Voice Thread Lesson Library

http://voicethread.com/about/library/

Here is the link for the Voice Thread Lesson Library.  Later I will read and post my favorites or ones I think you might be interested in!

5 ways to use Edmodo in Language Arts

Can I just say, "I am a dork!"  I have been getting the posts from edmodo like I wanted and then when I click on the link it tells me that I am not allowed to view it...so that goes on for a couple months...then tonight I realize I have to log in and then I can view it!  Nice!  


So, one post caught my eye tonight...a teacher blog talking about five ways she used edmodo in her language arts class.  She starts by describing a lack of success and quits; then after reassessment she tries again with new strategies.  Some I think we all should take a look at...http://finefindings.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/5-ways-im-using-edmodo-now/.  Each includes a real literature lesson idea and student examples!

1. exit tickets to find best questions (assessment, comprehension, inferencing)
2. image searching homework (cool idea--setting and character development)
3. Getting kids to be more themselves, while also looking closely at the text
4. quick polls
5. checking in (love that the teacher is checking in while home sick!)

Here's my only concern...why are these students short cutting writing?  Using slang....  I would like to see some research on the idea that students should or shouldn't be using proper writing when interacting in these ways.  I suppose it depends on the goal....  Where's the research?

Lessons from Angry Birds

Dan Meyer has a great approach to lessons that we as teachers can learn from Angry Birds.  Check it out:  http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=9797 .  The moral/summary of the lesson is in the last paragraph here.  (Scroll down and skip the tangent used for self-reflection/exploration.)

I think that this has become an obsession for me since I constantly find myself re-evaluating my whole teaching career--yes all eight years!  LOL!!!

This all started while working on my masters and has become more completed (and a source of anger) as not only my son struggles with poorly written assessments, but also with the fact that my husband can't understand it (or refuses to try) from my perspective. It is hard to watch a child who for two years teachers begged me to move up a grade, while my gut told me to hold him back.  Now I find that there are gaps in his education and obviously with the lack of time spent teaching science and history-there are bound to be many more.  Furthermore, it hardens my heart to hear from various students that a particular educational system failed to prepare them for college level content and fear that due today's emphasis on certain skills our educators are compromising sound instruction with shortcuts and a watered down curriculum.  There is a part of me that was so inspired by a blog entry I read a couple days ago about a lady to dreamed of a better school and actually went out and started her own school.  To add to this... I dreamed a dream  (literally) of a better school--one that was interdisciplinary and a combination of old school and new!  One that hadn't forgot that teaching students why something happens before teaching a shortcut was important...one where teachers like me need to learn to let kids explore rather than over control.

Ever since these two experiences I have thought that I can create a better learning environment...but then could I?  I think there is enough money out there to do it... (see I just found out I got another grant today!) and enough businesses to partnership with/support such as endeavor...but what would it look like?  How the day be structured to not only address learning standards but also life and discovery?  This dream is still formulating in my hear, but definitely one I would like to pursue.  The more I think about it the more I realize people like my husband are no good for me...they stifle my creativity and crush "dreams".  They can't see beyond today and forget to live life in the moment.  It makes me wonder if these people ever find joy in the day to day events?  Meanwhile, people like me are too busy planning that they fail to see what is directly in front of their faces, fail to act spontaneously and often fail to find joy in the ride.  This person materialized in the dream I dreamed and reminded me that labeling our students (or children) is wrong.  Before we do that we need to begin looking at ourselves.  Ultimately...I have come to hate the LAZY and my spouses voice.  There is more to life than working...there has to be some play as well.

So where does that leave me...?  That leaves me with this...angry birds isn't just a "game".  Depending on how you look at it and use it--it can be a valuable lesson not only in the classroom, but also in life.  I appreciated how this blog showed that angry birds can teach us 5 ways to be better teachers:  1) Make it easy to start a task; 2) Show, don't tell; 3) Give useful and immediate feedback; 4) Make it easy to recover from failure (opens up a new can of worms--debate the importance of grades and assessments); 5) Complicate the task gradually.  I find that these five truths have a lot to say about good teaching.  Words of wisdom--all from ANGRY BIRDS.

Now on another note...I am still searching the net for the math and science lessons I have heard so much about.  They will be attached soon!

Live Binder comes to iPads

MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2012

LiveBinders Comes to the iPad

The popular online online bookmarking, digital notebook service LiveBindersreleased a new iPad app last week. The new LiveBinders iPad app gives you access to all of your binders to edit and present the content stored within them.

If you aren't familiar with LiveBinders itself, it is a free online service that allows you to create online binders of webpages, images, and documents. Live Binders displays your collected content in a tabbed, book-like format. You can create binders for as many topics as you like. Adding content to your Live Binder can be done by manually typing in the url of a webpage, upload files from your computer to your Live Binder, or add content through the Live Binders browser add-ons for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

Applications for Education
Live Binders can be an excellent tool for students to use to create online booklets of resources they find online combined with content that they've created. I learned about the LiveBinders iPad app from Steven Anderson who uses LiveBinders to organize and share much of the great content he's discovered and developed online.

Lifecards App

Yet another app for digital storytelling--Lifecards.  Currently there is a cost for this ($1.99) but it seems like it would be worth it, especially at volume purchasing.  With this app students can create digital postcards.

Tools available in Lifecards:

• up to 4 pictures
• text
• add images and text effects
• map, stickers, and more...(you can make your own stickers virtually using hand cropping in own photos--could be used for Gail's totem project)
• email, publish (if email...always use jpeg not high resolution)

Lesson ideas:

• Perhaps if studying Ancient Rome--create postcard with facts like what is life like in this time, what food is common, what clothes were worn during war time, etc....
• Pretend you are Columbus/Lewis/Clark and create a digital postcard as you travel as this character and include it on a google map for an assignment!  This could be a cool idea with Gail's google maps and pins that she has done in the past...each pin could be a digital postcard.

Micro-Podcasting

Here is yet another pod-casting type tool available both for ios devices and on the web (i.e. Laptop/Desktop):  Cinch.  Through this website you can create a free account and begin the pod-casting experience.  (It is also available on the ios devices:  Cinch.  Be sure to pick the iphone app version if searching.)

This is coming from a podcast I watched today titled, "Giving Students a voice with Micro-Podcasting".  Sam Gliksman was the presentor (he is also the iPads for Education founder).  You can follow him at ipadeducators.ning.com or on twitter @samgliksman or email him at samglicksman@gmail.com.

His advice:

• limit pod-casts from 3-5 minutes
• minimum age for account is 13 (?)
• unlimited storage and useage as far as he knows
• set up a classroom account where you either create folder for the individual projects or a separate folder for each student in class
• be sure to use the reply function to give both feedback and encouragement to students
• be care to turn off the geo-tagging since this records the location of the pod-casts, photo, itouch or phone call
• utilize the widget function on the classroom or school webpage
• the widget will play what is in your main album and can be password protected or made public
• remember that once pod-cast is done it is posted and available immediately--great opportunity to discuss to to properly prepare through research, scripts, etc... as well as digital citizenship

Ideas for use in the classroom:

• use to record student reading throughout the year=portfolio for showing growth
• working in pairs prepare a script interviewing famous historical figure
• research and create a presidents day pod-cast illustrating how your favorite ex-President enriched the lives of American citizens
• create a series of pod-casts from the point of view of a crew member on Columbus' ship that chronicles his voyage across the world
• practice reading (teacher can reply with feedback and encouragement)
• create an autobiography
• can become a "reporter" and create broadcasts for sporting events, field trips, and more--can be done with a phone if you set it up that way!
• create cinch station for class--broad cast weekly school news for your community
• create a "what we learned" broadcast by different students each week and place on widget for parents and community to hear.
• use as a communication tool with parents
• use as an oral assessment tool--give kids a test and have them go home and take the test
• book reviews--have a broadcast station for your library!  How cool would that be!?!
• great tool for foreign language learning--portfolio for growth over the year

All of these ideas can be modified not only for different content but also different apps like voicethread, storykit, videolious, imovie, showme, etc....

Angry Birds

Ok, I just read Amber's blog entry about Tiki Lavalaunch (which I had to download) and then Angry Birds came up in my OSTA board meeting (which I am skyping with right now).  Nicole Duncan (a board member) has turned this obsession for the app (angry brids) into a STEM project for her class.  I intend on contacting her through email and seeing if I can work with her in developing this idea for our classroom.  What I got so far is that the students have made life size plush toys (math--scale/proportions and home ec--sewing--Glover?), catapults (science--physics, simple machines and engineering--building the catapult) and building the crash site (engineering).  We could bring in the technology of the iPad by using the app Angry Birds to develop background knowledge as well as basic physics knowledge.

Pre-teach:

• simple machines
• projectile motion
• forces
• gravity
• Newton's Laws
• stability of structures

Assessments:

• Science inquiry guide
• Engineering scoring guide
• speech scoring guide
• NETS standards
• writing assessment--which one?

Gmail group creation

Here are the directions on how to create groups in gmail as requested:

Creating contact groups
With contact groups you can easily organize your contacts, making it easier to email a specific set of people. For example, if you created a contact group called "Soccer club", you could just send a message to that group, rather than sending out an email to 50 different people. Never leave somebody off an email again!

To create a contact group:

Click Mail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts.
Select contacts that you want to add to a group, click the Groups button. , then Create new.
Enter the name of the group.
Click OK.


To add contacts to a contact group:

Select the contacts in the Contacts list.
Click the Groups button.
Select the group you'd like to add the contact to, or select Create new to create a new group.
If you have multiple addresses saved for a contact, you can choose which address should belong to the contact group by opening the contact and clicking the small arrow next to the group you'd like to modify.
Note: These instructions work only with the standard version of Gmail. If they don't match what you see in your Contact Manager, we suggest that you upgrade to a fully supported browser or click standard version in your account.


Note: this. Doesn't work on iPad...make groups on a regular computer...full version.

Pages shortcuts...

To quickly learn some of the keyboard shortcuts in Pages, the easiest way is to look in the menus. In the menu above, you can for example see that you use command+C to copy.

These are the symbols that are used:

⌘ is the "command" key.
⌥ is the key called "alt" or "option" depending on your keyboard.
⇧ is the shift key.
^ is the ctrl key.

However there are more keyboard shortcuts that are not necessarily available in any of the menus. Also note that they may be slightly different (or even broken) in other languages than English. Here are some examples of working shortcuts for an English keyboard:

Hold the mouse pointer over a word, and press ⌘ ^ D. This will call up a small dictionary window. If you want more information about the word, click on "more".

Type a few letters, and press ⌥ esc to get a list of words beginning with those letters. You can also use F5 for the same function.

To change to the next open Pages window, press ⌘ `.

To change to the next open application, press ⌘ tab.

To copy text or a graphic, highlight it. Then hold down ⌥ at the same time as you drag it to the place where you want to copy it.

You may have noticed that you can drag tabs around in the ruler with your mouse. However, by default they only land at certain positions. To be able to move the tabs around to any position on the ruler, hold down ⌘ at the same time as you drag.

When you try to close a modified document window, you get a dialogue asking if you want to change your changes. The three buttons each have their hidden shortcut: Return saves. Escape closes the dialogue without closing the window. ⌘ D is equivalent to "Don't save" and discards your modifications.

To get super script, like in mc², highlight a character, and press ⇧ ^ ⌘ +. (In the menu, it looks like the shortcut is simply ^⌘+. However, as the + character needs ⇧ to display, you need to add ⇧ as well. To get subscripts , like O₂, you only need to press ^⌘-).

To add an indent level to an item in a list, use ⌘ ]. To remove an indent level for a list item, use ⌘ [.

To add an indent level to an item in an outline, use tab. To remove an indent level for an outline, use ⇧ tab.

Graphics

If you change the size of a shape, you can hold down ⇧ at the same time as you drag its corners to keep the proportions between height and width.

If you want to rotate a shape or image, you can hold down ⌘ and hold the cursor over a resize point of the shape or image, to change the cursor to a rotation tool.

If you want to make sure that a shape or image keeps the same centre point, hold down ⌥ at the same time as you resize.

Some more graphics keyboard combinations are described in this post.

More resources

In Finder, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the search field, to get generic Mac OS X shortcuts.

In Pages, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the searchfield, to get Pages shortcuts.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Mac OS X at Apple's support site.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Pages at Apple's support site.

To learn how to customize your own shortcuts in Mac OS X and Pages, go to this page.

Regional technology cadre

Tonight was just the ending to a very busy day for me.  As always I am finding it easier to record my thoughts and ideas here for future reference and worldwide access!

Here are some of my take "aways" from tonight's session:

• Make sure you check out scoop.it to see what magazine topics you can find to help with various topics of interests.  Some people have already compiled articles, but you can create your own.  Also by setting up your out account you will get emailed notifications as to when a new post has been made.
• Much like the "Fruit Machine" (name generator) we have used in the past this session we use "TeamMaker" to randomly develop teams from our list of session participants.  I like the idea of using these random computer generated generators in the classroom occasionally.  It takes the "the teacher hates me" comments out of the picture.  Keep in mind that it is very helpful to have students' names already in a spreadsheet--do this by having students fill out a form for you in google docs!  They do the work--not you!  Then you just cut and paste names into machines....
• Although this will be mentioned later in my "To Do" list there are plenty of free webinars available to professionals in order to continue to grow.  Many of these webinars are also stored for viewing later...although you may not be able to access all content such as the slide shows, audio, etc....  Yet, the couple we looked at tonight seem to have it all!  
• When looking to do digital storytelling here are some best applications for different tools:  
• PC-photostory (free)
• MAC--iMovie
• iPad 2--voicethread (allows you to see picture while do narration), storykit (allows narration over picture...not option to view picture while doing audio); I believe you can do audio or type on either one of these.  
• LESSON IDEAS:  You could send students on scavenger hunt around school taking pictures of examples of 8 simple machines...come back label them and/or record and/or write explanation of the type of machine.  You could look for angles of varying degrees for math or just to create a slide show of different angles and their measures/id. whether acute, obtuse, right.  Perhaps you want to document your experiment results--record video/photos (can you do videos here?) and add explanation as to what is happening...oh, oh, oh....ANN, ANN, ANN...
• Finally, don't forget to look back at previous agendas...there is still so much I need to explore and revisit!  I just can't believe the amount of information out there if only we all had time to sit and look through it and then apply it!  

So, here is the TO DO LIST:

• Help Gail set up a filter for emails so they are sorted by topic/class etc....  Follow Amber's directions posted in her Blog on Dec. 1, 2011.  We will do this after January 23, 2012 during that week one day when I come over.
• While working with Gail we will attempt to get all her novel reading assignments on the ipad for student use.  At this point I am not sure what exactly that will entail.  Perhaps she has some of these assignments in a packet form already and we can begin the process of converting so that each student can download and complete them for this novel.  I hope that we can sit down and look at what she wants to do, identify a tool that works well on iPad to complete it, and then get it ready for use.  Maybe this is something I begin building for her to help with the next large unit of study.  Note:  Don't forget to utilize Google Forms for some of this...double check that if she attaches this invite to Edmodo kids can access and fill in!  Pretty sure it will work!  All responses from forms go directly into a spreadsheet that can be evaluated in real time!
• Gail has asked that I participate in several webinars form the site discussed above.  The ones I will look at doing include:  When it rains, it pours:  cloud storage 101; 20 Free ipad apps educators can't live without!--I am signed up!  11:30 to 12:00.
• I am interested in the following webinars:   Going Google: The Quick Start Guide to Getting Started with Google Tools (Feb 4);  Motivate Readers and Get Connected: Reaching Out to Authors on the Web (feb. 4); Productivity and Collaboration in the Cloud with Google Docs (feb 4); Web Tool Smackdown (feb 4);  Connecting and Collaborating with VoiceThread and Your iPad (feb 7--members only); Let Them Film: Promote Student Ownership in Learning with Video Cameras (feb 12); Get on Track and Stay There with Google Calendar! (feb 12); Using QR Codes to Engage Students(feb 12); Using Quizzes and Games in the iPad Classroom (feb 17).
• Both Ann and Gail would like to quickly figure out how to get documents from the ipad to other resources through either the cloud or dropbox.  I think I will ask Levi to get an account and then have him play with these features with me.  He can be on the ipad or laptop or both to test things out!
• I am really bothered by the fact that we can't insert a table/chart into Pages and then put pictures in the boxes.  We would really like to use this function to record data and observations for the science experiments...what about using Google Docs.--spreadsheet or insert table in word.  ok, I just played with in on the ipad and that may not work either....  Keep exploring.
• We need to put voicethread on iPads soon for video creation--like better than videolicious!  Don't have to worry about timings!  Here you advance slide with recording is done!
• I need to become familiar with iMovie so can help in each of these classes--focus on iPad though for now...looks different on Macbook.
• For Ann's class we ironed out basic details...we visualize a keynote presentation in which the students have a basic template.  Hypothesis will be written on a slide.  Background will be either written or narrated perhaps with visuals on a slide.  Most likely materials list and procedure will be combined through the creation of an iMovie in which they use both video and still shots with audio to explain/show what they did.
• Within Keynote students will insert data charts (transformed data) or tables that answer question/support or refute hypothesis/and will be hyper linked to data table created in Pages (unless better option).  Finally, analysis will most likely be an iMovie in which still shots, video, and audio are all used to explain their results.  Errors, additional questions and such can be bullet-ed on final slide (or incorporated into analysis narrative?)  The assessment pieces here should include both science content/inquiry and NETS.  
• NEW SKILLS:  hyperlinking, iMovie potentially, inserting/creating data table in pages (?)  
• QUESTION:  what data transformations will students need--graphs for growth (meas. height?), observations in nice table to document change (may need to compare and contrast photos), can we find an app that allows us to take a photo of plant and write over the top of it--like with parts or arrows emphasizing observations?
• Question:  how do we take a keynote off the iPad and drop it somewhere else to pick up?  Can we download keynote directly from iPad to Mac through USB?  Will everything have to be emailed still?  If so, can it be opened and saved on Mac since it has Keynote?
• Finally, I need to resend the flier with corrections--save to flash drive and take with me Thursday.

Interwrite Board Notes

So I have spent the afternoon working on DW's Interwrite board.  I needed to update the software and in order to do that I went to einstruction.com.  Under "support", go to "downloads" and "software".  This will populate a list of the available software downloads.  The newest software is called Workspace_Windows_8.91.278.5147.exe.  Once downloaded you need to find the file (in this case all teacher downloads are in their "My documents" and in the "Download" folder).  A window will pop-up and give you the option to RUN--hit RUN!  Next, select English. It will begin to install.

In order to update the gallery you must then download the content.  Once downloaded you need to locate the file and RUN it as well.  Once installed you will then need to build the content.  To do this you must click on the gallery button on the Workspace toolbar and then say build.  Select "yes" and the content will be built.  According to the tech (Erick) this can also be done for the Interwrite Pads.  So here I sit on NW's computer doing the same thing.  Wish me luck.  The case number for today was 183116.