This has been a crazy couple of weeks. Emotions run high, lots of uncertainty, COVID numbers increase... hard for both teachers and students to get back into a rhythm of learning. I actually learned a lot this past week, attending the STEM 4 Innovation conference, the Future of CS conference and a Friday night Leslie Fisher webinar on what's new with FlipGrid. Next week brings FETC, a free virtual conference.
Attending virtual conferences, while not at all like meeting people and talking with them in person, has been a great way to stay in touch with other teachers, with what is new in the tech integration world and learning more about how to help teachers with the pivot from f2f to remote learning. I was fortunate enough to snag a ticket to the Future of CS conference and 2 things really stood out to me. One was the role of AI or artificial intelligence in our everyday lives and how we can best begin to or continue to teach these basics to K-12 students. The other was the fact that technology is inherently biased along racial and gender lines. I attended an incredibly informative workshop run by Vicky Sedgwick, Alexis Cobo and Kelly Powers. Vicky has kindly given me permission to share the slidedeck. There are embedded links on the slides and an amazing amount of additional resources linked on the last few slides.
The other takeaway from this conference was from Dr. Nicki Washington's final keynote called, Do You *Really* Want an Inclusive CS of the Future? She points out in example after example that “Racism isn’t a BUG, it’s a FEATURE.” I hope to get access to a shareable recording of this one, as I think everyone would benefit from hearing more about this issue. It was a very powerful presentation. We also received complimentary passes to view Coded Bias- which I also highly recommend.
Ideas to Share
Teaching Social Justice is More than One Lesson
Hyperdocs to help teach social justice. This blog post includes 5 hyperdocs to help students process the recent events and to work through ideas on social justice.
Teaching Social Justice is More than One Lesson
Big Deal Media published a series of articles on Media Literacy today. Images are linked to the resources.
If you are interested in media literacy, be sure to sign up for NewsLitCamp with CNN, coming up on Jan. 26. https://newslit.org/updates/all-educators-newslitcamp-with-cnn-worldwide/
More math...Mathigon is an excellent online math resource. It's "the textbook of the future".
0 Comments
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
More Ideas for Black History Month
Since I took my vacation week off I have a backlog of "stuff" to share. Some of it can certainly wait, but I did want to share these Black History Month resources that I had collected.
Steve Wick shared a resource that I hadn't seen- Google Earth Voyage "Black History Month: The Journey of Us". The geo-tagged stories are a treasure.
Storycorps celebrates both Black History Month and the 150th anniversary of the 15th amendment with "a special collection featuring themes of representation, universal suffrage, and Civil Rights. The 15th Amendment, one of the cornerstones of civil rights, granted men of all races the right to vote in 1870."
JStor compiled an amazing collection of stories, ranging from MLK to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, “The Black Swan” to Billie Holiday.
Facing History has an excellent collection of resources to not only learn about the history, but to connect history to current events. You can see so much more here.
Teaching Tolerance focused on honoring the history of black civil engagement. " The official theme of Black History Month 2020 is “African Americans and the Vote.” Black changemakers and activists have been fighting for equal rights since before our nation began. This week, we’ll be sharing resources on the history of Black civic engagement and the continuing fight for full equality under the law."
One of the resources referenced is a film kit -Selma/The Bridge to the Ballot. You can see the trailer here. Ideas to Share
Google PD
Googlepalooza
I shared some of the presentations I attended at the MassCue Winter Googlepalooza last week with teachers at my school. Here's the rest of the schedule with the associated resources. Nothing actually beats attending, but you can learn a lot from the slide decks. One weird thing- some of the links are to gg.gg/ and my Malwarebytes doesn't like it. It opens fine on other computers, and I saw nothing that looked fishy... but just in case you see it too- not to worry.
Smithsonian Open Access & Tinkercad
Great Hyperdocs Resources
Richard Byrne- FreeTech4Teachers is always an amazing resource. Looking through my bookmarks, it was clear that his contributions stood out, once again, as valuable to pass along. I will give you a really brief view of a couple of them- and the links to learn more from the source. One of the tools he posted about this past week was ClassTools' new sorting game- Vortex. I tried out a couple of the pre-made games and thought they would be great for a review game. Gotta say- hate the font choice, but the game was fun and you can create your own. Can't find the original tweet or source, but check out this list of favorite tools of 2019 One other tool that Richard highlighted was Canva. I had looked at Canva back when it first came out, but have not used it extensively. Now that there is a free education edition, this tool is on my list to explore. Check out what Richard wrote and his video below. Another tech guru that I get ideas from on a regular basis is Wanda Terral- Tech Director down at Lakeland School System down in Tennessee. Wanda is a Google educator and always shares great practical information. This past week she re-posted the links to the TCEA (Elementary) conference handouts from 2019. This is a fantastic resource with tons of wonderful presentations. Well worth spending time to check out for all elementary educators with presentations on all sorts of topics/tools. If you can't make it to TCEA conferences, the handouts are the next best thing. Wanda also posted this image and the link to the site Retrieval Practices and a great article about Bloom's Taxonomy. Kind of turns the whole idea on it's head. And... she also pointed me to some excellent Google resources - Templates for Google Forms and Designing Infographics with Google Forms ( part of Applied Digital Skills ) Tinkercad App Just before the winter break Tinkercad announced their new iOS app. We use Tinkercad for our 3D projects- on chromebooks. I downloaded the app and can't wait to have the students try it out. Looks like a lot of great new features too, along with the new interface. We haven't really ventured into much AR and this may provide a way to make this happen. Cool Graph Paper
Primarily GoogleI started going through an online EdTech course -Primarily Google, over the break. The ideas for using Google in early elementary grades never cease to amaze me. One wonderful place to start is Susan Stewart's Primarily Google. Most of the time when I take one of these online courses, I come away with a couple of ideas, most of it- meh- knew that, etc. Not the case here. Yes, I know how to use these tools, but the creative ideas Susan comes up with... well check out her site and I think you'll agree- primarilygooglerocks! More Poetry Links I saw this one come up the day after I posted about National Poetry Month and knew that I really had to include it. Be sure to check out Kathleen Morris' blog post with a list of 30 ways to celebrate National Poetry month, a list of 15 great ideas you can use tomorrow and so much more. My favorites- a poem by our friend Kevin Hodgson over at the Norris School and a visual poetry mosaic tool. Richard Byrne also shared links about National Poetry month, using Poetry 180 . Check out his post here. I absolutely loved Tricia Fuglestad's work with second graders on Shel Silverstein's poem.
StoryboardThat InfographicsI was excited to read that StoryboardThat now has Infographic Templates for Education. Many of our HES students have used StoryboardThat to tell a story, as a book report, etc, but now, there's a new, easy to use feature- Infographics. One of the many things I like about StoryboardThat aside from their dedication to keeping our student info safe is their constant work to provide graphics to enhance learning. Here's the blurb from their site: "Creating an infographic is an easy way to showcase different information and topics in a digestible and visual format! They help students combine data, information, and visuals to further understanding and synthesis skills." Vimeo EssentialsWe have a Vimeo Plus account here at HES. One of the new bonuses with the Plus account is access to the Essentials collection- for free. So if you or your students are working on creating new videos and need some stock footage, check it out. See me if you need access credentials for this school account. Tinkercad 3D projectsAS we all learn more about using our 3D printer, I am always on the lookout for ideas to use the printing capabilities to integrate with and to extend our curriculum. Although it is tempting to just "go shopping" on Tinkercad or Thingiverse, I was happy to see some other examples on the We Are Print Lab click here . Here's one example: Ideas to Share
|
AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
|