading (and more): Research and online text is daunting for students in the middle grades. They are usually overwhelmed by the reading level more than anything else. Just think how often they use Wikipedia as a source and are stumped by the expert language. Here comes Twurdy. Twurdy is a search engine from Google, however all the "hits" are categorized by their reading level. According the site, "Twurdy uses custom designed readability software that includes information about the number of words on the page, the average number of syllables in each word, the average sentence length and more to determine a pages readability level." There are 3 options for searching, Simple Twurdy (fast but less accurate on the readability) up to Twurdy with Pop (slower but the algorithms are better.) What should you do with this? Direct students to use Twurdy for research and instruct them that only websites that are light pink or white should be used as sources. These are age appropriate reading levels.

Science: Energy conservation is a big topic around the globe so it is great when our Canadian neighbors design a site with multiple lessons. EarthCare is a wonderful source for lesson plans about alternative energy, waste management and clean water. In these 54 lesson plans and 19 activities you might find one that fits your curriculum or is a great enhancement. I particular like the Lights Off/Computers Off activity.

Learning Types: This is one of my favorites. When trying to understand all the different types of learners in the class and how to adjust your teaching, the Visual-Spatial Learner is very well suited to technology integration. But why? At this website, the visual-spatial learner is explained and there are ways you can identify this student in your classroom.

History: Now that you know how to save videos (see previous blog), make the most of primary source videos from CriticalPast.com. This site offers over 57,000 historical film clips and they are categorized easily by decade. Start every class with a short social video and students that are visual (see site above) will learn it.

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Today's Tech Tuesday focuses on the all important PowerPoint.

• insert and understand videos and not loose them
• create a playable file for uploading to Blackboard
• design your own templates using the Master Slide (or not).

Resources:

All Subjects: Sure there are plenty of conglomerations of resources for lessons but Curriki does it just a bit differently with their search options. For example, I'm thinking of starting a new unit but really don't know where to begin. I can Google and find lessons, but a whole unit is rare. Curriki offers this and more and they even use the Google Search engine to do so. I particularly liked the science lesson/experiment "Why Whales Don't Have Legs."

Math: I ran into this website and did not make an account but did email myself the solution to an algebra problem. I believe any math teacher (or maybe I should say math student) would want an account at Mathway.com. Mathway.com offers step by step solutions to virtually any math problem and the best part is, all this can be embedded in Blackboard, worksheets designed and graphs created. If any math teacher does make an account, I'd love to hear what you think about the features.

Literature: Perhaps I've mentioned the resource Edsitement before. It is a wonderful resource for lessons but I particularly like the detailed use of online literature you can find here. As an example, a lesson on Introducing the Essay provides both Mark Twain examples and Frederick Douglass. No need to search to support your lessons, every link and library are added. It is worth a second look.

Techies: I use the SEND TO option a lot. If you aren't aware of this handy save option, right click on a file or whole folder and you'll see the SEND TO in the menu that appears. There are basic locations such as My Documents, Desktop, your CD/DVD drive, and others depending on the computer. I particularly like it when I insert a flash drive or external hard drive because they also show up on the SEND TO menu. This makes it simple to back up large amounts of data in a hurry.  But you can add other locations to the SEND TO menu, particularly folders located on your H: drive. Really, these are just shortcuts in the menu and are very easy to create. Microsoft's howto gives the full details.

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