Group items tagged

My sister, Sarah Adams has just won her second distance learning award this year. She is an online professor for Savannah College of Art and Design and continues to wow everyone with her incredibly high ratings, ability to engage her students, and teach tough graphic design without being in a formal classroom. YES, I'm incredibly proud of her but even more proud that she's so helpful, cooperative, and encouraging when anyone (like me) or other professors reach out and want to understand how she does it. Yes, she's my sister and yes, I'm incredibly proud. I"m so proud of you sis. She differentiates learning in amazing ways. I promise I'll get her on Every Classroom matters and ask her how she does it. If you have any questions, post them here and I'll be sure to ask.

PDF Guide to Searching Internet -current

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces

"Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces."

Twitter has new photo filters powered by Aviary (an incredible tool that you can add for free, the last time I checked, to your school's Google apps for education account) it is easy to use. This article from mashable covers the changes but wonders if it is enough to pull people away from Instagram, who pulled the "twitter cards' feature earlier this week as more social media organizations try to claim "mine mine" over their users and don't want to share. Meanwhile, those who benefit, tend to be those who share the most.

We've been doing an incredible professional development with Angela Maiers. You start with what you want to "be" before you talk about what you want to "do." This model is powerful and transformative, but honestly it took me the first 3-4 hours of the 10 hour training before the light bulb went on and I went 'oh" - Oh, my goodness, I"ve been doing some of this, but we need a common language. We start with what we want to be "scientists" "a learer" "risk takers" "bold" "Models and mentors" - -she challenged us to "be the learner, leader, citizen you wish your children to be."

This is an incredible announcement - Wikispcaces classroom with so many tools you can use. You can create projects but also measure engagement of your students from a dashboard! This is exciting. 

The Florida Center for Reading Research has created an incredibly useful set of downloadable activities aligned to common core standards for fourth and fifth grade students. If you're teaching reading, you'll want to refer to this and dowlnoad some of these PDF's.

Can you help students motivate themselves? Yes you can! Larry Ferlazzo shares some incredible ideas in this blog post over on Edutopia with more than 25,000 shares as of this time. We can help students motivate themselves.

An incredible set of Google forms that you can use in your classroom. One tip - never collect emails or you violate Google's terms of service and can lose access to the spreadsheet like we did with our Eracism project last week.

An incredible set of drama resources from Kennesaw state. Drama teachers will LOVE this page, so email it to them.

Now this site is becoming incredibly useful. Project Gutenberg is taking their free ebooks and aligning with Common Core standards on Share my lesson. If you have ipads and are using Common Core state standards, You'll want to follow this content partner on the share my lesson website to find the lessons that will integrate with these ebooks. You can download the ebooks from the website.

My year long technology project (Google 20% project) can be downloaded here along with a link to the website where you can see my student work. This was an incredible project and I'm integrating it into all of my courses this year.

If you're on pinterest and use the hashtag #classrules in the description it will show up on this lovely board. This is an example of how hashtags can do incredible things on Pinterest (like on Twitter.) Now is the time to share these.

This excellent edtech blogger has great posts and is in my "vip" column on Twitter. Plus, he's an incredibly nice guy. Take time to peruse his top posts. I'll be sharing mine soon. His top one is tools to help you integrate blooms taxonomy into your classroom. Very nice.

I love Kanban boards of all kinds. I use Fogbugz to do trouble ticket tracking for my school. They've recently given it a facelift and it is incredibly useful and could be used for everything from maintenance tracking to trouble tickets. This is a plug in for the software called Kanban board that lets me convert the tickets to a kanban board. Love it!

Ceri is from the UK and is going to live demo a program he's written for Kinect (that he plans to give away for free) that emulates the program Soundbeam. This program lets you move parts of your body and plays music and is going to be an incredible thing to use for special ed students with the Kinect. This is his twitter handle. Follow him to Keep up with what he's doing.

Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.

The strength of Khan Academy's tutorials is content and clear presentation of this content. I didn't find either in Educreations' showcased examples: most could just be presented as a good old slideshow. Granted, a few do have an audio comment. But you can do that with slidecasts too (e.g. you can synch an audio file with your slides on Screencast.net or on MyPlick.com) Moreover, there is no way to caption such Educreations presentations including audio for the deaf, which means they can't be used in schools in US, Italy and other countries that have laws imposing accessibility for all for educational materials. And you can't subtitle them for people who don't know the original language, which severely curtails the potential use. Khan Academy, on the other hand has an international captioning/subtitling team - see http://gigaom.com/video/khan-academy-universal-subtitles/ . So OK, Educreations have an iPad app - the point is that Khan Academy's tutorials don't need one. The real difference is that Educreations' content is crowdsourced and the content of Khan Academy's tutorials isn't: not enough to outweigh the accessibility and internationalization issues above. Teachers can already produce their own online tutorials as slideshows, slidecasts or videos that can be captioned/subtitled in other languages with other platforms.

This is the Microsoft Research so.cl website (pronounced social) that is being tested in a few universities. I find it incredibly interesting that students sign in using Facebook instead of Windows Live ID, the preferred sign in for other services.