Using Voice Comments with Google Docs for End of the Year Projects by @CTuckerEnglish I had a “just in time” professional development moment thanks to Jennifer Roberts and her video titled “Docs Voice Comments.” I wanted to share it with other educators as I know many of us are planning end of the year projects, assignments, and written pieces. These culminating assignments are incredibly time consuming to grade. I also wonder how many of my students carefully read the comments I make on these pieces since they get them back just as the school year ends and summer break begins. Lastly, these end of the year projects are finished products, so covering them with comments or editing directly on them may not be the most effective way to provide feedback. My students are currently working on a Digital Portfolio Project to share the work they have created in our class. I’ve decided to use the voice comments app instead of typing out all of my comments. Follow the steps below to enable the Voice Comments app. Search for “Voice Comments” and connect app to your Drive account.
Create and Manage Student Blogs in 5 Simple Steps We’re seeing increasing numbers of educators use blogs as digital student portfolios, where students showcase their work and share their learning, throughout their school life. Why? Studies have found that the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to pay more attention and learn more (Clive Thomspon).When students were asked to write for a real audience in another country, their essays had better organization and content than when they were writing for their teacher (Clive Thomspon).Digital student portfolios can be used for application to colleges, Universities or for applying for jobs.We all have increased motivation when we feel personal ownership. You see greater improvements in student learning and literacy skills when each student has their own student blog. Blogs allow students to easily transfer the digital student portfolio to their own personal space as all standard blogging platforms allow you to easily transfer content between platforms using export/import. 1. 2.
Use Your Smartphone At The Library, But Not To Read Books While American libraries sprint to digitize their books, one Japanese library is using technology to enhance the experience of reading ink and paper. The Hanno library in Japan has just enabled a new use of near-field communication, or NFC. NFC is a wireless technology, sort of like a low-power Bluetooth that can transfer very small amounts of information just by tapping (learn more about it in our primer). That might be a URL or a payment--pretty small-fry considering what Bluetooth can do these days, but the key to NFC is that the item that's sending information doesn't need any power whatsoever. So you can have a badge or a sticker that delivers information to your phone with a tap. The library has installed about 100 tags, called "Tatchitagu," on its shelves, provided by Fujitsu. Even better, the system lets you check out books or add them to a sort of wish list so you can remember to check them out later. [via NewLaunches]
Create a Narrated Slideshow on an iPad with Haiku Deck and Explain Everything <div class="greet_block wpgb_cornered"><div class="greet_text"><div class="greet_image"><a href=" rel="nofollow"><img src=" alt="WP Greet Box icon"/></a></div>Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to <a href=" rel="nofollow"><strong>subscribe to the RSS feed</strong></a> for updates on this topic.<div style="clear:both"></div></div></div> This week I’m leading a 3 day iPad Media Camp in Oklahoma City. Check out the final narrated slideshow on YouTube, which I also embedded on our Day 3 curriculum when we’ll learn about “Interactive Writing” and “Creating Multimedia eBooks.” Here is the Haiku Deck presentation I used for my slides. Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad Last summer I led two iPad Media Camps and created similar FAQ narrated slideshow videos as well.
Student blogs and student voice – Redefining my role: Teacher as student Wednesday night has become my favorite night of the week. Yes, better than Friday night or Saturday night. Because Wednesday night is when my Inbox fills up with the latest batch of blog posts from my 5th grade students. Giving all of my students their own blog this year has been incredible. I have tried to emphasize that these are their blogs, and they can therefore write about whatever they would like. And each post not only has a unique topic, but a unique student voice as well. This is what I love about the blogs, but also what I sometimes struggle with. What is authentic “student voice”? Will they develop poor writing habits if I don’t have them fix every “mistake”? A few recent posts by educators I greatly admire have gotten me thinking about this more than usual lately. Let’s advocate for student voice, but not fake ones. Dean Shareski has an excellent post, Fake and Real Student Voice, that brings up interesting precautions about using “student voice” to further adult agendas.
There Is No Digital Divide We all know poor people are on the wrong side of an uncrossable technological chasm known as the “digital divide.” Their lack of iPads and data plans and broadband is just one more way they’re doomed to stay poor right up until they become the shock troops of the zombie apocalypse, am I right? Indeed, a recent New York Times piece, “Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era” (or, as Gawker put it, “Poor People Are Wasting Time on the Internet!”) Jessie Daniels, Associate Professor of urban public health at Hunter College and CUNY and author of a forthcoming book on Internet propaganda, tweeted her displeasure at the piece. Given her background in the subject, I asked Daniels to amplify her concerns about how the Times piece on the “New Digital Divide” missed the point. 1. Daniels: “Right, I think we’ve all sort of accepted the “digital divide” framework, but there are some real problems with that. 2. Daniels: “Yes, that’s definitely part of it. 3.
Notetaking Apps - a comparison of some popular ones Notetaking apps are a great way to get organized and keep track of everything electronically. There are a lot of different ones out there, so I thought I would go through some of the more popular ones and list some of the features they have. Click on the links for more information on each one also. 1. 2. 3. 5. 6. Setting up individual student blogs using blogger (part 1) « Teaching the Teacher Design by author Despite my well-documented loathing of blogger as a content management system over the last term I’ve set up 28 (!) individual student blogs using google’s platform. First of all do you have a purpose to your blogging. Next up get your kids commenting. But what if the kids say nasty stuff online? Have you taught them how to comment? Early on the term the class and I co-constructed our class’s quality commenting checklist. More importantly if there are comments where I feel a student might have said something that breaks our guidelines, I’ll have a conversation in private with them. Ok so you are ready to take the plunge and start setting up blogs. First up you might want to decide on a system for both naming and addressing the student blogs. If you are using blogger, then using firstname.blogspot.com isn’t going to happen as the addresses are long since taken. Now you are ready to create your blogs. Wait for part 2 where I give the technical details. Like this: