Many uses for short videos

Just wanted to share that my students and I have had some great learning experiences this week using the short videos from www.simpletruths.com. A few examples . . . We watched "Great Quotes from Great Leaders" and then did a classifying activity with Inspiration (analysis level thinking is part of the Language! curriculum). It was an easy way to incorporate both technology and social studies into my Language! curriculum! I'm also going to have my students go back to the video on their own and reread the quotes for an independent reading activity, as independent reading is also part of the Language! curriculum. So many possibilities. Today I'm going to show "Outside the Box" and have the students, in partner or small groups, orally retell the story.
Guess what? Retelling is also part of the Language! program. Has anyone else used these videos? I'd like to hear your ideas.

Nettrekker: To Use or Not To Use, that is the Question

Let us know if you are using Nettrekker, the educational search engine that our district subscribes to. Take a VERY QUICK poll for us so that you can communicate whether you want to continue to use Nettrekker or not.

Use Google Earth as Your Virtual Telescope

If you have been using Google Earth to simply span the globe...think about spanning the sky. Google Earth has a feature that lets you switch to viewing the sky from earth, turning your window into a virtual telescope. Google Earth has also incorporated some fantastic layers. I really enjoyed the "Life of a Star" layer. This shows you actual stages of a star's life and explains that particular stage. It is really cool.

What a great way for students to learn about stars. Just open Google Earth and click on the "Switch between sky and earth" button.
This will give you a view of the sky above the location you were viewing in Google Earth and it will give you a different set of layers. I double-clicked on the "Life of a Star" layer to get my lesson started.
This is just one of the thousands of uses for Google Earth. You can use Google Earth for history, math, science and more. For more new features in Google Earth, check out the latest edition of their online newsletter, Sightseer.

Share the Christmas Spirit

First and foremost, thank you to Dan Erikson (Poly Drive), Elizabeth Waddington, Kim Kolstad & Susan Veit (Castle Rock) and to Ronda McManus (Career Center) for their efforts in getting their buildings to participate in the TAGLIT survey. These three buildings were the first schools to get 100% participation in the TAGLIT survey for school district #2. Because this survey is such a crucial vehicle for the success of TILT, Karen and I visited each school and rewarded the school with treats...and we rewarded the teachers; each teacher received a digital camera and extra memory card. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! AND...THANK YOU!!!

Now, you must be feeling the Christmas Spirit so I thought I would share a few sites with you so that you could express your cheer appropriately with your technology. :O)

Use some fun Christmas fonts by visiting the following websites:
http://www.theholidayspot.com/christmas/fonts/
http://www.wonderchristmas.com/fonts/

If you need help installing the fonts, I have a tutorial!

Blue Ray

This may be a silly question, but I have been wondering what the difference is between a blue-ray disc and a normal DVD. Does anyone have a good answer? Thanks!

Post, Read, Comment, Reward: Printer Ideas

Random Comments to this post will be rewarded.

If you had a printer in your classroom...hooked to your desktop or to use with your laptop...what would you do with it? Would it be a benefit? Even a simple black & white inkjet? Give us some ideas of how this could help you.

How inconvenient is it to NOT have one?

If you do have one, how are you using it?

virtual workshops

Last night I participated in an online workshop using ivocalize. It was an art deal called "5 minute masterpieces" run by Marney Makridakis of Artella ( http://www.artellawordsandart.com/ ) The moderated discussion included the usual text (each person identified as they typed and posted); a whiteboard (we did a collaborative art doodle piece at the end); and easy to follow upload so we could share our paper collage pieces that we cut and pasted in our own locations from one side of the U.S to the other and into Canada. Pretty cool stuff! http://www.ivocalize.com/

I may sign up for another if it fits my schedule.

I've included two of the 5 pieces we did last night in an hour...there was discussion between the 5 minute projects.

Elizabeth

BTW - If you want the "story" I wrote to explain the creature and me portraits, you'll have to contact me to email it : )

Post, Read, Comment, Reward: Creative Educator

A random selection from the comments will be rewarded.






Creative Educator is a new publication that gives some great lesson ideas as well as integration tools and tips. It is produced by the company Tech4Learning, which was started by a former teacher and creator of HyperStudio. Tech4Learning also created a great site for image searching called Pics4Learning.

I think it is worth researching. Although all the lessons use their software programs...there are Web 2.0 alternatives to do everything they present! They also have links to free programs like a bibliography maker, a rubric maker and a graphic organizer maker! You can subscribe to the magazine - it is free. From what I have seen...it is a GEM!

Giving Teachers the Reins for Staff Development

I am reading this article out of a new online magazine called Sourcebook (magazine for professional development) and I just have to quote what someone says....

"I believe that true professional development takes a lot of time. The reason I think that this is so important is because oftentimes professional development is seen as: Go to a training one or two days after school and now you are professionally developed. I believe that to truly grow and learn, you have to use your knowledge, find out what works and doesn’t, and determine what gives you the results that you need."

I thought...HELLO!!! Someone has dared to say it out loud. This is the case with TILT, attaining technology skills and understanding how to effectively integrate it into your curriculum takes time. Planning and implementing it takes...more time. That is the reason for the 3-phase approach to TILT. It models staff development that is ongoing...because we don't just get "professionally developed" in an hour or two.

21st Century Skills Article

With the exploration we have had of 21st Century Skills, I thought you might be interested to know that THE Journal (Journal about technology in the K-12 classroom) has an article about that very topic. It is very insightful.

To read it, click here.

Edheads

Okay here is a very fun site that students can use that is very interactive and fun. This is a great site for extended studies students. The site is called edheads and I have definitely enjoyed what I have explored. (I am thinking that this is a good 4th-5th site) Predicting the weather and the virtual surgery are really neat!

Link Share 2

Alright, here is another site that is very neat to use, you can actually do some 3-D problem solving.

I really enjoyed the design and test feature.

Post, Read, Comment, Reward

Well, well, well...so you have decided to read a post on the blog. Is it because you have been made to or because you want to collaborate and communicate with your peers? Is it because Desiree is making you do it as part of an activity?

Students are posting, reading and commenting on blogs daily. It is part of their life and we should be making it a part of ours.

So in an effort to generate more interest and traffic for the BPS TILT blog, I have decided to create a contest. The first TILT member to comment (intelligently) on this blog will receive a prize.

Better yet, the TILT member with the most comments by semester end will receive a "BIG" prize.

Need a reason to read and to comment? I understand...just like your students, you are wondering, "How does this impact me in the real world?" So...here is the topic of this post...Do you have a projector in your classroom? If you do, how are you using it. Be specific. What is the last thing you did using your projector? If you don't have one...what would you do with one?

Now I know what you guys feel like, working like a dog just to get your students to interact!
:O)

Articles in Teacher Magazine

Thank you to Barb Fettig, US History teacher at Skyview for sharing links to Teacher Magazine articles. I think you can get some very valuable information for your classroom and your school.

Revealing American Education:
This article is a great resource for the discussion of Indian Education for All. It addresses the gaps between Native American and non-Native American viewpoints.
You can find the article here.

Web Sites To Know:
If you are involved in staff development, SQP, or are just interested in professional learning communities and school reform, you should read this article.
You can find the article here.

Using the MS Word Report Card Templates

Some of you have tried using the MS Word report card templates and have found some frustrations. I have created a pdf tutorial and a video tutorial to hopefully help you use these documents.

Printing Problems?
If you are having printing problems, you can save the files to your server folder, or a shared folder and then print them from a PC.

YouTube Videos in the Classroom

To those teachers who want to show videos from YouTube in their classrooms, I say, “Put a sock in it…TubeSock that is!”

If your district is like mine, YouTube is blocked through the school filter to avoid violating school board policy, which simply states the school will not give students access to inappropriate material via the Internet. I am paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. YouTube is a website with a simple purpose…to share videos. It is a social site that lets users mark videos as favorites and to comment on a video. The issue for education is there is no filter at the YouTube site. You can find videos ranging from a virtual tour of our solar system to extremely explicit videos with R-rated (I say XXX-rated) standings.

When our Technology Director is asked about the blocking of YouTube, her reply is, “I realize that many of the videos on those sites do not fall under that category[R], but we cannot filter selectively and in my experience even the most benign videos on YouTube can have vulgar comments posted beneath them.”

Teachers in our district have found some pretty amazing and useful videos via YouTube, but they are frustrated that they can’t show these videos in their classrooms. Our Technology Director put me in charge of finding alternative websites to use or some other solution. That is when I told her, “Put a sock in it… TubeSock that is!”


TubeSock is a shareware program ($15) that works on both the Mac and PC and that allows you to extract videos from YouTube. Obviously, you can’t extract them from school…you are blocked by the filter so you might have to do some prep work. Using TubeSock is painless, I promise.

Using TubeSock
Step 1: Download TubeSock. You can get it from versiontracker.com or the company, StinkBot.
Step 2: Visit YouTube and find the video you want to extract.
Step 3: Copy the URL for the site.
Step 4: Paste the URL into TubeSock:
Step 5: Save your video. You are done.

The cool part of TubeSock is that you can save your video into several different file formats (H.264, .mp4, .flv or .mp3) and you can set the resulting video file to go directly to your Movies or Music directory, or choose the final destination yourself. When the video has been saved, you can use any basic player to view your movie, such as QuickTime, Flash, Media Player…whatever you like.

This inexpensive and easy to use program is a solution for those educators that find videos on YouTube. Now, typically those same videos can be found on appropriate sites, so I have to ask…what are you really watching on YouTube?

Oh! Put a sock in it!

Chalk Talk Results

See what you and other TILT members thought of the following questions:
What is important to you as a student?
What is important to you as a teacher?
What does effective staff development look like?
What are some barriers to integrating technology?

Visit here to see your work!

Interruptions are Impolite

We were in charge of the manner of the week so we made a little class video. Hope you enjoy it!!

I used a digital camera to take the video and then I imported it into iphoto. I then could email it to the other teachers in the school so that they could show their class the manner of the week.

Link Share

Here is a great site that I use with my class to bring real jobs into my classroom in order to help students see the relevancy of the concepts that they are studying in school. They, and I, really enjoy the site and I hope that you will as well!! Just click on the link below!

the future channel

~Abbie

Back to School

There is no more denying it, school is about to start up for the 2007-2008 school year. With it comes a responsibility to be ready for our students who, over the summer have become even more technology literate. They are texting on their cell phones, listening to podcasts, participating in social networking, and creating videos to publish on the web...just to name a few activities.

Are you ready?

Education World has published an article with technology activities you can do with your classroom. Check out their site: http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech141.shtml

Solution Watch has a nice article on getting back into the swing of things using Web 2.0 tools. Article Address: http://www.solutionwatch.com/512/back-to-school-with-the-class-of-web-20-part-1/

Whatever you use as a tool to prepare for a new year of tech-savvy students...enjoy learning and exploring with them. Have a great year!