Showing posts with label tech tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tech tools. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Monday, June 16, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 06/17/2014
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- The brain can get by on less energy when you overlearn a task
- Decades of research have shown that superior performance requires practicing beyond the point of mastery.
- Whenever we learn to make a new movement, Ahmed explains, we form and then update an internal model—a “sensorimotor map”—which our nervous system uses to predict our muscles’ motions and the resistance they will encounter. As that internal model is refined over time, we’re able to cut down on unnecessary movements and eliminate wasted energy.
- Energy expenditures continued to decrease even after the decline in muscle activity had stabilized
- even after participants had fine-tuned their muscle movements, the neural processes controlling the movements continued to grow more efficient. The brain uses up energy, too, and through overlearning it can get by on less. These gains in mental efficiency free up resources for other tasks:
- Less effort in one domain means more energy available to others.
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There are useful apps in here for both teachers and non-teachers.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/29/2014
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These are great tech tools that can really enhance a classroom. GAFE could certainly replace some of them, but I believe many of them hold up well against comparable Google tools.
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Think of this as a "make your own Wheel of Fortune". It would be great for creating a review game or choosing what to read next.
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This site offers data files from UNdata to overlay on Google Earth. Imagine looking at statistics laid out on a globe.
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Find tons of great museums from all over the world listed here.
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- Many teachers I encounter have decided that they need to crack down on — if not entirely eradicate — screen distractions in their classrooms. (A minority of teachers accept it as a form of 21st century doodling.)
- If the activity is engaging and challenging, there is an authentic audience, and prescribed time limits, students won’t mess around.
- The more time I spend “teaching” teachers something from the front of the room, the more inclined they are to check email, Facebook, or whatever.
- Add in the possibility that they they’ll have to present to the entire class, or post their creation online, and they’re even more focused
- the activities are challenging and expectations high
- it’s more like: “This is hard. And I’m not going to show you how to do it. But I expect what you create will be excellent.
- Tell students you’re going to present their work at a conference, or submit it to a state publication, and then watch the heightened focus in their eyes
- Teacher lectures impart useful information and explanations, and they can be lively and engaging.
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Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/28/2014
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Use this tool to create a lesson plan in a creative manner than can be easily understood by other teachers.
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This article offers up suggestions on how to use Evernote, Three Ring, Google Sites, and Kidblog to create digital portfolios.
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- Did I refer to the class as our class or my class?
- 8. If our class were a company, would it be out-of-business now?
- 9. Did students create and experience a great class or simply take a class and get credit?
- 15. Did I take advantage of spontaneous learning opportunities when students’ interests had obviously shifted, or did I maintain an inflexible mindset and vow to never deviate from an archaic lesson plan?
- 17. Was our class set up to promote creativity and collaboration or memorization and silence?
- 19. Were 21st Century skills embedded within daily assignments?
- 22. Did I gain professional wisdom by speaking to my collegial mentor?
- 24. Was the technology in my classroom used in an authentic manner? (Shannon Reed)
- 25. Did I avoid professional negativity by declining to gossip at work?
- 26. Did I manage my stress level by enjoying time with my family and friends, by exercising several times a week, by zoning out while engaged in a hobby, and by simply chilling out every once in a while?
- 28. Did I laugh often with students and colleagues?
- 31. Did I allow students to co-write their own project-based, learning contracts?
- 34. How many colleagues did I observe in-action in their classrooms this past school year?
- did I remember the names of all co-workers?
- 39. How balanced were the assignments this year in terms of requiring creativity, practical thinking, and analysis? (Adam Johnson)
- 40. Did I participate in a professional learning community outside of my school via Twitter?
- 46. Did I consistently blog as a form of professional self-reflection?
- 47. Am I a stronger teacher today than when I first stepped into the classroom at the beginning of the school year?
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This article provides three good tech tools for teachers who want to try a back channel chat and nearly a half dozen ideas for incorporating this type of technology into the curriculum. There are even suggestions for how to use it with students as young as 6 years old.
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- Diigo provides a free, efficient, effective and reliable way to save and organize your favorite websites, online articles, blog posts, images and other media found online.
- Diigo provides a lists feature that allows you to share carefully selected bookmarked websites with your students.
- Adding bookmarks to lists is easy. When you save the bookmark, you are able to allocate it to any list you have already created, or create a new list as you go.
- Diigo has tools that encourage students to collaborate with others to analyze, critique, and evaluate websites.
- Diigo provides opportunities for students to apply higher level thinking skills while researching and gathering information.
- Diigo allows you to gain access to the ‘collective intelligence’ of the internet.
- Use Diigo to provide visual access to websites you have collected using the built-in program ‘webslides’.
- Use Diigo’s advanced tools to link its power to blogs and RSS. Lists of similar websites that you have created can easily be posted onto a blog by using the ‘post to blog’ button.
- Use Diigo tools to enhance professional reading and save time creating summaries of online posts.
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- Access your information from any computer, or even your iPhone or iPad!
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Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/21/2014
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This site lists methods and tools for making flip teaching videos and many of them are free.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/13/2014
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Rubrics for collaborative projects as well as digital projects.
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Tech tool for creating infographics.
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- Article details how to get students to design quality infographics and offers up a few suggestions on which apps to use.
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- myBrainshark (1) is a superb tool that allows students to add a voiceover to PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, videos, and photo albums -- or to simply produce podcasts
- myBrainshark (1) is a superb tool that allows students to add a voiceover to PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, videos, and photo albums -- or to simply produce podcasts
- If you are looking for a tool that also allows for video narratives along with PowerPoint presentations (instead of basic audio), I would suggest Present.me (3).
- PosterMyWall (4) is a fantastic tool for creating artistic, high-quality posters (5), collages, photo calendars and/or photo cards that can either be shared online or printed out and inexpensively shipped home.
- PosterMyWall is slightly restricted in terms of the amount of options available for customization (mostly pictures and text), but other services, such as Glogster (6), offer a wider range of options.
- But Glogster is very glitchy
- Screencast-o-matic (7) is a powerful screen recorder that allows users to capture anything (8) happening on their screen, as well as voice and video from the webcam for up to 15 minutes in the recorder's free version.
- Some high-quality alternatives to Screencast-o-matic are Jing (9) and Ezvid (10), both of which are very powerful and offer unique features.
- Padlet (11) is another free program that facilitates the creation of virtual walls (12) where students and teachers can post sticky notes with almost anything they want.
- Other similar sites are Linoit (13) or NoteApp (14).
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Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 05/08/2014
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This site connects teachers with industry experts. Would work well for STEM projects.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Friday, March 28, 2014
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 03/26/2014
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Online poster creator.
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Flip teaching report indicates a positive learning trend.
- Report: Interest in Flipped Classrooms Surpasses Other Digital Learning Trends -- THE Journal
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/23/2014
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Raspberry Pi is a small affordable computer that students can learn to program themselves. Here is a great review of how it works.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/16/2014
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What grammar indicates about a person's competencies.
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Why tough love works and why it matters.
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Another DIY video site with instructional videos as well as advice videos.
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Checklists and organization strategies for everything!
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DIY dedicated site.
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Helpful article for considering how teachers can learn from their own lessons. The samples from current teacher blogs are very impactful.
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Storyboarding tool with stock images and the option to import one's own images.
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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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Prezi: A Spicy Version of PowerPoint
If PowerPoint is a merry-go-round, then Prezi is a roller coaster. It zooms in, it zooms out, it zips here, there, spins upside down and after it's all done, your hair is standing straight up and you're back at the beginning. That metaphor is not meant to detour you from using it, but rather to excite you about how your students will experience Prezi presentations. Let me give you one more example of how Prezi operates. If you are a Google Earth user, think of how you start off looking at the Earth from outer space. You type in your address and before you know it, you are hurdling toward your home at breakneck speed, stopping just above your roof. From there you decide to type in Nice, France (because you've always wanted to go to the south of France. You zoom across the country and over the ocean to land on the French coast. Now translate that experience to a presentation.
To learn how to use Prezi, I recommend watching the video below. (Set aside about 30 minutes to watch and do.) Jen Johnson, the instructor, is very detailed, but you get a wonderful sense of how to use all of the tools in Prezi without feeling overwhelmed. Make your own Prezi as your watching the video; just pause it after each instruction and try the tool for yourself. By the end, you'll have your first presentation completed. Just remember, when you display your presentation, change the display setting in System Preferences to 1024 x 768 for a 4:3 ratio.
For more tips and tricks on Prezi, check out Dan Steer's blog post "The Best Prezi Tips I Found Today".
**If you embed your Prezi then make sure the embed code is https not http. Did you get that? Add an S.
To learn how to use Prezi, I recommend watching the video below. (Set aside about 30 minutes to watch and do.) Jen Johnson, the instructor, is very detailed, but you get a wonderful sense of how to use all of the tools in Prezi without feeling overwhelmed. Make your own Prezi as your watching the video; just pause it after each instruction and try the tool for yourself. By the end, you'll have your first presentation completed. Just remember, when you display your presentation, change the display setting in System Preferences to 1024 x 768 for a 4:3 ratio.
For more tips and tricks on Prezi, check out Dan Steer's blog post "The Best Prezi Tips I Found Today".
**If you embed your Prezi then make sure the embed code is https not http. Did you get that? Add an S.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Lists for me, lists for you, lists for two
Two work flow apps that I have begun to use to track my work are Workflowy for tasks that I need to get done and Azendoo for tasks that I need a group of people to get done. Both are appropriate for middle school students, though they will need to create accounts.
Workflowy is great for the person who finds himself/herself writing out lists of things to do at home and at work. Keep them both in the same place and then embed lists within lists. Does this sound like a Type A person's dream come true? It is! Sync between your computer and phone. Get daily updates on what you've done and what you still have to do. Watch the demo video below, sign up and start making lists.
As for Azendoo, here is a great way to break up group projects into small tasks assigned to specific group members. You can set due dates, sync with other mobile devices, and link work to apps like Evernote, Dropbox and Google Docs. All parties can be held accountable and work becomes transparent when everyone is working via collaborate apps. To learn more about how you and/or your students can use Azendoo effectively, visit the help page for answers to your questions. To get a visual sense of how this software can be helpful, watch the promo video below. Other tutorials exist on YouTube.
Workflowy is great for the person who finds himself/herself writing out lists of things to do at home and at work. Keep them both in the same place and then embed lists within lists. Does this sound like a Type A person's dream come true? It is! Sync between your computer and phone. Get daily updates on what you've done and what you still have to do. Watch the demo video below, sign up and start making lists.
As for Azendoo, here is a great way to break up group projects into small tasks assigned to specific group members. You can set due dates, sync with other mobile devices, and link work to apps like Evernote, Dropbox and Google Docs. All parties can be held accountable and work becomes transparent when everyone is working via collaborate apps. To learn more about how you and/or your students can use Azendoo effectively, visit the help page for answers to your questions. To get a visual sense of how this software can be helpful, watch the promo video below. Other tutorials exist on YouTube.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Three Blogs I Love
If you are looking to expand your understanding of technology in education and you already have a sturdy foundation, I would recommend these three blogs to you. The last one, Edutopia, also has content related to all areas of education.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
The author, Med Kharbach, describes the blog as "a resource of educational tools and mobile apps for teachers and educators". Topics include: posters, iPad resources, teacher guides, YouTube for teachers, teacher tools and free downloads.
Free Technology for Teachers
Richard Byrne provides amazing free tools to teachers with quick explanations on how to use them. His tabs include: iPad apps for schools, Google tutorials, free guides, alternative to YouTube, video creation resources, and creating blogs and websites.
Edutopia
Edutopia is a wonderful resource tech tools, lessons, new teacher tips, grade level appropriate material, and almost any other topic related to education. They host educational blogs (which is why I have included it here), classroom guides, videos and educational resources. If ever you are stumped by a problem, I encourage you to look here.
Addendum:
Edudemic just reposted their "Fabulous Education Technology Blogs Worth Following".
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
The author, Med Kharbach, describes the blog as "a resource of educational tools and mobile apps for teachers and educators". Topics include: posters, iPad resources, teacher guides, YouTube for teachers, teacher tools and free downloads.
Free Technology for Teachers
Richard Byrne provides amazing free tools to teachers with quick explanations on how to use them. His tabs include: iPad apps for schools, Google tutorials, free guides, alternative to YouTube, video creation resources, and creating blogs and websites.
Edutopia
Edutopia is a wonderful resource tech tools, lessons, new teacher tips, grade level appropriate material, and almost any other topic related to education. They host educational blogs (which is why I have included it here), classroom guides, videos and educational resources. If ever you are stumped by a problem, I encourage you to look here.
Addendum:
Edudemic just reposted their "Fabulous Education Technology Blogs Worth Following".
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