Ed Tech Crew

"Yesterday I sat down and built a new guide, Google Documents for Teachers. The 40 page guide (embedded below) is designed to help teachers who have never used Google Documents. This document is part of a larger project that I hope to complete this month. Please leave a comment if you have suggestions about how to improve this document."

RM Byrne writes: Last month I published a free ebook titled Google Documents for Teachers. Just two weeks later Google released Google Drive and made Google Documents a part of Google Drive. Therefore, I had to update my ebook. I present to you now, Google Drive and Documents for Teachers. The document is hosted on Scribd. You can download it from there as a PDF.

about:flags

123D Sculpt is another 3D iPad app from the Autodesk 123D series (last time I showed you Catch, for making 3D models from photographs ). Sculpt is specifically made for the iPad - and is free for the time being. Sculpting is a natural fit for the iPad touch interface, and the app is an incredibly powerful way to realize your most horrific nightmarish creature designs, or simply as a fun creative exercise.

'Ever wondered what happens when you send an email? Take a journey with Gmail and find out. Along the way, discover our data centers through videos, photos and more. It all begins when you click send.'

Master Story Teller - It's lying twenty-four times a second

The E2BN / NEN Gallery is a community resource, built and maintained by the education community for the education community. The Gallery is a growing collection, at present containing around 52,000 Image, Audio and Video resources covering a wide range of topics relevant to the curriculum. Its purpose is to provide a free repository of high quality materials, copyright cleared for use in teaching and learning.

Database that links films to historical events. Search by country or subject. Useful for finding movies to compare perspectives on some historical events. Eg. By clicking on Japan it shows films about Japan but some are made in Japan, some in US, some in China.

Create infographics and charts - interactive data visualization

Create a printable descriptive summary of your video - good for 'How to' vids?

LiveBinder from techwithtia

Free Video Movie Maker and Slideshow Creator For YouTube

This is an interesting SMORE related to Edmodo is a social learning network that is safe for students and FREE for teachers! With a "Facebook-like" look, it's sure to grab your students' attention and get them excited about learning. This session will explain what Edmodo is, how you and your students create accounts, and give real-life examples of Edmodo in action. I'll show you how to assign and grade work in Edmodo and give advice on best practices, as well as share permission forms and roll-out materials. Whether you teach first grade or fifth, this is a resource you will definitely want in your technology toolkit!

"Hundred Zeros is a collection of best selling eBooks that are currently free on Amazon. You can download and read any of these books on your computer, mobile phone, tablet, Kindle or inside your favorite web browser. The list is updated every hour."

Children given iPads to use at school are more focused on learning and less likely to misbehave, research has found. University of WA education researchers have been investigating the use of iPads and other mobile devices in 12 independent schools during the past 10 months. UWA's Grace Oakley said teachers found that students were more likely to finish their homework and do a better job.

The tweets are getting longer - what do we think about this direction.

An inevitability I guess. There are a good few people who will be delighted that they can shoehorn more information into a tweet, for all the reasons described in the article. Me, not so much. I like the brevity that tweets provide, allowing me to scan the stream and quickly pull out those nuggets that lead on to further information, join in exchanges discussing issues or participate in more extensive debates like #edchat etc. The act of contributing within a constraint of 140 characters forces you to think harder about what you want to say and ensure that your message still retains clarity - surely a higher-order skill? If the character limit is expanded, will tweeters become lazy and allow their tweets to bloat? Maybe I should have answered your question in 140 Tony. ;-)

Good points - and yes should have kept it to 140 characters just for consistency. I tend to agree - I guess the interesting thing is that groups/people can apply but will this single them out and will people proactively avoid them because of it. Think not but interesting to watch.

Looking for something to jazz up your literacy lesson? Check out Domo by goannimate. A free animation tool that allows you to create funky looking animations. A great tool for any literacy lesson especially if wanting to emphasise dialog, setting and characterisation for creative writing. 

Flipped Classroom Analysis Review the following articles on the Flipped Classroom and iTunes U Real Flipped Classroom The Inverted Classroom Khan TED Thinking Myths vs. Reality The Flipped Classroom: A Full Picture Flipped Classroom Network iTunes U