Group items tagged

This is the "site community" for my blog -- I'm learning a lot about what people have marked and the annotations feature is really cool. If you blog or have a website, you should look at the automatically created site community -- also check it out for those sites you really enjoy reading -- you may turn up some of their great old posts that you've not read!

This is a sample of the "site community" that is created around every website-- all bloggers should take a look at the site community created around their own site. Cool!

If you have older kids and want to Mystery Skype - I'd like to start setting some up - tweet me through this Skype profile or via Twitter. I have students at a variety of times -- 5 classes. ;-) Join in and find others!!!! This is for you. Set a goal of how many mystery skype's you'd like to do in your classes. I'd like to do once a month eventually but for now, if I can just get for each class, I'm going to take it from there.

The Taboo show talks about things that are hard to discuss. The most recent show talks about how to teach with a broken heart. I know I've been broken hearted enough to quit at least twice in my short 12 year career and most teachers I know have been there. This is an important topic with lots of great discussion from one teacher who is there and some who've been there. If this is you, take a listen and I hope this helps. "Even the best teachers feel disillusioned about teaching at times. However, some are brokenhearted and dispirited about what teaching has become, yet continue teaching because they have limited alternatives. Is there a solution? Follow:@blairteach, @JessedHagopian @coolcatteacher, @bamradionetwork"

This looks like a very cool English game that uses all kinds of shows to teach. Thinking that ESL teachers will want to test this one out. Mau Butler send me this message about this new site: Hello Vicki, I've been an ESL teacher for 20 years, in several countries, and a reader of your coolcatteacher blog for a while. Congratulations. You do excellent work. :) For the past 3 years, I've been building a very innovative approach to teaching and learning English, which is now ready to use. Considering your work, I thought you'd be interested in trying it out. It's called Tripppin and I strongly recommend you see it for yourself on www.tripppin.com but this is us in a nutshell: "Tripppin is an English practice platform, which blends offline and online learning experiences into a game, a music channel, cooking shows, animation, entertaining videos shot around the world, and excellent support for English teachers everywhere." Hope you can have a look :) Thank you.

@Coolcatteacher share this K12online Web 2.0 booklet stating that classroom's considered Web 2.0 are held up by 6 pillars: Internet Safety, Information Literacy, Internet Citizenship, Internet Teamwork, Intentional Internet Activities, and an engaged teacher.

New list of 100 edu twitterers

Lists do always get a lot of people riled up, but I did find some interesting tweeters on this list to follow. Some of them I wouldn't add, but some are cool. If you want to see some great twitterers -- my follow list is around 1600 and there are some amazing people that I'm following who just totally blow me away. (Add more daily.) Just go to http://www.twitter.com/coolcatteacher and click following to see them. Twitter is really a great tool for learning.

The information at the advocates for digital citizenship, safety, and success about the I read blocked blogs week. This loosely joined group of educators has created a central clearinghouse for activities such as this. Create activities that fit within digital citizenship and join and post. We have a blog, wiki, and more information -- everything is linked at http://www.netvibes.com/coolcatteacher#Ad4dcss -- Join in.

I strongly encourage you to join in the growing international group advocates for digital citizenship, safety, and success just to see information that we have and to add to it.

The ustream for the Web 2 smackdown and a list of links from the session on a wiki page. Some people don't like the term "smackdown" which originated from wrestling (guess it shows my southern roots) -- just meant to be a lot of fun and sharing - not supposed to be too serious. Lots of great tools shared here. The ustream is great if you have time, if you don't, there are quite a few links in the diigo list I share here.

I've updated my BYOD toolbox with some more of my favorite apps and tools for Edutopia. If you need some ideas, then, here you go! Epic BYOD Toolbox https://t.co/qMCCSRpWrJ by @coolcatteacher | @cw…

If you use Diigo but are researching a certain topic for a book or term paper and also use Evernote, I recommend setting up an ifttt.com recipe similar to this one I'm using for my collaborative writing book. Everything tagged "collaborative writing" goes automatically to my collaborative writing book. You could use this for a course. You could take everything on Diigo tagged with the course number into a notebook (or into a Google spreadsheet, for that matter.) There are many other sources of information you can use to collect information on a topic in one place. 

Flipboard is an excellent tool (now it has curated magazines you can distribute for your classes.) It is a wonderful RSS reader and monitoring tool.

Don't collect personal data in Google forms!

This is my most popular post on Facebook and I still agree with the conclusions in this article.

Teaching students with new tools, enthusiasm, and belief that teaching is a noble calling

It is finally here. Here are the details on our Flat Classroom global book club. (click the link for more) Every week for 10 weeks we will meet at an alternating time - 12 hours apart. (For the East Coast USA it is Sundays at 6 pm Eastern or Monday mornings at 6 am eastern)  Visit our Book club calendar to convert these times to your Time Zone. Subscribe to this calendar via Google calendar to keep up with events.This is Sunday evenings at 22:00GMT alternating with Monday mornings at 10:00GMT in our Blackboard Collaborate room https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2007066&password=M.065891D192F8072208BF5756999CE0 .   The book club is free and everyone is welcome. #flatclass Book Club Meeting Times Week and Date Time Topic of Conversation Week 1: Sunday March 11 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 1 - Flattening Classrooms through Global Collaboration (p 1-17) Chapter 2 - Impact on Learning: Research in the Global Collaborative Classroom (p18-30) Week 2: Monday, March 19 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 3 - Step 1: Connection (p 31-61) Week 3: Sunday, March 25 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 4 - Step 2: Communication (p 62-96) Week 4: Monday, April 2 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 5 - Step 3: Citizenship (p 97-125) Take a break. Week 5: Sunday, April 15 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 6 - Step 4: Contribution and Collaboration (p 126-157) Week 6: Monday, April 23 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 7 - Step 5: Choice (p 158-196) Week 7: Sunday, April 29 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 8 - Step 6: Creation (p197-214) Week 8: Monday, May 7 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 9 - Step 7: Celebration (p 215-234) Week 9: Sunday, May 13 22:00 GMT (6 pm EDT) Chapter 10 - Designing and Managing a Global Collaborative Project (p 235-267) Week 10: Monday, May 21 10:00 GMT (6 am EDT) Chapter 11 - Challenge-Based Professional Development (p 268-293) Chapter 12: Rock the World (p 293 - 304)  We're also inviting the educators featured in each chapter to be with us for the conversations about "th

I was rereading this old post for some writing I'm doing about filtering and it struck me that although this post was written in 2008 it reads like it was written this morning. I think there are some very valid arguments to share as you discuss content filtering in your school. When asked about how to help kids with allergies, researchers have made the bold statement , "Let them eat dirt! " As I read these articles, I was struck with the parallel to the content filtration debate that rages in education today.

This post of mine has started being reshared again. It helps you see how you can use wordclouds with just about anything (including surveys.) A Quick tutorial.

Remember to sign up for the Elementary art project Everyartist Live! for November 21. It will be here before you know it and you need to start your projects now.