Five-Minute Film Festival: Twitter in Education. I think it's fair to say that Twitter can no longer be dismissed as a trivial passing fad. Though I had dabbled with a personal account, my entire opinion changed when I started my @VideoAmy account and dove in to the conversations educators were engaged in. While some people certainly do tweet about what they're having for breakfast, teachers, administrators, and educational organizations use Twitter in a whole different way -- making smart use of those 140 characters to share resources, wisdom, and inspiration.
With the wealth of information out there, you have to cut through the noise a little to figure out how it will work best for you. PLN-building? Classroom discussions? Home-to-school communications? Keeping abreast of trends? 5 Tools For Creating Your Own Infographics. Five years ago, almost nobody knew what the heck an infographic was. (I sure didn’t, and I was a graphic design major in college at the time.) Now that the infographic craze has saturated us with new visual knowledge (and marketing gimmicks), something interesting has happened: The creation of infographics has become democratized. No longer is the act of creating a visual data story confined to professional designers using professional tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Now anyone with a data set can build an infographic. (See also 5 Business & Design Tools Every Tech Freelancer Should Learn.) Trust me when I say that with these tools, you don’t have to be a designer to create a high-quality, effective infographic.
Does this mean there’s no place for professional designers and data? With that in mind, I’ve cobbled together a list of five services/methods that even non-designers can use to create or commission great infographics. Infogr.am: All The Bells And Whistles. A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School - 81 Page Free PDF. Since 2006 I have used Blogger for many blogging projects including this blog and many classroom blogs.
Over the years I've introduced many teachers to blogging through Blogger. Blogger is easy to use and flexible enough to support you when you're ready to start using some advanced blogging strategies. I've covered the basics of Blogger and blogging in various blog posts over the years. This week I finally put all of those posts together with a series of annotated screenshots in one cohesive package, A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School. A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School covers everything from blogging terminology to blogging activities to the nuts and bolts of using Blogger.
You'll learn where to find media to use in blog posts, how to use media in blog posts, and get ideas for media-based blog posts. You'll also learn how to set-up your blog for multiple authors and how to manage comments. A Complete Guide to Using Blogger In School is embedded below.
Tech fast track. 44 Better Ways To Use Smartphones In The Classroom. 44 Better Ways To Use Smartphones In The Classroom by John Hardison first appeared on gettingsmart.com This week an online article grabbed my attention. Its title read “94 Percent of High School Students Using Cellphones in Class.” I immediately scoped out the heading and thought to myself, “Finally, teachers are beginning to embrace the powerful little gadgets.” However, it did not take me long to realize the researched article took quite a different slant. One quotation in particular caused serious professional introspection on my behalf. The article quotes the researchers as stating, “‘The potential damage stemming from heightened cell phone use during class casts a pall on the entire educational system, on the school atmosphere, on the educational achievements of the class, on the pupil’s own learning experience and on the teacher’s burnout having to cope with discipline problems in class.’” 44 Better Ways To Use Smartphones In The Classroom Use Smartphones to Collaborate.
18 Awesome Survey & Poll Apps. Customer feedback and market research are among the critical factors that determine the success of a brand. If you care for your customers or are a true believer in a democratic process before rolling out a new product/feature, polls and surveys are the right tools. Online surveys are by far the fastest and cheapest modes to collect information and feedback from users. We’ve put together a list of online survey and polling apps for you to get a better understanding of your customer’s mindset. Do read on. Polldaddy Polldaddy Polldaddy is a legend in the domain of online democracy. Free Accounts: AvailableCustomization Options: YesReady made Templates: Not Available SurveyMonkey SurveyMonkey Millions of people use SurveyMonkey for everything from customer satisfaction and employee performance reviews, to course evaluations and research of all types.
Free Accounts: AvailableCustomization Options: YesReady made Templates: Available Zoomerang Zoomerang Wufoo Wufoo eSurveysPro eSurveysPro Pollcode Pollcode. In Education. Education - Resources - Teachers and Administrators.
Google Drive Gets Profile Pictures and One-Click Group Chat. Google on Thursday announced an update to its Drive service featuring the addition of profile pictures, one-click group chat, and a new look for anonymous users. The company says the new features will roll out “over the next day or two” so if you don’t see them yet, don’t fret. Once you get the update, you’ll immediately see the profile pictures of other viewers of a given file at the very top (previously you would just see their names). Google hopes this will make it easier for you to quickly scan who else is in the file. Furthermore, you can now hover over a photo to see details about the viewer and add them directly to your circles on Google+. Note that this can be done without leaving Google Drive, showing the company is further integrating its social network into its file storage service. Anonymous users (people without Google accounts that open up a document) are also affected by this change: they get their own profile pictures and animal names.
Top Image credit: Pawel Kryj. Gadgets. Ideas to Inspire. Ideas to Inspire.
How to for teachers. Fall 2013 Tech Training. Video. Www.mediatech.org/wp-content/uploads/sgtc_form.pdf. Eric/docs/hopey/hopey_04.pdf. Best Practices in Evolving Education. Blogs on Technology Integration. In part one of this series, I shared how I use freely available video in my reading and literacy methods course to help my preservice teachers understand close reading instruction at a level that could not be attained through reading and discussion alone. In part two, I shared my curated collection of videos for general Common Core info, as well as videos to teach the close reading, text complexity and informational texts standards. Below is my curated collection of videos of exceptional professional websites for reading teachers that feature videos and resources on word generation, explicit instruction, graphic organizers and text difficulty, among other topics.