Twitter is a Teacher Superpower! “We all know that education budgets are getting cut more and more, and that meaningful professional development opportunities have unfortunately become a bit of an oxymoron in education. Not only can being a “connected educator” help change that, but it can also provide you with ongoing inspiration and support. I’d even go as far to argue that being connected will be the most impactful thing you can do in your career.” Elana Leoni, blogger for Edutopia. I will even go far enough to say that becoming a connected educator is a Teacher Superpower! While I can come up with pretty new and innovative ideas while planning inside my classroom, I can gain so much more from sharing my ideas, collecting ideas on Twitter (known jokingly as #ideabandits), and connecting with other educators to collaborate about even more inspiring ideas. Here is how: Get yourself logged onto Twitter and sign up for an account using your computer, iPad, or smartphone. Next step is to add an image of yourself.
Analyze your Facebook page - LikeAlyzer 7 Tools for Creating Mind Maps and Outlines Online One of the presentations that I made this week was about having students create videos to demonstrate their knowledge of a topic. In that presentation one of the points that I stress is the need for students to create outlines of their videos before moving onto the technical aspects of constructing a video. Here are some tools for creating outlines and mind maps to plan video projects, podcasts, or essays. Quicklyst is a nice tool for taking notes and creating outlines. Knowcase is a free tool for recording ideas and creating outlines. Spider Scribe is an online mind map creation service. Folder Boy is a new service for recording, sharing, and organizing ideas with a team. Wise Mapping is a free collaborative mind mapping tool. Exploratree is a free graphic organizer creation tool. Slatebox is a slick tool for collaboratively creating mind maps and organizational charts.
Movenote Google+ Hangouts One touch to see the whole family With one touch, you can start a video call with one friend or a whole bunch. Video calls ring everywhere your friends have Hangouts. Whether they’re on their computer, phone or tablet, they’ll know you’re calling. If they’re not around or can’t pick up, Hangouts will let them know you were trying to reach them. Call phones right from your computer From Hangouts on your computer, just type in a phone number or pick one of your contacts.
Mind Mapping Tagxedo Poetica - Edit Documents Online as if You Were Writing on Paper Poetica is a neat new service for collaborative editing of documents. The best feature of Poetica is its similarity to writing on a paper document. While reading a document you can click on any word or space between words to insert a line drawn to the margin where you write your comment. Clicking on a word or space also allows you to simply insert a suggested word above the line. If you want to suggest a change for an entire sentence you can highlight it and insert a drawn line to the margins where you can write your suggestions. Your suggestions are written in blue while your corrections are written in red. Applications for EducationPoetica supports importing Word files, PDFs, and Rich Text documents.