Exploring New Territory

While working in a school this week with different grade levels a Tech Facilitator told me about one of their Kindergarten teachers who was going to make their first Skype call with another school. Now I was thinking that they were going to make a Skype call here locally within the school district or maybe at the most here in North Carolina. I was surprised, and a bit excited, to hear that they would be talking with a classroom in Hawaii. When I talked with the teacher involved she said that they were going to be talking with the school and then she had also setup a Twitter account so that her students could tweet out their feelings about the call. I could tell that the teacher was a little nervous about making the first call, but that is normal since you really do not know what to expect the first time.

Their first call was this week and everything went really well when we talked about it and the students had already began to post their tweets on Twitter. The only thing that the teacher remarked about was that she was going to look into getting a different microphone so that the participating class would be able to hear the students better during the call.

This Kindergarten teacher has taken a big step and seems to have gone outside of her comfort zone. I have to commend her for taking things to the next level and exploring new territory. I hope that this quick blog will help to inspire you as well to explore new territory and to step outside of your comfort zone.

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Shodor.org\Interactivate is a Great Resource for Math and Science

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/ is a great resource for Math and Science. It is a java based Math & Science courseware that includes lessons, discussions and standards for the teachers and activities, tools and a dictionary for the students. Shodor contains over 70 lessons based on the activities for grades 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12. The discussions will help the students understand math and science concepts. There are over 100 interactive activities that allow students to explore the many areas of math and science. The dictionary lists the terms the students encounter in the website. The tools are a subset of the activities index page and can be used as stand alone applications in analyzing numbers and data.

Polar Coordinates Activity

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Quick Tips with ActivInspire

You have found all these great resources in Learning Village and you want to write on them using your ActivBoard; or you want to copy them and put them into your flipchart. What do you do?

Once you have pulled up your file from Learning Village that you want to write on, open ActivInspire. On the toolbar is a button with a picture of a blue screen and black scribbles on it. This is called "Desktop Annotation". By clicking on Desktop Annotation, you can then write on the document even though it is not in ActivInspire.

The next thing that you can do is to click on the button next to Desktop Annotation; Desktop Tools (this is a picture of a blue screen with a hammer and wrench on it). Once you click on Desktop Tools, your file from Learning Village can be brought up. Move your mouse over the icon, select the picture of the camera and then the last picture of a camera with a square on it (area snapshot). From there, move the white box over what you would like to take a picture of. Once you have everything highlighted by the box, click on Current Page or New Page and your image will then be placed into your flipchart. Then click on the icon again and click on the picture of the flipchart to open your flipchart up again.

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Meeting the Teacher Evaluation Standards

I recently attended an Edmodo webinar that spotlighted Brunswick County Schools and their district wide initiative to launch Edmodo. The initiative started with an email campaign to teachers and usage spread immediately. As they began training teachers, they focused on using Edmodo for the teacher evaluation instrument and as a communication tool for PLCs. They wanted their teachers to have true conversation about student learning and decided Edmodo would be the right tool to use. The initiative started a year ago (October 2010) and now all their teachers use Edmodo to communicate and share resources to support their PLC.

In addition, Edmodo provides teachers a way to document how they are meeting the standards on the teacher evaluation instrument. Using Edmodo teachers can model ethical behavior and appropriate use of social media. Teachers are demonstrating leadership by facilitating PLC discussions in their Edmodo groups. Working in Edmodo with their students, teachers can target students individually to leave feedback or provide support resources all in a safe online environment. Teachers who join the professional communities in Edmodo can develop their professional learning network (PLN) and reach out to teachers worldwide, making it easy to connect with other professionals globally.

I personally have been using Edmodo for the past few months to connect with other teachers and it's been a valuable tool for sharing and learning best practices. I see and hear about teachers using Edmodo for their PLC meetings and how its been a successful collaborative tool. Edmodo was recognized and honored by the American Association of School Librarians as Best Website for Teaching and Learning. Learn more about Edmodo and how it can transform you classroom by checking out their blog.

Image from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1708

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Puzzle Pieces?

Last week I was fortunate to attend Thinkfinity training. Thinkfinity is a free collection of lessons and resources for in the classroom, afterschool, home, and even professional development. This great site is sponsored by the Verizon foundation. They offer general things and specific resources for states based on their guidelines. When searching by standards, I noticed lots of resources for Common Core and 21st Century Skills.

In my opinion, one of the best things about Thinkfinity is the Content Partners they work with. I think of their partners as puzzle pieces working together for teachers and students.

"Verizon Thinkfinity Content Partners produce the program's nine discipline-specific, standards-based Web sites. Each site includes lessons for teachers, activities to use in and out of the classroom, games for young children and teens, adult literacy resources and reference materials for anyone in the education field, as well as for parents and afterschool practitioners."

• National Geographic Education
• Science NetLinks from AAAS
• econedlinks from the Council for Economic Education
• readwritethink from the International Reading Association and NCTE
• ArtsEdge from The Kennedy Center
• Smithsonian's History Explorer
• Illuminations resources for teaching math from NCTM
• EDSITEment! from the National Endowment for the Humanities of Art
• Wonderopolis from NCFL

The teaching resources available from these Content Partners are aligned to National Education Standards.

I think that Thinkfinity has found lots of puzzle pieces to encourage, support, and engage learning experiences for students and teachers!

image by Patrick Hoesley found at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60057912@N00/4579775685/

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Super Secret Twitter Tips

This is the last in my series on everything Twitter. You can read this first on How I do Twitter PD and the second on What People Wish They Had Known Before They Started. 

Today lets look at all my tips, tricks and resources for getting more out of Twitter. 

I get asked all the time one of three questions:

1) Where do you find all those links you post?
2) How do you make sure you don't miss everything without staying on Twitter 24/7?
3) How do you organize everything you find from Twitter?

Well I am so glad you asked. There really aren't any secrets. It's just great resources that I use to leverage more out of Twitter to find what I am looking for or to keep myself organized.

So lets look at what I use...

1) Where Do You Find All Those Links That You Post? Well my brain is hardwired to Google so I just think of something and it gets tweeted. Ok, if only that were true.Actually a lot of what I find to post comes from the work I do. And all goes back to where I started.

Almost 3 years ago, when I created my account I was looking for a way to share the resources I was looking for with the teachers across my district. Twitter was a great and easy way to do it. And that has continued in to my current role. I get to spend lots of time looking for resources for teachers across my district. Sharing is caring so I figure if one teacher in my district can benefit there are probably others out there too.

So the long and short of it is I usually start with a Google search. And that will yield some good results... sometimes. One of my favorite resources is the wisdom of the crowd. And there is no better place for that then Diigo. With Diigo search I can look for specific tags of items that folks have shared. Most of the time I get better results there than anywhere else. And I keep my links there too for anyone to be able to find. Most every link I have ever posted ends up there, eventually. And I don't hesitate to revisit and post something I already posted a while back.

Google Reader is another place. I follow lots of different blogs on lots of different subjects. And I almost always find great content there. Sometimes it's like going down the rabbit hole. I will check out a post on one of my favorite blogs, FreeTech4Teachers, from my good friend Richard. He will post something that will lead me to something else, that leads me to something else and so and so on. I can get really deep looking for stuff, finding great content to share along the way. 

A lot of what I post is retweets from other folks. Again, letting the wisdom of the crowds do the work for me to find great content. It goes back to following people for their quality, not following as many people as I can. And retweets extend the reach of your network. You and I might follow each other, but someone who follows me, might not follow you. So the RT extends the content and grows the network. It's a win-win!

2) How Do You Make Sure You Don't Miss Everything Without Staying On Twitter 24/7?Believe it or not I do sleep. Not well since I have a 2 year old that thinks 3 am is a great time to get up and play. But I do take breaks, often. One of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to be on Twitter all the time to see all the content. Keep in mind, if stuff is really good or "not to miss" lots of people will pass it around over the course of several hours/days. You are bound to see it at some point.

Hashtags are a great way to keep up with stuff. Lists are another. Both allow you to go back in time up to 2 weeks to find stuff. While hashtags are a great way to track conversations and to find people to follow, many will post resources and hashtag them so others will find them. You can then put all your favorite people in a list so that you can see their posts any time. (And if you use something like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite it is easy to set up columns to follow those things any time.)

There are tons of great websites too that will find the most important stuff for you. The Tweeted Timesand Paper.il are two sites that, when you connect them with your account will analyze the resources of the people you follow and find the best ones and present them to you in a newspaper format. (These are 2 more ways I find great content too.)

KnowAboutIt is new service I have been playing with. Instead of finding the most important content it gives you every link that comes through your stream along with the tweet and who tweeted it. You also get a daily email of the most popular content along with what they call Hidden Gems, content that might interest you based upon what comes through your stream.

The point is you don't have to be on all the time or feel like you have to see everything that comes by. Be smart and use these tools and let them do the work for you.

3) How Do You Organize Everything You Find On Twitter? I have a group of monkeys that does all my filing, filtering, evaluating and organizing for me. Sadly, not true. But I do have lots of tools that I use to help me keep track of everything I find.

One I have written about before is Read It Later. This is, hands down, my favorite tool. When someone posts something and I don't have time to check it out I just add it to my Read It Later list and go over it when I do have the time. The best part, I can access my list from anywhere on any device. So if I am sitting some where for a few moments I can go through my list.

Diigo, which I mentioned before for finding loads of great content is where I put my content too. I have always been a fan of Diigo because of the great stuff they offer educators but really I like just being able to save my links there and give them tags so that I and others can find them easily. 

The point to all this is that Twitter isn't work. It's not supposed to take up massive amounts of time or energy. Sure you have to spend some personal capitol keeping up and growing your network but as you have seen there are loads of great tools out there that you can put to work for you to find amazing and valuable resources for you and your classroom.

What do you use? What are your favorite Twitter tools to keep up with or organize your stream. Leave some comments below.

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This month in netTrekker ...

Did you know that netTrekker has groups of resources to go along with themes each month?

Did you know that you can get to netTrekker from the Learning Village Dashboard?

You can find these Monthly Projects by looking in My Portfolio in netTrekker. Each registered user of netTrekker has their very own portfolio to store things in ... so if you don't have My Portfolio in the sidebar when you visit netTrekker, make sure you register using your school code and the teacher code.

Inside My Portfolio, look for a folder called Global: netTrekker portfolio. This is a collection of resources and projects from netTrekker users. In this portfolio, you can find a folder for Monthly Projects. Each month has its own folder containing project ideas and resources already pulled together for those projects. (There are also instructions on how to copy resources from that portfolio into your own portfolio.)

For the month of October, you can find resources and project ideas for:

• National Learning Disabilities Month 
• Lief Erikkson Month
• Halloween
• International Non-Violence Day
• Christopher Columbus Day

Remember all the resources in netTrekker are teacher reviewed so they are safe for students ...

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