CALL_IS_VSL

"Step 1: Import your kindle highlights to your Diigo library. With the new Diigo chrome extension, it only takes one click to import all of your highlights from a book to your Diigo library. "Step 2: Organize highlights from a book in your own knowledge structure. "After Kindle highlights are imported in your Diigo library, it's easy to add them to an outliner where you can then organize these highlights in your own structure."

"Poetry writing is an excellent practice for strengthening one's writing skills. Through poetry writing, we gain command of language, cultivate a robust vocabulary, master literary devices, and learn to work in imagery. And that's just a small sampling of how poetry improves basic writing skills." Articles discusses the emotional and intellectual benefits of reading and writing poetry.

Each of these is explained in detail: "#1 How to manage money #2 How to manage emotions (especially worrying) #3: The importance of a healthy lifestyle #4 To question everything #5: To respect other peoples' rights to an opinion #6 To value creative arts #7 To respect the natural environment #8 Public speaking #9 Manners and etiquette #10: How to teach themselves"

"Our research showed that lots of great tools being are used across the world in school libraries. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to take some of those ideas and focus on the tools that we thought could have the biggest impact. Take a look at Facebook groups such as The School Librarian's Workshop, Future Ready Librarian and Int'l School Library Connection. All are closed groups, but can be joined on request and are full of school library staff willing to share advice and support. There is also a lot of information shared on Twitter, so if you have not headed there yet it is time to go and do some lurking. "We chose to focus on four online tools: Google Hangouts/Skype, Padlet, Flipgrid and BreakoutEdu. Although we are still using the physical Breakout boxes, we have the opportunity to move to the digital version if we need to."

"Social bookmarking is a way to save, store, group, and share Internet bookmarks online. It allows you to have access to your favorite bookmarks on any computer with Internet access, so even if you are away from home, or work, you can still find and use the sites you value most. Social bookmarking sites also give you the option of joining a group of like minded people, following, or being followed by, individuals who collect similar types of bookmarks to your own. Examples of such sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and the focus of this article, Diigo."

"Spark for Education is a free service that Adobe has launched to address the concerns that schools have had about Spark since it's launch a few years ago. The biggest of those concerns being use by students under the age of 13. Spark for Education is designed for school-wide deployment (much like G Suite for Education) in a manner that is COPPA compliant. The school will be able to manage student and teacher use of Spark including access to the service itself. Additionally, Spark for Education will provide students and teachers with free access to all of premium features of Adobe Spark." T/h to R. Byrne

"In the past I have shared Google Drawing templates for students to create drag-and-drop "magnetic" poetry with a winter-theme as well as for Valentine's Day. "This time I have updated the template for Springtime. Just like before, doing this activity with technology such as Google Drawings provides many benefits: " No limit on the quantity of words provided. Just copy and paste more of them as needed. Great tech skills practice with dragging and dropping and copying and pasting. Ability to edit the words provided if needed. Ability to add your own words. Easy collaboration with others. Easy to share or download your final creation. No pieces to get lost. It's free! "See below to get your free copy of the Springtime Magnetic Poetry template to use with your students (or yourself) however you want, as well as directions on how to use it." A template and instructions follow. T/h to Eric Curts blog, Control Alt Achieve

"Click here to download Your Guide to Finding Copyright-Friendly Images for Educational Use" Linked from the site.

"Student choice is not only a simple way to increase student engagement, it's also an essential factor in developing digital literacy while building 21st century life and career skills. Choice boards typically start with a specific learning goal, then provide students with a variety of ways to practice a skill, learn a concept, or demonstrate understanding." Site offers a variety of Choice board templates for your classroom use.

"Students classed as less able are being hindered by being grouped into ability-based sets, according to new research published today in the Cambridge Journal of Education." This is something I have always suspected -- good to see some research out there. Project-based learning (with careful supervision and formative assessments along the way) is a much better idea. While the study is based on secondary students, I think it applies equally across all grade levels.

A set of G-slides that can be used for writing a novel. This approach really works with short stories and poetry, and over the course of a semester or year term would work for a longer effort. Makes a great project for group effort as well. My niece wrote a novel in 2nd year of secondary school, and self-published on Amazon. Great idea for teaching writing, critical thinking, and long-range planning.

"The Myth of 'Learning Styles' "A popular theory that some people learn better visually or aurally keeps getting debunked." Despite all the research to the contrary, teachers (and students) continue to believe in 'learning styles.' Let's take a step back, read the actual studies, and look at ways to make students better learners all around.

Text analytics, the analysis of open-ended responses on questionnaires, could become the new wave of teacher/student evaluation. Teachers don't have time to read comments from student surveys, but that's where the most valuable information resides. But a chat bot could use text analysis to dig out and compile action points that might make an impact on learning. You can try out Hubert the chatbot by signing up at a link in this article.

"Innovative educators know they have to update classroom management strategies in the modern classroom. Here are twelve strategies to do just that."

"Here is how it looks when you are using outliner to organize bookmarks, annotations and notes." A short video and an actual outliner to show how this feature of Diigo works.

This set of questions is very inclusive and should help you creative good projects. The questions are conveniently categorized as "simple," "basic," etc. through "complex," so you can choose whether to do a quick survey of your planning or a thorough scan, perhaps for a more long-term project. These questions would also be useful for content-based learning.

This blog describes some of the games the author is working on and includes comments by kids about the educational games they tried out. The focus is on games to teach science, but the ideas are interesting and might be applicable to other areas (games to teach grammar?)

"This is the first in a three-part series on Gamifiying Your Instruction. The series is written by Karl Kapp, professor of instructional technology and internationally known author of two books on gamification, both co-authored by ASTD. " by K. Kapp. Notes that gamification is not necessarily a technology-driven methodology

"This is the second in a three-part series on Gamifiying Your Instruction. (Part one can be found here.) The series is written by Karl Kapp, professor of instructional technology and internationally known author of two books on gamification both co-authored by ASTD. "