Going To Calgary

I am going to the Smart SEE convention in July.  I entered the Smart SEE contest and luckily was just informed that I will be attending the conference with 50 other educators in July.  I am extremely honored and excited because I use my smart board 8 hours of every school day and I spend a lot of time developing interactive lessons with the tool kit.  I try to share with the other teachers in my district and hopefully I will learn a lot of new things this summer.

Is anyone else going?  If so, what are your expectations?  How do you use the smart toolkit?

A fantastic organized list of tools

http://sites.google.com/site/jmstechnology/web-2-0-tools

JMS Technology has organized a fantastic list of tools for both students and teachers.

Teachers as Master Learners

http://weblogg-ed.com/2010/teachers-as-master-learners/

“What I want are master learners, not master teachers, learners who see my kids as their apprentices for learning.”

I enjoy my day with the students best on days where they are the active learners and they are mentoring each other and me.  It reaffirms why I am a teacher when I see students ask questions, make connections, and then teach another student.  When we model being life long learners then we are fostering the future.  Most days in the classroom are fun and learning takes place but on those special days when you can see the gleam in a students eye as they discover something for themselves and they are able to communicate it to someone else then I know that I am in the right profession.

Tech News April 2010

great idea for IWB screensaver

http://primarytech.globalteacher.org.au/2009/04/

What a good idea.  You should check out what she is doing.

The possibilities are endless! Here’s how to do it…

1. Make a slide in PowerPoint as normal
2. Save the file as a Device Independent Bitmap
3. Click to save every slide
4. Go to Display in the Control Panel
5. On the Screen Saver tab, click My Pictures Slideshow, and in the Wait box, set the amount of time you want to elapse before the screen saver is displayed.
6. Under Screen saver, click Settings. Under How often should pictures change?, set the slider at the interval you want between pictures
7. Under Use pictures in this folder, browse to the folder in which you saved the presentation or slide and click ok!

I wish I had one of these for the classroom.

My summer goal is to be artistic and creative and make one of these for my classroom.  Wish me luck.  Maybe I can even get my students to create me one????????

Periodic table my students need

One of my goals as an 8th grade physical science teacher is to show my students that the elements of the periodic table are not just symbols.  I spend a lot of time sharing with them the ways that the elements are used in their lives.  This is a poster that I do have in the classroom but now my students can have access to it online as well.  Hopefully, I am making science real and when we move from memorizing the symbols for the elements into discussing the common compounds in their lives they have an appreciation for the materials that they continually interact with.  I like to think that they find it interesting that gold, silver, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen are not the only interesting elements in their daily lives.  A little Na in the car airbag, As in LED’s, and Zr (almost a girl’s best friend).  Every teacher at every level would benefit from sharing this resource with their students.  Use it in English to write an essay to convince the board of a company to keep this element on its shelves, have students use the symbols to spell real words with (COW-carbon, oxygen,tungsten), how many words can they come up with.  Use your name and write it in elements (Alice- Al, I, Ce), and simple math games what is the sum of 2C and an O).  I could go on and on.  Have fun with this by jinging the elements and making trading cards at bighugelabs.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/bpes_new/bpes_new_uk/STAGING/local_assets/downloads/secondary_resources/pt_preview_080409.jpg

Reasons to Use SmartBoard and the toolkit

During the class (Tech221) I shared with you why I thought using smart board and the smart toolkit was a useful tool for classroom teachers.  I recently came across the following list put out by Vanessa Cassie, Jan. 2010 (http://blog.sharpsav.com ), where she very succinctly and much more elegantly then I can or did, outlines the usefulness of smart board as a classroom tool for every teacher. 

1. Capture on the fly note: I will print notes for SPED students or those that have been absent, or with broken arms

2. Show a video: digital streaming has become the only way that I show video content anymore, especially in short clips

3. Model a skill or an experiment: using a ruler, a microscope, organizing an essay

4. Add a bit of magic: fading in and out, using the toolkit to add sparkle

5. Conduct the lesson from one locations: quickly jump between applications with touch screen: I don’t have to run back and forth to my computer to change screens

6. Provide good visuals that can be manipulated: pictures big enough for everyone in the classroom to see

7. Organize all the elements of your lesson in one place (add attachments and url’s), embed all of the pieces: I don’t have to try to remember where I put something that I know I want to use in the lesson

8. Page record the lesson for absent individuals or replay as needed

9. Just to operate in the same medium as the students.  Interactively.  Of course, the best is when the students are manipulating the board, playing review games or demonstrating something that they know

180 tech tips.com

http://www.180techtips.com  I can’t believe that I have never run across this site before.  Many of the tips are very basic but I have found after working with teachers in my building and other regular folk that sometimes it is nice to have access to a resource that can quickly answer your most basic questions.  This site does just that and I highly recommend teachers signing up to get the daily tips. You never know when you will find one that will provide you with an answer to a questions you didn’t know you needed to ask.

Readfresh is dead

Unfortunately, one of my favorite web tools, Readfresh,is dead.

I have been using it for about 5 months and having shared it with lots of people I am sad to say that it is closed.  I don’t know what happened and I am not sure what tool I will use to access my favorite blogs.  I liked this tool because it let me easily see the pages and not just the url’s.  I could click on each page and be instantly directed to that site.  I know that there are other tools out there but readfresh was easy to use. I am extremely sad at its demise.

Student Wish List

http://sites.google.com/a/students.halldale.org/tech-tool-reviews/home

Here is a site put together by 8th grade students on what kinds of web 2.0 tools they would like to use in their dream school.  What would you add?

Originally posted by http://rsu2teachertech.wordpress.com

xtranormal- Kingdoms we need for our Planet!

Podcasting with fotobabble

http://www.fotobabble.com

fotobabble is a fun and free tool that lets you podcast a short message that is attached to a picture.  You can then embed it in your blog or on your wiki.

I think that I have found a new tool that will let me send messages to my parents.

 

 

 

Death by ‘Power Point”

From Arizona K-12 center: http://azk12.org/blog/

Most of the teachers that I know are still using power point to give lectures with and to have students produce projects.  It’s not that I still don’t use it but it is my starting point and not the end.  Recently I made a power point on cyber bullying for a presentation that I have to make to our middle school staff next week.  I made the power point, then I saved it as jpgs and put some of them into a glog.  I then made a video of them with photostory, and I made a slide.com presentations as well.  My goal was to show my fellow teachers how to take a simple power point and change it up.  Students could easily accomplish these alternatives once they have their power point, then they could get feed back from people outside of their own classroom.  Plus it just adds a lot of fun to working on a project.  At least I think so.

Plus I came across this at the Arizona k-12 site and found that it makes all the points that I wish I could have said so creatively.

Life After Death PowerPoint from EMT Media on Vimeo.

Classification Alphabet Project 2010

Classification Alphabet project 2010

The students were to make a poster that represented an animal that started with a particular letter from the alphabet. Then they were to find its classification from kingdom to species, plus add a picture, and a few other pertinent details.

Classification of organisms

Voice thread

The reason we should pay attention to detail.

from feedproxy.google.com

Glogging and Blogging

Okay, I think I have become a little wacko.  It is 5 a.m. and I am blogging about glogging.  I have been wanting to have my students do a project using Glogster.com.  After introducing to Tech221 and asking them to try it out I made a couple of glogs myself.  I am addicted.  I have spent all night dreaming up projects that my 7th and 8th graders can do. 

 

I have also decided on a new classroom mantra. Fun, Fun, and more Fun.  After listening to the teachers at my school that went to ISTC last weekend and their discussion of one of the sessions on the ‘reasons to have fun’ in the classroom, I realize that I am a closet ‘fun teacher’.  I do think that if students can equate fun and excitement with learning than we will have life long learners on our hands.  So when the statement was made in the lunch room that mass murderers come from households that did not have any fun time it home that even though none of my students will ever be mass murderers I need to make sure that we have fun in the classroom just because.  Therefore, even though I normally daily try to inject a sense of fun everyday with my general demeanor in the classroom I am going to find activities that allow students to have more fun.  Some of the ways that I do this already is to use smart board games for review, to make sure that in my chemistry unit we burn stuff up, and now I am going to include making glogs.  Glogster glogs are my new fun addiction.  I am old (over 50) and if I can have fun and be inspired by such a simple concept what will my students think.  I know.  They will LOVE it.

The first thing that we are going to do is to film ourselves doing chemical reaction experiments and then put them in a glog.  I can’t wait to share them with all of you.  I encourage everybody to become a glogger.