Group items tagged

Google, texting, and scheduling tools for organizations and personal productivity. Education focus

XMind is a free online visual organizing tool.

refer to video re research tools

Storyboard That is a cutting edge Web 2.0 tool for rapidly creating amazing storyboards, no art skills needed. Great for business meetings and in the classroom for students to express their creativity. LL Note: If you want to print out the free version storyboard, it puts a big digital watermark across your pictures. I found a work-around for that: take a screen shot, then edit that picture as you need to. Short term, for small projects, it's workable. If I were going to use this on a regular basis, I'd ask my school to get us a subscription. It calls itself a storyboard program, but it really works much more like a comic strip. But it could be very useful for brainstorming in class. You can make 3 free storyboards a week, which might be enough for many of us. It's really easy to use, and you can customize some of the features with your choice of color.

This looks like a really powerful storyboarding tool. I'd recommend trying it.

I came across this list of technology resources almost by accident but found that it added to the apps and resources that we have been exploring. I thought that it was helpful to have them categorized and organized in a way that grouped together applications based on their function, much like we have discussed in our class sessions. This list addresses the level of technology our students are experiencing in their daily lives and allows Jewish Educators to better implement technology in the classroom.

This is useful if you need to fill in a document (letter, newsletter, flyer) with text just to see how it will look. I used this a lot when I worked in desktop publishing. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

With Google Custom Search, you can harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website. * Include one or more websites, or specific webpages * Host the search box and results on your own website * Customize the look and feel of the results to match your site

Tutorial video that explains Twitter (from Commoncraft)

A Web 2.0, interactive, open source tool for creating customized ritual texts, such as siddurim, haggadot, zimriot, benchers, etc.

Tutorials on these two online resources.

How to use Facebook and what to use if for

How to use Twitter and what to use it for

Information, resources and reflection on Jewish early childhood education

Thanks, Lisa. This one is especially helpful to me. Have you see any of the blogs that Ellen Dietrick has done? She is the new director at the Temple Beth Shalom Nursery School in Needham, and she uses blogging to involve parents in a way that is rich, deep, and meaningful. Her blogs are private, though, so I cannot share the link with you, but perhaps you or I could drop her an e-mail if you'd like to see. At TOS, we are anticipating replacing our weekly newsletters to parents with blogs beginning this summer or next fall, so I was interested in looking at this one! I think that this tool is useful in its ability to communicate more efficiently with parents (and with other educators and community members) and to engage them more deeply. I also feel that blogging can be a great way to make connections between curriculum, activities, and child development more transparent for parents through the use of tags. For example, you could tag all of the activities that incorporate, for example, Israel, and then parents could see how Israel is integrated strongly throughout the curriculum. I have used blogging before. I personally find it very user friendly.It produces a strong documentation of children's learning over time, and of the growth of curriculum over time. I do feel that one of the dangers of blogging, however, is the ability to quickly publish information without much editing. I noticed in the first post today on this blog that were a few type-os! I think that particularly in early childhood education, there is a need to produce quality well-written communications to demonstrate that educators are knowledgeable and themselves well-trained.