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Tips, tricks, and help for educators and bloggers using technology

Tips, tricks, and help for educators and bloggers using technology

21 signs you’re a 21st century teacher « Brave new world Yes, the phrase (is it a definition?) 21st century teacher has been bandied about and annoys some people, but whatever you want to call it, shouldn’t we all, as educators, use this checklist to check our relevance? Or at the very least, we could evaluate these checkpoints to determine whether we judge them to be important in the scheme of our work as educators. As a teacher librarian I can only do these things if I find a willing teacher with a class. Not much you can do without a class – a one-off lesson doesn’t make a great deal of difference. Your students work on collaborative projects…with students in Finland/USA.You share lesson plans with your teacher friends…from around the globe. Some of these have given me ideas - You give weekly class updates to parents…via your blog (I have documented class activity in blogs, but haven’t gone the step further to sharing with parents. The last point: You tweet this page, blog about it, “like” it, or email it to someone else… What about you?

12 Tech Tools That Will Transform The Way You Teach! In a Simple K12 blog post titled “17 Signs Your Classroom is Behind the Times” they provide a list of things that characterize a classroom that has fallen behind. Number 16 lists a variety of technology tools that every educator should know about. As I read the list, I realized that although many teachers are interested in and excited about technology integration, they are too busy to explore all the new technology tools available online. This blog post is dedicated to all of the overworked teachers who just don’t have the time to seek out this information. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. [Note: StoryJumper is another online digital storybook maker worth checking out!] 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Pictureka-like Activity w/Web 2.0 By Brian ThomasJune 29th, 2011 8:28 am If you’re a board game player (raise your hands), then you most likely have played Pictureka before. This game challenges players to take a very busy image and find parts, pieces, items, and people in a race against time and each other. This site also gave me the bright idea to marry two of my favorite things together….board games and web apps. Conceptboard can do so much more too! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5-7. The teaching strategy here is called Visual Discovery. Web tools abound like grass, or weeds depending on your perspective. Comments comments

Expat Educator Example of Student Electronic Portfolio Home Page (with the student name covered) I do my best to teach paperless. One of the disadvantages of less paper is that parents don’t see much of the work students do in class. Electronic portfolios virtually eliminate the parent question: What is my child doing in school? But electronic portfolios have value beyond parent communication, as Jessie Chuang explains in her Educemic post. This post has two purposes: Present a model you can use for your own students’ portfolios. Homepage For a number of years, I struggled with this opening page. Other students attached widgets such as fish bowls or basketball games. The purpose of the portfolio is to present “professional” work. Wordle provides a great way for students to share their personalities without sharing personal information. Student Writing In the past, students copied and pasted their final drafts to individual pages. First, students attach images of their outlines and their rough drafts.

What Makes Project Based Learning Effective? #Edchat #EngChat I've been meaning to write about my adventures in Project Based Learning for a while. It's a topic many teachers are interested in, but are unsure of how to implement it or know if it is working. After much thought, I have broken down Project Based Learning into the 5 parts that make it effective in the classroom. Long before my Epic Romeo and Juliet Project, the first major project I created was during my student teaching 10 years ago. As I look back at the project (and ahead as I prepare to bring it back), I notice all of the things that made this project work that lead to deep understanding. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Next week, my students will be creating their own Transcendentalist Society. If you have any thoughts on bringing PBL to your classroom, please do not hesitate to contact me. - @TheNerdyTeacher

Exquisite Corpse 2.0: 4 Apps for Collaborative Story Writing As a child, I was a huge fan of a collaborative story writing game that I later learned was also a favorite of the Surrealists. The gist of the "exquisite corpse" game: write a sentence on a piece of paper. Fold the paper so that only the last word or phrase can be seen, and pass the paper around in a circle. Folding Story Folding Story is a website that lets you read, create, or contribute to these collaborative stories. Exquisite Corpse: A Poetry Game Exquisite Corpse is another web-based app based on collaborative poetry-writing. Exquisite Corpse Project The Exquisite Corpse Project recently ran an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign, but I like this idea a lot (in part because I've toyed with the idea of building the same sort of thing). Google Docs None of the apps described above are necessarily ideal for a classroom setting. Why Exquisite Corpse? The Surrealists argued that a game like exquisite corpse tapped into the power of collective creativity.

How to capture video from an iOS device Reader Andrew Lane is interested in the technique I used to capture video from my iPad’s screen. He writes: I just watched your video about configuring the kid-friendly iPad and noticed a couple of things. You win this week’s Most Observant Reader award. It’s true, I did capture motion from the iPad’s screen, which is something that’s been difficult to do in the past. Fire up your iPad 2, third-generation iPad, or iPhone 4S, expose the multi-tasking bar, swipe the bar to the right until your see the device’s play controls, and tap on the AirPlay icon. You now need an application that turns your Mac into an AirPlay device—one that your iPad can mirror its display to. Once I had that set up I simply used a screen capture utility on the Mac to make my recording. This is a tremendous step forward for people doing presentations and recording motion screen captures, but it’s not perfect.

I've Been Waiting for This! AirPlay Mirroring to a Mac (no Apple TV required) Update: Reflection has been renamed Reflector. It is available for Macintosh and for Windows PCs. I am so excited for a new Mac app called Reflection! It shows my iPad's screen live on my computer screen wirelessly! In the past I've used different ways to show iPad's screen on a projector to an audience. All of these past methods require iPad to be stationary. Wireless mirroring to Apple TV is made possible by AirPlay, a feature of iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. As someone who travels, it's not ideal for me to carry around an Apple TV and VGA adapter and hope that I can set it up on the network at the school or conference. Finally a Mac app has been released that does what I've been wanting. Reflection literally takes less than two minutes to setup. Download Reflection and copy it to your Applications folder. Mirroring is great for modeling device use by the teacher. Student devices can be mirrored as well. Reflection is also great for making screencasts of what you seen iPad or iPhone's screen.

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