Use Ted-Ed lessons to amplify your great lessons!TED talks have been around for years and offer engaging talks about technology, education and design. TED-Ed takes this one step further and now offers an amazing array of excellent lessons that you can use in your class as is, or modify to suit your curriculum. You can use the lesson creator and make your own lessons too. You can even take any educational video, modify it and submit it to the review panel to be animated and added to the site. "TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos. " These videos can help engage your learners and serve as an introduction to a lesson, a springboard for discussion, or just a way to differentiate and add choices for your students. You can sort prepared lessons in various ways, including- content, student, duration. Another way to find interesting videos is to use the Series option. Students from elementary grades through higher ed can all benefit. Each lesson has 4 parts: Watch, Think, Discuss, and Dig Deeper. Here's a couple ideas for elementary age students: Sponge Bob math lesson and a lesson on heros from Matthew Winkler Looking for Writing or Grammar videos? Check out How misused modifiers can hurt your writing Richard Byrne has compiled an excellent playlist of TED-Ed videos on the Human Body There are some great Social Studies and History choices too! Check out the TED-Ed blog for more great ideas! Make history by recording it with StoryCorps "Everyone has a story. What’s yours? What about your parents and teachers? Your elders and mentors? Now is a great time to add all of these stories to the largest living archive of human voices on the planet: StoryCorps."
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Over the weekend I was listening to several SimpleK12 webinars on Google Tools. One presenter showed a Jeopardy like game, made with Flippity.net. Now if you've ever used the online templates, PowerPoint, etc. to make Jeopardy quiz games for your students, you know that can be a pain in the neck. This looked easy. So, I checked it out, and not only was it easy to do, but their flashcard maker would be a great way for you/your students to collaboratively study for exams. Just download the templates, open in Google Sheets and follow the step by step instructions. The quiz show game.. Here's a short video from Richard Byrne to show you how to do it and there are also complete directions on the site as well. The Flash Card Generator What I really like about this 1. You can add images 2. You can add video 3. It can be collaborative! Because it is made from a Google Sheet, you can share the sheet to your entire class, assign each student/group of students one section and they make the cards for the group...remember to update the link when adding to the published card deck 4. Options- card, list, cloud, quiz
Don't miss out! This is all week- online- all day/all night... and of course all sessions are recorded. Help your students expand their horizons- check out all the opportunities for you and for your classroom. About 170 countries are represented at this conference.
Did I mention that it's free.... online... all week... I signed some of the classes at HES up for this project...http://ifyoulearnedhere.weebly.com/ The final project last year was to publish a page for your school in this book
My favorite tools to use with students tend to be those used for digital storytelling. Digital StoryTelling is a huge umbrella and many tools fall into this category. Not just for the primary grades, these tools offer wonderful alternatives to traditional papers or powerpoints. If you have access to iPads or tablets you can use a myriad of tools to make books, video or slideshows. My favorites in this category include:
You can also use tools on your computer or laptop to create digital stories. Prezi is available online, as well as Google Slides. You can leverage slides to create much more than your typical powerpoint type presentations. Check out this Google Slide presentation on Washington’s Presidency- lots of engaging features. Check out Animoto for a quick, engaging way to display content. You can get a free educator account as well as 50 accounts to share with your students or colleagues. You can make beautiful posters with Canva or Smore or use the Lucid Press tools right in your Google account (Go to Drive>New>More>LucidPress). You can produce a beautiful book with StoryBird, complete with professional artwork. The hardest thing about digital storytelling is choosing the right tool to enhance and display your content, or your student’s content. Believe it or not, this is a very short list of what is available online, on devices. What’s your favorite tool? Powerpoint is not evil… but check out some tips from the experts: Thoughts & Tips on Presenting Naked. Aren’t you glad you read to the end? Keep it simple! Try one new tool this week! An old favorite
Time to spare? Time to breathe? Most of us find that we rarely have a spare minute in the day. Sometimes it feels like you can barely keep your head above water with deluge of information we get from all the various media in our lives. I've often heard the expression of drinking from the firehose to describe the experience of learners trying to filter online content.
That's why learning how to curate and save and share online content can be a real time saver. Don’t you hate it when you know that you saw a great image, or precisely the right article or video online and then can’t find it again? Curation may be one answer. Curation combined with collaboration may help your whole grade level or department. You all know what collaboration is, but what about curation? Isn’t that just for libraries and museums? No. Curation of online content can be done by anyone. There is simply too much information available today and aside from web site authentication, this flood of information is an ongoing issue, it’s just plain overwhelming. This is where your PLN, your peers, and the global network of educators can help. Fourth grade teachers across the country are all using very similar curricula. AP bio teachers all need to get through the same material. Teachers across the world routinely create, curate and collaborate. There are as many ways to curate information as there are people, so I will just go over a few of them. Teachers today can demonstrate and model the use of these tools to help students make sense of the information that they are inundated with. Social Bookmarking is an excellent way to save resources, to share to friends, a group or a class. Most social bookmarking platforms are set up so that you can use them across devices and access them anywhere that you have an internet connection. Teachers at HES are familiar with one of the tools, Symbaloo as we use it as a start page for students, as well as a start page for teachers. Here’s a short video from Beth Holland at EdTechTeacher to explain a little more about one of these tools- Diigo, which just happens to be my favorite. You can set up a class to use Diigo, set up or join Diigo groups, etc. Introduction to Diigo from EdTechTeacher on Vimeo. Social Bookmarking Tools:
These are a few of the popular curation and collaboration tools:
Diigo Symbaloo Evernote Aside from these tools I often use curation tools to pull from social media online. These are tools you may want to check out.
Does this take time? Yes. It is generally time well spent. Although I think that social media can sometimes be an enormous time suck, it is also critical to at least take a peek outside the bubble of Pioneer Valley and learn from other teachers around the globe. Hadley has plenty of silos already- open up your classroom walls and create, collaborate and curate with others. I spend about an hour a week on Twitter, look at the headlines from some of the other feeds and if something catches my eye, will investigate further. I learn something new every day- and it's not just about tech- it's about teaching. The tool I use constantly, on a daily basis, is Diigo. Everyone is different. Pick one tool, try it out. Model it with your students. |
AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
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