Using Digital Video to Engage Students

Digital media are buzz words you often hear in education today. Thankfully, research is showing us that using digital media to create digital videos is paying off in the classroom. I recently read an article in the Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) journal about three beginning English Language Arts (ELA) teachers and how they used digital videos to engage their students.The teachers wanted to find a way to get students...

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Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers!

Yesterday I learned a great site for teachers and learners that I had not heard about before. The tagline for TeachersFirst is Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers! I love that concept since I feel like it acknowledges the creativity and intelligence teachers apply as they work towards the main goals of promoting student thinking and encouraging learning. I have often said recently that I don't only think of literacy now as just reading and writing...

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Need some more summer ideas?

OK, so your children (and maybe you, too) are home for the summer and you hear the first, "I'm bored." They are home from summer camp, family vacation trips, or wherever and need something to occupy them. My husband and I were in the same frame of mind last summer when our 11 year old granddaughter came to stay with us for a month. Luckily, we had lots of ideas and events from the local community and pulled a few more fun things to do from our...

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The Ocean Portal from The Smithsonian Institute

http://ocean.si.edu/ Yesterday I found a new web site that I am really excited about: The Ocean Portal. The Ocean Portal is a brand new web site that has lesson plans for teachers, blogs, photo essay's, fossils, pictures, and videos. View images taken by award winning photographers. Sign up for their newsletter. Learn about Ocean and Ecosystems, Ocean Science, and The Ocean Over Time. How can you use this for education? First you would...

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Document Cameras in your Science Class

Now that I have been discussing uses of Document Cameras (doc cams) in your 21st Century classroom a co-worker suggested that I give out some specific advice for teachers to use them. So what I will be doing is to provide some general topic ideas for teachers to integrate the use of their doc cams into everyday instruction.My first installment will cover some ways to use your doc cam in your Science class. In our school system we use Lumens DC...

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Working with Words on the Web

On June 20th, as part of the grand finale of technology training for this past school year, I was able to share lots of resources that would help teachers teach and work with vocabulary from their curriculum. The web was our playground where we used different websites to connect the technology standards and objectives for both teachers and students.I used my Vocabulary Teaching Tools livebinder to introduce the websites, tools, lesson plans and activities....

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Ever "Wonder" about Digitial Storytelling?

This past week the Department of Instructional Technology provided a series of summer workshops on a variety of great topics ranging from Edmodo to Thinkfinity to digital storytelling. Digital storytelling has always been an area of interest for me so I decided to seek out some resources and ideas on how teachers can use it in their classrooms. Thanks to the great team of people I work with at DIT, I came across Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano's "How...

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Subscribe To Our Podcast

If you remember we have a district-wide podcast that highlights, well, whatever comes to mind when Melissa and I record. (And you can visit http://wsfcs.k12.nc.us/ditunplugged to hear more.)Well now Schoolwires has made it much easier to take those podcasts on the road. They have added a "Subscribe in iTunes" button at the very bottom of our podcasting page. It looks like this:When you click you are taken right to iTunes and automatically subscribed...

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The Document Camera AHA! Moment

Recently I spent a day at a school working with teachers on ways to integrate Document Cameras(doc cams) into their instructional day more so that just as an expensive overhead. While you can still use your overhead resources, a doc cam offers teachers so much more. As I have talked about in other blog posts our school district has put a lot of time and effort into designing a 21st Century classroom solution. The solution include a doc cam for...

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Creating and Engaging CPS Performance Questions

A performance question is an open-ended or subjective question that requires a specific response, usually in the form of short answer or essay. A rubric is a tool associated with a performance question that allows the instructor to divide the total number of points available for that question into distinct categories. For example, the points for a 10-point essay question could be divided into four categories worth 2.5 points each: grammar, punctuation,...

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"Photo Editing on the Web" Workshop

I did a “Photo Editing on the Web” workshop this past Friday. It was part of a two day series of new workshops we did for the teachers of the Winston Salem Forsyth County School District. It also gave me the opportunity to revisit a passion of my past that I don’t utilize as much any more. Photography is a part of our everyday lives and also is used when teachers create content for their teacher web pages. During the training I took the teachers...

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Spark your Climate Curiosity

This morning I was reading through some Tweets and came across one that had a link to a website that I had not seen before.The website is WeatherSpark which when I went to it really blew me away at the amount of information that was available on it. When you go to the homepage for the site you just enter in the city you live in or one that you want to see the weather for and click Get Weather.Once you do this you are taken to the Dashboard Tab which is partitioned with a Geographical Map on the left side of the screen which displays the previous...

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Social Networking for Students with a Twist

I recently held a workshop for teachers in our district on a widely known but lightly used web resource within our district. The site is set up so that both students and teachers can have an arena for which to learn, collaborate and share information both in and outside of the confines of the four walls of your everyday classroom. There are two things that I really like about this site. Students DO NOT have to have email at all.It resembles another...

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Summer Technology Workshops ... A Reflection

This past Friday, June 17 and Monday, June 20, the Instructional Technology Department held a 2 day, 10 hour collection of technology workshops. They were all a big success! I really liked how the workshops built upon each other. My workshop was about an overview of Thinkfinity. Thinkfinity is a web site that has lesson plans, multimedia, interactives, e-sheets, and professional development webinars. Everything within Thinkfinity and its partner...

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Looking for resources over the summer?

Are you going to spend some time this summer looking for some new resources to use for your lessons when school starts back?netTrekker is a leader in the delivery of digital K-12 educational content and is dedicated to enhancing the education of today's youth with highly effective technologies that deliver rich educational content to every child in a safe, relevant, easy-to-use format. With the mission to help every child learn and a belief that...

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Starting A School Twitter Account

The end of the school year is upon us however many are looking forward to next year. You may be thinking what can you do differently next year? How can you stand out above the crowd? How can your school become a larger part of the school community?While Twitter is beginning to catch on with many educators, schools are lagging in their adoption of the platform. But let's think about it. Twitter is a quick and easy tool to let the entire school community...

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Storing the Mobi for the Summer

I just wanted to send this information out to people who have an eInstruction Mobi. Teachers should remove the rechargeable battery from the pen when it is not going to be used for an extended period of time such as the summer. To do this, locate the little square button on the back of the pen just above the 2 silver rings. Use a key or something to press the button in a bit. Slide the pen apart and you will expose the battery. Take the battery out...

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NCVPS Blackboard Upgrade Compatibility Issues

North Carolina Virtual Public School has updated the Blackboard system they use to 9.1. However, they have learned of a few incompatibility issues. These issues occur when students use Internet Explorer versions 7, 8 and 9. Students will experience issues with content not being viewable, not being able to participate in assessments, or uploading assignment files into the system. Internet Explorer can be modified to be more compatible by using IE...

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Don't Forget about the IRC this Summer!

The IRC (Instructional Resources Center) IS OPEN ALL SUMMER LONG for teachers and staff from 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM every day except the Fourth of July weekend.Teachers and staff have full access to our Professional Book Collection, Educational Research Database, instructional and staff development videos, Multicultural Collection, equipment, and preview books. In our wonderful large new workroom, you can laminate, use the Ellison Die cuts, make posters, create buttons, bind books, etc.No Appointment necessary.If you have not visited our "New" facility...

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Words in the Clouds

 I have been having fun using Wordle to create word clouds for about everything and adding the created  image to blog posts, wiki pages, handouts, and more. While working on a presentation I was going to do at the AIG conference, I found a very similar resource called "WordItOut."  It also allowed me to create a cloud of words from my own text but with some additional features.My presentation included...

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When Does Learning End?

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SlideRocket - A Great Presentation Tool

Ever look at your presentations and think there may be something missing? Chances are you've been there. I know I have. I'm not a design expert by any means, but thankfully I don't have to be since a teacher friend of mine introduced me to SlideRocket. SlideRocket is a free presentation platform that makes creating engaging presentations simple. Over the course of the past few weeks I've been using it more and more. Now it's my first choice...

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