CTAP Siskiyou Web 2.0

Various keyboarding sites for students of all ages. Typing Web: Typing Tutor is better for older students. Dance Mat typing is one of the most fun sites for younger students.

Nice example of how to use Google Forms to capture information by students on how they perceive different aspects of your courses. Class evaluations shouldn't be something to fear, but to welcome as a lifelong learner and give students a voice into your reflection process.

Teaching quality has been defined as "instruction that enables a wide range of students to learn" (Darling-Hammond, 2012), and it is the strongest school-related factor that can improve student learning and achievement (Hanushek, 2011; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges, 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain, 2005). Knowing this, what is the best way to foster and provide ongoing support for good teaching practices? While every school is unique, research has identified several elements that can almost universally increase the chances for successful teacher development and create a powerful and positive school community.

Jennifer Roberts, a veteran English teacher in San Diego, and a Google Certified teacher, shares how she approaches plagiarism with her students and uses the tools in Google Apps & Google Search to help curb intentional and unintentional plagiarism.

"Geo Listening " provides a service that monitors the posts of the 14,000 students in the Glendale Unified School District, to help curtail cyberbullying, drug use, and other problems. This article provides for great discussion with students, teachers, admin., and parents.

Catlin Tucker clarifies what "Complex Text" is and shares a link for teachers to see what the Lexile Measure is. Read the comments on her post, as a few teachers respond with additional resources.

Kathy Cassidy, first grade teacher, received a challenging comment on her blog, regarding her classroom blog and protecting her students. She shares masterfully, and with kindness, to the comment. Want a rationale for classroom blogging? Find some of that in her reply.

Powtoon is a neat app you might want to check out. Jayme does a great job with this example. You can see more examples by another teacher at http://learninprogress.blogspot.com/2013/09/starting-off-school-year-with-pow.html

"Through digital curation we collect, manage and collate the best, most relevant content, on a specific topic or theme,  for ourselves and share with others. Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organization, annotation and presentation." This post is a summary of ideas, tips, and resources to become an effective curator.

Kyle Pace, Google Certified Teacher and Instructional Tech. Specialist shares his insights into creating workflows in Google Drive with students. The most common methods used are #2 and #3 (Doctopus is another popular script that I like). However, another teacher shared another on you can view here ( http://goo.gl/Kuy3b9 ) that utilizes the idea of a digital portfolio. Using one of these methods is KEY to helping you and your students more effectively leverage Google Drive...and keep your Inbox a bit leaner from all of those file sharing notifications.

iPad screen recording and annotation app - 99 cents

Step by step tutorial on how to get started with blogging by Sue Waters of Edublogs. Sue is part of my PLN and is my go to person when I have questions about blogging. She's wonderful!

This post explains the "why" and "how" of Twitter in teacher friendly terms. Joanne Fox is an elementary ed. teacher who helps moderate #Caedchat on Sunday evenings when she's not teaching and tweeting. Make Twitter your Superpower as a teacher or administrator.

Learn in this video how to make the transition from iGoogle to igHome.

College writing/literature instructor shares how he uses Google Docs to teach writing.

A Twitter friend, Holly Clark aka @hollyedtechdiva,(http://hollyclark.net/), shared a post she found about how Google Apps can make a difference for teachers & students. And they are making a difference, and there's so much more we can do. Just think, students and teachers in our district have created over 30,000 docs, 1,712 spreadsheets, 1,027 presentations, & 2,894 folders. There are also over 9,000 files uploaded and stored in Google Drive. And there are 10 things Google Apps teachers rarely, if ever hear. Check them out :)

Concise definition of self-directed learning, six bullet points, and a nice infographic of self-directed learning. An important point mentioned: "One of the misconception about self-directed learning is that learners learn in complete isolation from others while in fact the core idea behind SDL is that learning is driven by intrinsic motivational factors  stemming from the learners own desire to learn and drive his/her learning experience beginning with recognizing a need to learn."

Helpful look at some of the reasons we need to help students learn how to engage in online content through blended and asynchronous learning environments.

"Meet Dictation v2.0, a web-based speech recognition app that will transcribe your voice into digital text using the Chrome Speech API. You can also install Dictation as a Chrome App." I tried it and it works pretty well. No special software is needed, so it will run fine on a Chromebook.

Backchanneling has a lot of promise with students in many different content areas. Here is a Social Studies teacher who shared her first experience using Today's Meet as a tool for doing formative assessment and teaching critical thinking skills during a film she showed students. Check out the learning process she shares in her reflection.