Ideas to Share
Elementary STEM with Ms. Crosman YouTube channel has STEM challenges, STEM read alouds and more. Worth checking out.
Tony Vincent tweeted about a new extension that lets you take notes on YouTube videos- side by side.
More Jamboard Ideas from Alice Keeler and Kim Mattina
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Canva for Education Summit- TODAY @ 5 EST
This should be good. Never tried Canva? Great tool- and it's free. You can use it with students, create infographics, comic strips and more. https://www.canva.com/events/education-summit-2020/
Accessibility
Tech & Learning recently partnered with the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to offer the Beyond Access Forum: Inclusive and Individualized Education, an interactive and thought-provoking virtual event focused on digital accessibility, inclusion, and teaching information fluency.
You can watch this presentation below or simply check out the great ideas for using assistive technology in remote and blended settingshere. STEAM
CS Ed Week
Computer science education week is right around the corner. I spent some time yesterday on a Kodable webinar and will be putting together information for HES later this week. In the past we have been able to use physical coding, partner coding and more. Today, we need to plan on remote learning, or at the least social distancing and not sharing materials. Most of the major CS sites are putting out even more unplugged activities than usual and expanding their selections. If your students have Tinkercad accounts, this may be a great time to explore coding with codeblocks. If you have a 3D printer available, perhaps you can print some of their designs, or use merge cubes to visualize them in 3D. More on this next week.
Game Board
Alice Keeler created and shared this great game board template to use in google Slides. She gives complete instructions, as well as a link to the template on her blog. You can modify this, assign it to students to create review games, and more.
Math Resources
Useful Chrome Extensions
I have included a Wakelet, after the "Just for Fun" section, with articles and sites focused on Social Emotional Learning. Currently there are about 30 articles/links; just click load more to see all articles. Some are informational, while others have activities to try with students. If you have links which you would like included, just let me know. If you would like to be a collaborator on the Wakelet, contact me.
To Share
Just for Fun- More Bitmoji Ideas
SELMassCue NewsMassCUE has a new digital micro-credential program that you may want to check out. Here's their blurb... and the link: " This four-level program is available to all MassCUE members at no cost during the introductory roll out of the program. Many of the module tasks are embedded in the Hoonuit platform that is included in every MassCUE membership! After completion and review of each badge level, an educator will receive PDPs as well as a badge within a three-week period after completion and approval from the MassCUE PD Committee. We encourage participants to earn all four badges." I just attended a Digital Promise webinar yesterday on micro-credentials. They have a pretty amazing platform of micro-credentials to choose from. Most are free, but sometimes the issuing agency will have a fee. Check with your school or licensing authority to be sure that they will accept micro-credentials. Sorry- back to MassCUE News... There will be another GooglePalooza in Western Mass again this summer- over at Gateway Regional in Huntington. I went last year, had a good time and gained new ideas to use in the classroom. Chris Parker does an excellent job hosting and helping to organize- and they have good food. Here's the link and the blurb" MassCUE’s Googlepalooza event is a full day of G Suite for Education (formerly Google Apps for Education) hands-on workshops taught by experienced Google Certified Trainers and Educators to promote better learning in the classroom. Participants will have a choice between presentations at varied ability levels – all covering a wide variety of G Suite tools, devices (Chromebooks, iPads, Android Tablets), teaching strategies, and implementation. All of this learning for just $65 (fee includes lunch.)" Summer PD... I have not attended this online PD, but have heard great things about it- Check out Hive Summit- https://www.hivesummit.org/ They have not announced this year's speakers yet. Reexamining ReadingI recently read this article in EdWeek: Explicit Phonics Instruction: It's Not Just for Students With Dyslexia. What I got out of it- there is a move to reexamine reading instruction. Then I read the Washington Post article which was referenced- "Want to read fast and well? Ignore the rules of the speed-reading gurus" A quote from Seidenberg rang true, “A look at the science reveals that the methods commonly used to teach children are inconsistent with basic facts about human cognition and development and so make learning to read more difficult than it should be. They inadvertently place many children at risk for reading failure. They discriminate against poorer children. They discourage children who could have become more successful readers.” Finally I went back to the other articles referenced and chose " Hard Words Why aren't kids being taught to read? This was really interesting and kind of terrifying. Look at the graph below-(You get more info on the interactive graph online). The author then goes on to talk about "balanced literacy" and concludes that it does not reflect the current brain/learning science. Really interesting article. Check it out: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read Ideas to ShareLooking through the links I saved recently, 3/4 of them came from Jen Giffen (http://virtualgiff.blogspot.com). Always a great resource- lately I think I have bookmarked most of her posts.
"Ear-Reading"Hmmm... Who calls listening to a book ear-reading ? At any rate, several articles have appeared in the last couple of weeks about the use of audio books. Is it cheating? How does it help students or does it help only some students? I never listened to books as I drove myself and my children and their friends back and forth to school every day (50 minutes each way). I trained myself not to listen to anything in the car- sanity while driving middle school age children was a priority. Now I listen to books pretty much constantly- on the way to and from work, while I'm working outside, weeding, mowing, shoveling snow... I consider it reading. I read about 300 books a year, more than half are audio books. Is listening to a book cheating? Well, are you working on decoding or comprehension? If you want your students to understand the material, let them listen to it, look at it, watch videos, etc... The only caveat I have is that videos are generally not true to the book and you lose the language, the flow that the author intended. In the past I have used the uPAR test with students and found that the vast majority of students- something like 87%, demonstrated significantly better comprehension- up more than a grade level- when they also got to listen to the text being read. UDL works. Both Edutopia and The New York Times have really interesting articles about this- check them out. Master FlipGrid!If you hadn't noticed, I really like FlipGrid. Since the acquisition by Microsoft, many things have changed, aside from it becoming a free resource. It seems like hardly a week goes back without something new- and it's usually good. I was so happy to see that Holly Clark is giving a FREE course, beginning this Friday to help you #Master FlipGrid! You can sign up here. TEDTED talks have teamed up with Brightline Initiatives to offer 21 Days of Ideas. Check it out Live from the North PoleGoogle has been tracking Santa for 15 years now. Check out what's new up at the North Pole. Chrome Extensions-TabsThere are books about chrome extensions. I just want to talk about a couple of them. I have used One Tab and Speed Dial2 for years and really like them. Recently I noticed that a similar extension Toby, has also been included in many favorites lists. I downloaded and installed it, but really haven't put it to a test. Perhaps one of you can let me know what you think. One Tab is incredibly useful to me, especially when I am listening to a webinar and popping 20 or 30 tabs open as I listen. Not only does this suck the life out of my computer and slow it down, but it has caused Chrome to crash and then I lose all my open tabs. One Tab to the rescue. I can have a ton of tabs open, press One Tab and it scoots them all into one tab, lets me label it, share it out as a web page, etc. It supposedly works across devices- but I end up with different lists on my different devices. Here's a quick screenshot of what this looks like. I use Speed Dial 2 as my start page. I have 3 tabs- one for sites I use at home, one for sites I use for work and one for sites I used for course work. I use this extension constantly. I have it set to be the tab that opens when I click on a new tab. Here's an example of this one. So what does Toby do? Supposedly a little bit of both. "Toby is better than bookmarks, it's a browser extension that helps you organize your tabs on every new page." It sets itself up as the new tab page automatically. (I had to undo that in settings, since I really like SpeedDial2). It puts all the tabs you open in a list on the right and then you make collections- pulling the tabs in - so kind of like One Tab, but it's supposed to be a great way to organize. Reading through the comments on the Chrome Web Store, it sounds like it meets the needs of some folks perfectly and others wish there was an import/export and other features. The jury is still out for me, but I will try it and see if I want to add Toby to my toolbox or replace a tool with this one. Chrome Extensions: ProductivityThis week I whitelisted a few more chrome extensions for our students. As most are aware, having too many extensions up and running can really suck the life out of performance, so it is best to use something like Extensity to manage them. The extensions I added are Save to Google Keep, Internet Abridged and Reader View. Google Keep is becoming more and more robust, a great place to take quick notes, an easy way to collate ideas and save to Drive; it has the ability to OCR text in images, etc... I have been using it more and more of late and like to be able to right click on a web page and Save to Keep. I can add labels as I go. I was trying out new summarizers. When looking for resources, I tend to skim through articles to weed out the fluff before settling in to actually read something closely. Summarizers can be tricky, as I am never sure of the algorithm used and so many times, they simply don't work. This one, Internet Abridged, seems to work and the summaries actually makes sense to me vs. some I have tried which seem to simply leave out 50% of the words. Another extension added this week is Reader View. For many who regularly use iPads you are used to seeing those little lines that indicate a web page can be viewed in Reader View- cleaned up, minus all the distractions. Now, you and your students can do the same thing in Google Chrome. Try it! Some of the other extensions I recommend include: OneTab, SpeedDial2, and Mercury Reader, along with AdBlock and TextHelp's Read and Write for Google Chrome. . Honestly, I do have at least 150 extensions, but I regularly use a very small percentage and leave the rest off until I need them. Science Games That Give You SuperpowersH/T to Fred Delventhal for sharing Larry Ferlazzo's post on this science games site. It does appear that Legends of Learning is really free. "Over 1000 curriculum aligned science games for elementary and middle school students within the Legends of Learning adventure. Legends of Learning is always free for teachers and students in school." Here's a review of the site. Fake News- again...Here's another resource, new to me, Mind over Media, from the Media Education Lab. I first met Renee Hobbs years ago at Educon in Philly. She is an internationally-recognized authority on digital and media literacy education. Ten years ago we all thought that the CRAP test would be all the students needed to help them verify web sources. Needless to say, times have changed as evidenced by Alec Couros' recent article for EdCanNetwork: How do we teach students to identify fake news? In a world where it is increasingly dangerous to simply trust what we read and see... This is just a very small sampling of some of the PD that is available. I subscribe to blogs to stay up to date- FreeTech4Teachers, CrtlAltAchieve, and many more. I am no longer on Twitter 24/7, but check in on a few edu chats that I learn from. I try to attend every Classroom 2.0 Live session that I can, on Saturdays at noon, but if I have to miss it, I know that I can catch the recording and check out Peggy George's famous livebinders with amazing resources for the topic. Vicki Davis creates a 10 minute podcast, just for busy teachers. Matt Miller and Kasey Bell put together an excellent podcast, the Google Teacher Tribe. I follow folks on Twitter, on Facebook, etc- to learn from. Teachers all over the world are willing to share their expertise and make connections. There is no "one-size" fits all PD, but there are so many choices, you can be sure to find something that works for you. Try a podcast, try an edcamp, subscribe to a blog or a facebook group like Breakoutedu, Hyperdocs or GlobalEdCollaborators. Make connections, forge your own pathways. Show your students how to be a learner, by example. Read & Write for Google Chrome- TexthelpAs I mentioned at an HES staff meeting, we have a district-wide subscription to Read& Write for Chrome. This is not just a tool for special education, but an excellent UDL tool for all. Students will not naturally "just know" how to use this extension. They will need to be shown, or at least pointed to either the self-paced course or the playlist for older students.
KQEDI saw this article the other day, and since information literacy is such an important topic, clicked through to see what this bootcamp entailed. I had been to KQED Teach before, but the offerings have been expanded dramatically. Well worth checking out. CourseraYou may have checked out Coursera in the past, but once again- courses change and I love the course I am "enrolled" in. It's called Tinkering Fundamentals: Motion and Mechanisms, by the good folks at Exploratorium. I pop in and out, not taking it for credit, but learning a lot as I go. There are courses for whatever you would like to learn. Exploratorium is a favorite of mine, with 3 different courses offered. HoonuitMassCue offers all it's active members a free subscription to Hoonuit, formerly Atomic Learning. This is an excellent resource, especially for teachers, with resources like Integrating the 4 Cs into Your Classroom, Flipping the Classroom Training or Tech for Students with Dyslexia. If you are a new Massachusetts teacher this year, you can even get the membership to MassCue for free for a year! Check it out here. Simple K12Simple K12 can offer one stop shopping for quick shots of PD with a short video, or you can spend an entire day listening to various experts- other teachers- talk about how they are using tools or strategies in the classroom. It's a subscription site, but they continually offer free one day PD deals. This coming Saturday, 12/9/2017, brings an online Google Event called The Ultimate Guide to Google Basics: Using Google Tools in the Classroom. EdWebEdWeb offers a series of webinars on topics of interest to educators across all disciplines, preK- higher ed. I love the variety of topics and speakers and the fact that these are recorded to view at my leisure. You can earn PD certificates by attending live or by watching the recorded session and taking a quiz. They also have online PLC groups that you can join. Check out the amazing schedule here. Below is just a screenshot of the webinars coming up- this week and next. Making Learning Visible
Once again- FlipGrid is front and center. I watched another webinar on using FlipGrid in the classroom- across all ages and disciplines to make learning visible, to share learning. This came after spending part of my afternoon with 4th graders who were introducing themselves, via FlipGrid to students around the world, as they prepare to work on projects with students in Mexico, Canada and Australia.
Here's the recording of tonight's webinar. If you haven't made time to check out this tool- it is easy to use and a great way for your students to make their learning visible. #Global Maker Day 2017
Interested in makerspaces? Today was #globalmakerday. I was too busy all day, but plan to catch up with some of the challenges and videos later in the week. Lots of info from various vendors as well as the challenges are on the landing page.
Feedback
Before I forget- again- Rushton Hurley ran a cool little project this past week- a 5 day challenge to become a better teacher. Along with ideas you can use to present or discuss materials in the classroom, he also has ideas about feedback. You can still learn more about it here and grab a couple of colleagues and give it a shot.
A couple of tools that I have been playing around with lately that you may want to check out include CheckMark and Talk and Comment Talk and Comment is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to put voice notes and comments anywhere. "This free extension lets you record and send voice notes on all sites (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Github, Gmail, Google+, Wordpress, ...), in a easy way. Voice notes can be played even if you don't have the extension installed." Here's the quick overview:
CheckMark is a new feedback extension for Google Docs, put out by EdTechTeam. You can find in the chrome web store. Like others of its ilk, it allows you to insert pre-set comments quickly and easily. The user interface is clean and easy to use. And I think, like other users, that the ability to customize the pre-set comments would be a welcome addition. Here's a couple quick videos for you to check it out yourself.
Loom- add videos anywhere
Another way to give feedback is to pop a quick video onto an email or a Google Doc. Loom gives you a super quick and easy way to do that. And.. it's integrated with Gmail and Google Docs as well as lots of other applications and platforms. Here's a quick overview. Try it- you may like it. One of the questions about chromebooks in the classroom that I often hear is "How do I create/edit video on a chromebook?" The answer varies. Are you trying to edit a video that you created elsewhere? Or are you trying to create a video? Or are you trying to add audio to a slide show? Or? Or?... One tool that is often overlooked is the creator tool on YouTube. The C4L blog (a student led support site) recently posted about using these tools. You can check out their work here. Of course you can do a quick search on youtube and find tons of videos to show you how to edit video on youtube. Below is just one example. Remember you can edit a creative commons video, upload and edit your own, upload images and add a sound track and so much more. There are lots of tools out there to create videos on chromebooks. Richard Byrne recently published a blog post featuring 12 ways to create videos on chromebooks! My absolute favorite for ease of use is Adobe Spark. For those of you who are Adobe fans, you know that Adobe had 3 separate tools which are now kind of one suite. Adobe Spark can help you create quick and easy videos, Adobe Page can give you a quick and easy web page and Adobe Post is a quick and easy way to create beautiful images for social media. In schools- the students need to be 13+ to create accounts. I really wish they would add some sort of teacher dashboard, even if you had to pay a small annual fee. Spark is easy to use and I have seen it used successfully and independently by grade 1 students to give beautiful results.
Another way to create video on chromebooks is with WeVideo. WeVideo has been around for quite a while and is a pretty robust platform for a web based editor. Below is the quick intro, but they have a whole library of video tutorials on YouTube. Depending on your bandwidth, the upload can be a little laggy and can be problematic when you have a class of students trying to finish up, upload and go on the next class at the same time. Screenshots and ScreencastingOne other video/screen sharing question I get is how do I (1) take a screenshot, (2) make a screencast. The answer to #1... Use the ctrl key and the split window key to save a full screenshot to your files. Use Ctrl+Shift+the split window key to save a partial screenshot. Remember that files saved to your downloads folder are not permanent and especially on school chromebooks may disappear. If you need the file, save it to your own Google Drive. You can also use Awesome Screenshot extension which offers additional annotation, blurring, etc. Screencasts can be accomplished in quite a few different ways. To be honest, I use camtasia and snagit on my home computer. TechSmith had a snagit extension which has been discontinued. The best screencast capturing extensions are Nimbus and Capture, Explain, Send. Nimbus is a robust extension, easy to use and does just about anything you's like. Jason Savard's Capture claims to be the simplest- with no crazy permissions. I used to use screencastify, which also has a lot of features, but is a bit more complicated to get started with. So, what do you need a video for? To record your screen, to teach a lesson or to get quick feedback? Don't forget about recap- a great way to collect individual videos from students for quick feedback and more. VICKI DAVIS presented an excellent webinar this afternoon called 15 Best Tools for G Suite for Education. I was late, but she went over a couple tools that I hadn't heard of/tried before. She also shared a great PDF with her tool list! One tool, a Google Doc add-on that I am planning to try, is Pro Writing Aid, which "... is a Google Doc add-on that assists students by checking their writing for consistency, grammar mistakes, cliches, acronyms, and more. " I've tried Grammarly and although I know that many, many teachers and students love it, it kind of drove me crazy and I felt like it was in my way. But, please try it! Everyone likes different things. I also didn't know that Easybib now does a web site credibility check. I still like the SAS Writing Navigator Tool from SAS Curriculum Pathways to help students organize their writing, even if it didn't make the top 15 list. It's a chrome app as well as being a Google Docs add-on. She also shared some really cool math tools, some basic teacher tools and one last one I want to mention- the educational templates in Lucid Charts. Need a graphic organizer- they've got 'em and they are pretty cool. Read more from Vicki, and don't forget to check out the extra goodies from this webinar- The Hemingway App. Thanks, Vicki! Improved Voice Typing in DocsGoogle also recently announced yet more changes in Voice Typing in Docs. It is the best speech to text I have seen, especially for young voices. And... it's free! Here's the list of commands. If you haven't tried it.. super easy, but the commands will take a bit of getting used to. Here's a quick video as a refresher or an intro. TEXTHELP newsTextHelp continues to add more functionality to Read & Write for Google Chrome with a new Read-Aloud feature. Remember this is free for everyone in our domain- all staff, faculty and students. It's a pretty robust tool. I got an email from them the other day as they are looking for teachers to help develop a new writing assessment tool. It sounds really cool and if you help them out, you may get the tool free- forever! Check it out here. LAST, but not LEast...I spent the day at #EdCampAccessNY on Saturday. Among the many resources shared, were a couple that I plan to check out in the coming weeks. One for Early Readers got glowing reviews from a NY teacher who is using it. She claimed it was better that RAZ kids. Now, that's going some. Check out Reading Eggs and let me know what you think. The other web site is Literably, a site to help assess reading fluency and comprehension. Check it out and see if it can help you. |
AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
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