April is right around the corner and will be bringing us National Poetry Month. More about that next time, but, a friend shared this article with me about a new anthology of Native poetry, with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Check it out. I'm sure that with Amanda Gorman and poetry at the Super Bowl, we will have a lot to share in the upcoming weeks. Equity and Accessibility I tend to write about various tools for accessibility a lot as that was the biggest change for me when I flipped from private schools to public schools. I had never had kids with disabilities of any kind in my many years in private schools, either it wasn't a "good fit" or the kids had private tutors, so it did not impact my teaching. Then in the fall of 2013 I started working in a public school. I ended up taking a crash course- 36 credits in 16 months and an Ed.S later- now, I get it. This didn't even touch on equity issues relating to gender, race, digital access, etc... just physical and cognitive issues. I was thrilled to see the article and listen to the podcast that Katie Novak and Mirko Chardin did with Jennifer Gonzalez recently, called If Equity is a Priority, UDL is a Must Check out the article and podcast here: www.cultofpedagogy.com/udl-equity/ Katie and Mirko talk with Jennifer starting ~ 5 min in. More Accessibility Stuff
CAST presented a webinar today called : What It’s All About: Teaching, Learning and Assessment These frameworks are a work in progress. This is the slidedeck (ppt). The recording will post in the coming weeks. Torrey Trust et al, recently shared this really nice hyperdoc/choice board on the Foundations of the U.S. Political System. Please remember to make your own copy/ do not request edit access, and please credit the authors. Tall Tweets I highlighted Eric Curt's tutorial for Tall Tweets, back in 2018. Lately I have been seeing more and more folks using both Tall Tweets and the new version Studio Creator to quickly and easily create gifs and videos. Teachers have been assigning or offering this as an option... show mitosis as a gif, show the water cycle as a gif, etc. So, I added the new version, Creator Studio, the slides add-on, to our allowed marketplace add-ons. It has mixed reviews, so if you try it and want to share either your positive or negative experiences, let us know. It's an add-on, so go to slides, add-ons-get add-ons to find it. It looks like most of the features you may want to use may not be free. Ideas to Share
0 Comments
Would you rather play with Santa or read the blog post? Safe SearchOne thing that caught my eye this past week was the Safe Search info posted by Shelly Terrell on her Teacher Reboot Site. This is part of the 25 Days of Free STEM Resources Digital Advent Calendar that was shared previously. We have a tab on our symbaloo start page for safe search, but this reminded me that that tab as well as the multimedia resources tab both need to be refreshed. Here's a screenshot of Shelly's safe search, and a link to more info. Shut the Box GameLove this game that Alice Keeler coded in Google Slides. Try it with your class- virtual or in person. How does it work out for you to have lots of kids playing at once? Or did you try it with pairs of students? Here's the link to make a copy of the document. It has the video as well, if you need to follow along a bit. If It Were My HomeAnother site that I noticed, thanks to Wanda Terral, was this one- If It Were My Home. The topic initially reminded me of the children's book, If You Lived Here: Houses of the World, but this site is all data driven and aimed at a much older audience. Really interesting site, making it easy to make comparisons. I remember a site, years ago, that took students around the world, looking at images of how people live, but cannot remember the name! If you know the site, please leave the url in the comments. World Read Aloud Day is coming!World Read Aloud Day is coming up in February and that will be here before you know it. Kate Messner has a great list of volunteers on her site who can virtually visit your class. Check it out here. Scholastic, a major sponsor of the event, has lots of ideas (and books). You can learn more about their #WRADChallenge here. You can download a packet of activities and sign up at LitWorld, here. Chromebook Handwriting InputAs I am testing out the new 2n1 chromebooks we have for grade 2, I was really interested in the handwriting on a chromebook video I came across. I tried it and yes, it works, but... I didn't find it quite as easy as shown. I was just using my finger, though, not a stylus. It also works on a regular chromebook on the touchpad, but it was wicked hard to do- at least for me. So, try it out and see what works for you. I am also hoping to get some of the Google Play Store open for us, so then both teachers and students could more easily annotate in Google Classroom via the app. More Techmas GiftsThis presentation was shared by NVUSD's Promethean Education Consultants- Ashley Green and Xan Roberti. Thank You! (yes, it is pretty graphic heavy and may take a bit to load) Still Struggling to make Interactive PDFs?Social Studies anyone?Richard Byrnes from FreeTech4Teachers wrote a nice post the other day about CNN bell ringers for social studies class. You can read his post here. Another post that caught my eye was from Larry Ferlazzo, who introduced me to a new site called Enslaved.org. Time Magazine has introduced a new video series called The History You Didn’t Learn. The purpose is to help fill in the gaps on a moment in history or a historical figure that’s often misrepresented in K-12 classes. They have one video on YouTube with more to come. Take a Break, and enjoy Free PD in your PJs!Ditch Summit videos will be up thru January 8th! They are worth your time. Sign up for FETC- FREE virtual conference! https://www.fetc.org/register
As I mentioned in the email last week- the Tech Tuesday blog is having "technical issues". I checked with Weebly support again today- and it has been escalated... but no solutions yet. The post links seem to work, but when I link to just the site- it is missing the archives, and is squished, etc...generally a mess. So- hopefully this page will be the temporary solution while they figure out what broke. A couple of things that were in the post last week- but disappeared into cyberspace- Diigo Google Drive changes GOOGLE DRIVE CHANGESMatt Miller wrote an excellent blog post with ideas for how you can use the new changes in classroom. Here's a quick video tutorial from that post. Alice Keeler also has step by step written and screenshot instructions. If you have time, read her take on the use of this for differentiation- interesting. DIIGO Diigo is an online bookmarking service. This means that you can bookmark on one computer and see all of your bookmarks at home, or on another device. I've used this service since about 2008 and have over 11,000 bookmarks- all tagged and easy to find. The premium version will also allow you to save cached pages- so that when a site disappears, you can still access the cached version.
All students in grades 4-6 at HES have Diigo accounts. We have a teacher dashboard and can see all the sites the kids bookmark. This can be really helpful for collaborative projects. Diigo has outliners, annotation and has added a new screenshot annotation tool. If you haven't looked at Diigo in a while- check it out. This page has lots of different tutorials- but does not have the latest features, unfortunately Fake NewsThe problem with fake news is not anything new. The terminology has changed a bit- from yellow journalism to media literacy to "fake news" and “post-truth” but the message is still the same. Educators and students need to sharpen up our CRAP detectors. You can take Howie Reingolds' mini-course, teach your students a memorable acronym or check out the plethora of lessons on offer from Kathy Schrock. We all live in our own little bubbles and we often create our own echo chambers - listening to, watching the news, videos from - only the folks that we agree with. It may be outside of our comfort zone, but we may well get closer to ferreting out the truth if we look, and train our students to look- outside our bubbles. Check out the graphic below from i.imgur- sorry not sure about the attribution- maybe Vanessa Otero@vlotero. See full size. Here's a list of sites with Lesson Plans you can use to learn more about fake news and to help teach your students how to be more critical of information from news sources. DIIGO One of the new resources this week is the updated Diigo chrome extension. Diigo is used for bookmarking and annotating. The new chrome extension streamlines these features and adds a new screenshot annotation tool. So, why should you care? Diigo can help you categorize bookmarks and share them across all of your devices. It can be used as both a research and a note-taking tool. You can create groups in Diigo and share bookmarks with your peers or create student groups. I've been using Diigo since 2008 and have over 11,000 bookmarks! Now, some of these sites no longer exist- but the premium Diigo version also offers a way to save a page cache- so you never lose the resource. You can sign up as a teacher for a free accounts and get a teacher dashboard to monitor student accounts. Students at HES in grades 4-6 have Diigo accounts. Big Changes in Google ClassroomI sent out an email blurb about this last week, but essentially you can now differentiate your assignments in Google Classroom. Matt Miller of Ditch That Textbook has created a brief tutorial. 3D ToontasticLast, but not least... 3D Toontastic. Google bought out Toontastic a while ago and has just released a new app for digital storytelling- 3D Toontastic. The really cool thing about this- it works on "some" chromebooks. I haven't tried it out on the chromebooks at HES- but my personal chromebook is on the list. It is also an android and iOS app. And- it's free. So- if you have the time- and the right device- check it out! Do your students know how to search effectively?
Does this jibe with what you have observed? Search is a gigantic topic. It is also one of the things that I find that many students and sometimes their teachers don’t have much information about. One could easily spend an entire year teaching a course on search… but let’s condense it to a blog post for today.
There are some amazing resources online if you want to learn more. Google has a site for educators with lesson plans. There are two online courses to help you learn more about search. This one on power searching is ongoing- starts up every 2 weeks and there is a great course called advanced power search that you can take any time and progress through at your own pace. Alan November has been a strong advocate for information literacy for years. Here are a couple of questions from his site. Can you answer them? *What clues in a Web address might indicate you are on a personal website? * How would you conduct a search for the following: a list of Web sites of all the academic institutions in South Africa? (Hint: South Africa’s country code is .za) Answers here
HES resources include links for search on Symbaloo. Symbaloo gives you a handy visual way to bookmark helpful links for search for students. Although one can make a custom Google search for student use, my experience has been that after the first link the students tend to wander off to the omnibox.
A quick overview of the changes teachers and media specialists see in schools today.
Remember- You Can't Just Google It!
Google Tips and Tricks
Favorite Infographic for Search from Hack College
|
googlefor_web.pdf | |
File Size: | 953 kb |
File Type: |
Author
Maureen Tumenas
Archives
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015