Over the past few weeks I have collected some great classroom resources surrounding the use of Google for various classroom activities. Here are a few of my favorites. (In no particular order. I don't want to make anyone jealous or anything...) Googlioshttp://sites.google.com/site/googlioproject/E-portfolios are becoming more and more popular. This site teaches educators and students how to organize all of their digital content in one place (a Google Site) for showing off their best work. Using a Google Site is actually pretty easy but Googlios...
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
As I was walking through one of our schools today I went into a classroom and started talking with a teacher whom has one of our Interactive Classroom Solutions set up in her room. We discussed some things about her board that she could not get working and were able to quickly correct the issue and get her back into action.As we talked before her students came back in from specials she told me that this was her first year in a classroom with an Interactive White Board(IWB), and that she had not really had any formalized training. As we discussed...
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
So I found a neat classroom blog today with some great projects and pictures on it (I mentioned it in another blog post).What is interesting though is the way that I found it. Where do you look for ideas and neat examples? I have places that I generally look, but I wasn't really looking this time, it just kinda found me ...So it started with when Marlo Gaddis found and shared EDU Symbalo.In EDU Symbaloo, there are collections of links and webmixes....
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Recently I have been quite impressed with the various representations I have found online of Blooms Taxonomy.Kelly Tenkely's blog ilearntechnology.com has several (including some digital resources):Bloomin' Tree Bloomin' PinwheelUm-bloom-ra Bloomin' PeacockJust today I came across another great resource related to Bloom's Taxonomy. I was very fortunate to find a Storybird creation that uses questions to help introduce the idea of Blooms Taxonomy...
I have received a number of questions dealing with the following things so I thought I would write a blog about the answers to these questions so that it might help someone. First of all when you open CPS, if your database is on a flash drive or somewhere other than the C drive, you will encounter the following message.This message is fine. Just click yes to continue through the process of opening your database. If you click cancel, you will exit...
I had a workshop a week ago for some Social Studies teachers. They wanted to know how they could use EDU Glogster in their class with students. They also wanted to know why they would want to use EDU Glogster in their classroom.So, I created a glog on Using Glogster in Social Studies. The workshop went well. We talked about ways to use EDU Glogster and I showed some examples of how other people have used it in their social studies classroom. One of the ways I use EDU Glogster is as a teaching tool. I usually show my glog to workshop participants...
Inquiry-based projects provide students with authentic science experiences. Here are some suggestions for creating and using inquiry-based projects with your students.Action-Reaction blog – is it real or fake? Guided inquiry and student-centered learning to foster the development of critical thinking skills. Students may collaborate, be self-directed, communicate and analyze through inquiry-based projects. http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/ Connecting News with National Science Education Standards blog encourages middle school teachers to use current...
It is very challenging sometimes to provide the help that teachers and staff need. Wouldn't it be great if you could just point them to a website that answered some of the basic questions you get everyday like what is a cookie, or how do I teach my students what Netiquette is, or how do I use Garageband?There is a great resource out there from Center for Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida called Tech-Ease that I can...
Monday, 22 November 2010
When I was asked to help administer a math test, I really didn't think much about it. Testing is testing, right?All the students looked much the same as when I was in high school - young, studious faces; some a little nervous with others holding onto the "I can do this attitude." The most noticable difference was the technology piece available for them. Times have definitely changed. I had paper and pencil to figure out my solutions to the extensive questions. Some problems would take an entire sheet of paper. I watched the students read the problem...
Friday, 19 November 2010
I just learned about an exciting Glogster project for first grade classes. Here is some information from the wiki for this project:This project is created by Mrs. Kellam's 1st grade class with help from Mrs. Ogen, our technology specialist, at Nursery Road Elementary in Columbia, SC. We have created a glog (an online, interactive poster) about our community to share with you. Please view our glog and then create a glog about your community to share with us and other participating schools on this wiki. It will be fun to learn from each other...
I have been going out to schools and conducting staff development on SMART Boards. As I was conducting the staff development several teachers asked if there were handouts for them to refer back to when they got back to their classroom and tried to remember what I had gone over. This got me to thinking about how I could get them information in non-traditional ways. The first thing I did was upload several Quick Reference Guides from SMART Technologies into my wiki for workshop attendees to open and view. Next, I created a glog from Glogster EDU...
Math and Science were not my favorite subjects in school, so when I was teaching either of those subjects I always tried to find ways to make it make sense for both me and the students. While looking at some of the resource sites available from netTrekker last week, I came across TeachEngineering. I have been impressed with what I have seen so far.Here is a description from the website:The TeachEngineering digital library provides teacher-tested,...
This week, Melissa Edwards and I attended an workshop on the latest version of the Schoolwires Centricity 2, our district web hosting solution. When we transitioned to Schoolwires in March, we knew that a newer version was soon to follow. It was very exciting to hear how much the company has listened to its clients as they developed Centricity 2. WSFCS is currently scheduled to begin our upgrade on December 29, 2010. I would like to share just a...
Teachers have been looking for ways to do more than talk about current events in class by finding ways to apply science and math to real-world situations. But “how do you plan for academically rigorous projects that are ‘ripped from the headlines’?”Here are some suggestions from the article.Think about creating a project where your students take the role of the problem solvers, designing a rescue within a certain amount of time. Use the rescue of the 33 trapped Chilean mine workers as an example. Have students think about what they would need to...
Thursday, 18 November 2010
I attended a netTrekker Search training recently and learned some new things about the various ways to search for things in netTrekker. If you have not moved any of the widgets around on your dashboard (which you can now do to organize better for personal preference), one of the boxes at the bottom of the dashboard is called Current Events. Now at first glance, this box did not appeal to me, but after hearing about it at the training. I might have to move this box from the bottom of my dashboard to the top of the dashboard!If you click on Breaking...
Over the last few days I spent some time with the folks at the Promethean Headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, talking to them about their social media presence. If you didn't know, they have one. Well, sort of. In visiting, I hoped to talk to them about what they can do to increase their presence and how each of the different teams in Promethean can utilize things like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook to reach out and advance their mission.I had spent...
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
So how do you best brand yourself using Social Media?We have been discussing all day today ways to brand yourself through the use of Social Media. I sat in a room with a number of other professionals from different educational and business backgrounds and everyone agreed on the fact that in order to make yourself, your business or your products you need to increase your digital footprint. So the discussions then moved to the how aspect of branding.Making yourself Stand out from the crowd, using different unconventional methods to get your point...
In order to update the firmware of the Mobi, you have to go about it a bit differently than is posted on the eInstruction website. They will tell you this process if you call their Tech Support number. eInstruction is a very good company. There are two hex files they will email you with instructions that are similar to the steps I have listed here. This is a more detailed list of the steps needed to complete the manual update of the Mobi receiver and the Mobi tablet itself. The steps are not long or complicated but they should be done in order...
Monday, 15 November 2010
There are several ways for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools employees to access Atomic Learning. Teachers can access Atomic Learning from Learning Village; all employees can access Atomic Learning from the WSFCS web page; or by typing in the web URL address (https://www.atomiclearning.com/). To go to Atomic Learning from the WSFCS web page, click on Employees, click on Resources, click on Professional Development, and click on Atomic Learning....
Saturday, 13 November 2010
It has been awhile since my last written post and I find that each day it becomes harder to take the time to sit down, think, and write. As technology advances in school, I seem to have less time for it and on most days, that is frustrating. You see, I preach to the folks in my office how it is important to spend a part of each day learning something new. I love to be on the cutting edge of new technology resources and yet that is something that...
Friday, 12 November 2010
While sitting in on a trouble shooting workshop with Promethean earlier this week, I received a lot of useful information that will help us out a lot with the ActivClassroom solutions we have in the district.One piece of information that updates our Classroom Solutions training is that you do not have to plug in your ActivSlates every night to charge them. It was stated in the session that the ActivSlate with regular use need only be charged every...
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
You might find some helpful resources looking in the November Projects folder in netTrekker! Each month the people at netTrekker pull together resources for various topics or themes related to that month. Since all those resources are put in one place, that saves you time by not having to search for them. What is even better is that the folders for each month are still there, so you can pull resources and other ideas from past months as well.This...
I realized today that I have talked a lot about my various Livebinders but never really have taken the time to explain what they are or how they work.First, a video...Think of Livebinders as a virtual 3 ring binder that you can put pretty much anything in. Webpage, PDF, image, video, text, they all can go into a page organized for you.Each item can be on it's own tab or you can further organize by using sub-tabs.Here are some of my binders:Twitter:...
Monday, 8 November 2010
If you are using eInstruction’s CPS Pulse in your classroom, you will need to update the firmware on the RF receiver. That’s the thumb drive looking item you plug into the USB port of your computer. It’s used to communicate to the CPS. If you also use the Mobi on the same computer, it would be a good idea to plug them each directly into one of the computers USB ports. You shouldn’t plug them both into a USB multiport mini hub. By doing this, both...
How is technology being used in the classroom for more effective teaching, differentiated instruction and to meet the needs of every student in the school? This article outlines how one elementary school uses technology. Each classroom in the school has an interactive whiteboard, eight computers and access to digital cameras, flip cameras, remote-response clickers and PDAs.Here are some tips from the teachers on how they use this technology with their students.Deliver instruction through multiple forms of mediaTeachers access instructional videos,...
Now that we have started the second nine-weeks of school I thought it would be helpful to offer some useful resources in science for middle and high school teachers. This is just a short overview of the many sites included in this site. To view all the resources please go to:http://www.guide2digitallearning.com/professional_development/web_2_0_science_tools General Science Google Earth – use Google Earth to fly to places around the world. Check out the Showcase of tours and videos or the Gallery of images.http://www.google.com/earth/index.htmlGoogle...
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
EDUGlogster has two new features for premium users. Presentations and Portfolios. I put together a couple of Presentations from Glogs that I had previously created or that someone else created and I added to prepared Glogs. The Presentations are listed below.To create a Presentation, gather similar glogs together, for instance staff development, reading, social studies, etc. Even if you didn't create them yourself, you can add to prepared glogs....
Monday, 1 November 2010
I have been focused on ways students can use the information and images they find to create glogs (multimedia posters) with EduGlogster. Students can use colors, shapes, images, videos, and audio recordings to share the knowledge discovered after completing research using netTrekker Search. I was looking today at the netTrekker village forum. I had seen a thread about glogster/eduglogster before but had not really looked at the comments. Teachers talked about the ways they could create followup assignments by linking various activities found...
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