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Maker inspiration from SF's Exploratorium
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/21/2013
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Suggested apps and web tools as they apply to Bloom's taxonomy.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/19/2013
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- Consider this if your are a GAFE school.
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For the tech challenged.
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Extensive American history video archive.
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- YouTube is really special because it is a searchable video library where videos are immediately sharable to anyone in the world.
- YouTube is important because it is social.
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Summary of a study on causal relationship between visiting an art museum and having greater appreciation for the human condition.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/18/2013
- College papers: Students hate writing them. Professors hate grading them. Let’s stop assigning them.
- Hilarious article on why assigning papers might be more of a punishment for teachers than for students.
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Reasons to build a PLN.
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For when you need a laugh.
PLN - Got one?
One of the buzz words/acronyms that has been flying around for some time is PLN. The abbreviation stands for personal learning network. However, I like to think of it as a professional learning network because I use my PLN to help me do a better job as a tech integrationist.
Here's what a PLN can do for you.
So what does a professional learning network look like? Well for me it started off slowly with Twitter. I began by subscribing to a bunch of educators who were recommended to me by a friend and then eventually by Twitter itself. (Twitter generates suggestions based on who you currently follow.) You can follow me @JillBergeron2 and see who I'm following. Wanna know more about Twitter? Check out this amazing guide put out by Edudemic.
From Twitter, I moved on to Diigo, a social bookmarking site. When you sign up for Diigo, be sure to sign up for a teacher account through Diigo in Education. This has been such an asset to me in my job and here's why. Diigo will send you bookmarks either every day or every week (your choice) that are specifically related to education. You can sort through other teach bookmarks by use the tags. Again, just like Twitter, this is a site where you can follow other educators whom you respect.
My third foray into building my PLN has come through MyYahoo RSS reader. What a reader will do is pull the most recent posts (typically just the headlines) from a set of blogs to which you subscribe. It collects all of these headlines in one place for you to browse at your convenience. What you need to look for is the icon to the right. Click on it and it will ask you which reader you want to use. I like Yahoo because it's always an option on any site, but there are plenty of others to choose from. Then find some blogs that appeal to you. Edutopia and Edudemic are good places to start.
Here's what a PLN can do for you.
- It will help you build a community among like minded educators.
- It will shower you with unique ideas, links, articles and videos.
- It will prevent you from having to Google everything because now you will have a reliable network from which you can pluck resources.
So what does a professional learning network look like? Well for me it started off slowly with Twitter. I began by subscribing to a bunch of educators who were recommended to me by a friend and then eventually by Twitter itself. (Twitter generates suggestions based on who you currently follow.) You can follow me @JillBergeron2 and see who I'm following. Wanna know more about Twitter? Check out this amazing guide put out by Edudemic.
From Twitter, I moved on to Diigo, a social bookmarking site. When you sign up for Diigo, be sure to sign up for a teacher account through Diigo in Education. This has been such an asset to me in my job and here's why. Diigo will send you bookmarks either every day or every week (your choice) that are specifically related to education. You can sort through other teach bookmarks by use the tags. Again, just like Twitter, this is a site where you can follow other educators whom you respect.
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Monday, December 16, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/17/2013
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Could be worked into character education.
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Good idea for STEM or for PD.
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Quick summaries of these apps (work on laptops and tablets) followed by equally short descriptions of how they work in a flipped setting.
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For iPad users.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/14/2013
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Short video lessons in here that explore the modern era as well as history. Good for STEM, language arts and social studies.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/13/2013
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Article from the Gates Foundation.
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A catalog of game based learning resources.
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MakerBot Academy Math Manipulative Challenge
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Op-ed on how workers will need to be complements to computers.
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Learn Google Drive workflow management in my webinar series How to Use Google Drive In School – January 2014 http://t.co/d43mNkOaps
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/12/2013
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Options for teachers looking for relevant classroom YouTube videos.
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Great article on differentiation.
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Top math blogger in US.
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Great math resources for MS math teachers. Coincidentally put together by MS math teacher.
Head, Heart, Bag, Bin
Last week our sixth grade social studies teacher, Andy Hulm, presented to our faculty a catchy framework for thinking about how we teach and how students learn. Andy had just returned from a trip to his native England following a family gathering and a visit to his former school. One of the teachers there shared with him his teaching philosophy which is outlined in the
graphic below.
graphic below.
One of the ways in which this can work is by having students write on post-it notes for each category. These thoughts can then be transferred into a writing assignment. And so while this can be utilized with a number of technology tools, it can also be used with pen and paper.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/11/2013
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How to build your own search engine using Google. Great for LS teachers who want to limit the sites their students can visit but also give the children an opportunity to learn how to search.
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See the interactive graphic for ideas on how to use Google Drive in the classroom.
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Helpful ways for schools without a 1:1 laptop program to use Google Drive for teaching and learning.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/10/2013
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Differentiation for elementary school music.
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For those interested in educational chats via Twitter.
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This is a truly comprehensive list of no registration web tools which is great for teachers of children under 13.
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Great article on the need to help students better learn to concentrate given the distractions that digital devices provide.
- “The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than ever before, we have to be more focused on cultivating the skills of attention,”
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- Learning Music - Symbaloo
- A great compilation of music tech tools.
- Backwards Edtech Tool Flow Chart
This is a phenomenal chart for matching goals with tech tools. -
Some good journaling prompts here. Especially if your students are using a blog for journaling.
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For anyone who embeds YouTube videos, it's worth checking this out.
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Transition to GAFE from FC.
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For Chandler's email transition.
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This might be a possibility for our MS students when we introduce GAFE.
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This teacher does a great idea of helping his students share their work. And he has done it using a platform that we use at Chandler.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/07/2013
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Good explanation of Easel.ly with warning that it does not work on Chrome.
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Based on the terms of service and privacy policies of the these five sites, I would recommend Infogr.am and easel.ly for teachers with students under 13.
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How to use Twitter to help build your learning network. This is a great article for helping teachers understand how to use Twitter for PD.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 12/06/2013
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- From the students, integration demands creativity, problem-solving, perseverance, collaboration and the ability to work through the rigorous demands of multiple ideas and concepts woven together to create a final product. Integration is not simply combining two or more contents together
- By weaving the arts into and through our content in naturally aligned ways, we are providing relevance to student learning, and giving them an opportunity to connect their world to our classrooms
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- The keys to using Arts Integration successfully are:
- Collaboration between arts and classroom teachers to find naturally-aligned objectives
- Using an arts area in which the classroom teacher is comfortable (for many, this starts with visual arts)
- Creating a lesson that truly teaches to both standards
- Assessing both areas equitably
- Sample Arts Integration Lesson Seeds
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Transforming student learning through tech. Substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition.
Mandela and the Mockingbird
Right now, our eighth grade students are writing reflective essays in response to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Tomorrow as they continue through this process, it will be in the shadow of a life spent fighting segregation and injustice. With Nelson Mandela's passing, nations and individuals alike will mourn the death of a leader whose influence extended far beyond his own country's borders. Chandler's students will see these quotes in Ms. Dretzka's classroom as they reflect on a book that also sought to challenge a policy of institutionalized segregation.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Educational Resources and Tech Tools 12/05/2013
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Great videos for explaining abstract concepts with tangible drawings.
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Free math resources with some decent looking lessons that can be sorted by grade level or concept.
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Create interactive visuals for class projects.
Parent CATIE 12/3/13
Yesterday, Chandler School hosted its third Parent CATIE (Conversations About Technology In Education) forum. As a school with a one to one laptop program, we seek to educate all members of our community in the best uses of technology. To that end, we invited parents to join us for a session on safety and social media. We opened the session with a light-hearted video of Louis CK discussing the overwhelming urge to use technology because you can! We then moved into a survey where we asked the parents to think like their children and answer four questions on how kids use social media. We then compared the responses of the parents with those of the students. Turns out, parents do know their kids! Based on the information provided to us by the students, we then went over how to set safety filters on YouTube and discussed how children, and teens in particular, are using SnapChat and Instagram. Below is material we covered with links included.
Social Media Tips
Social media safety
YouTube
5 Ways to Keep YouTube Safe and Fun for Kids
- Enable YouTube Safety Mode
- Use Internet Filters
- Keep the Computer Public
- Speak With Your Kids
Snapchat (for use on mobile devices only)
- Sexting information via Common Sense
Instagram
- hashtags (#somuchfun)
Social Media Tips
Google Cultural Institute
The Google Cultural Institute is an amazing collection of images and documents curated by leading institutions around the world. The have partnered with Google to help bring these amazing works, some of which never see the light of day in their own facilities, to a global audience. Whether you teach history, art or math, there is something in here for everyone. The two videos below give an introduction to the online institute.
The first video will make you want to use the site.
This second video explains some of the wonderful offerings put forth by the Google Cultural Institute.
The first video will make you want to use the site.
This second video explains some of the wonderful offerings put forth by the Google Cultural Institute.
Monday, December 2, 2013
Education Articles & Technology Tools 12/03/2013
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Cool tutorial on how to post bookmarks to blog. One less click for teachers!
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Good article on how to make PD relevant and appropriate for teachers.
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Hilarious video on what Facebook would look like in real life.
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