EBTL2

The Google for Doodle Competition has been transformed in to activities and virtual field trips for all grade levels.

I saw this in my Twitter feed a few times today. Definitely intriguing.

For all you mathematically inclined types out there... For all you writers, best one liner - "After watching the video myself, I checked to make sure I still had my wallet and my watch."

Looking for STEM activities for iPads and other tablets? The Concord Consortium has been converting their activities to HTML5 for physics, chemistry, biology, math and Earth and space science.

I wish I could convince some of my skeptical colleagues at RMHS how valuable Twitter has been for my own self-directed professional development. For the most part, they think I tweet about random daily happening and any comments about my participation in social media are tongue in cheek. I shrug it off because they don't understand the truth of the value of social media to me. Here is a list of people UNDER 30 YEARS OLD worth following to enhance your own social media self-directed professional development experience. Enjoy!

Is the PC dead? If so, what is the life span of our smart phone, iPad, and Chrome book? Technology is changing so fast, so how can we possibly keep up? What is the best product for my needs? There are a lot of questions, but also many amazing product ideas. How about "turning our tables, floors and windows into touchscreen displays" or using your "touchscreen wrapped around a coffee cup"?

Is the PC dead? If so, what is the life span of our smart phone, iPad, and Chrome book? Technology is changing so fast, so how can we possibly keep up? What is the best product for my needs? There are a lot of questions, but also many amazing product ideas. How about "turning our tables, floors and windows into touchscreen displays" or using your "touchscreen wrapped around a coffee cup"?

Interesting article on setting guidelines for limiting the amount of time kids spend on a device. Also brings up issue of parents not really knowing how to help their child use the device for educational purposes. My guess is that most parents defer to their children as the experts on their devices and yield to what they want for apps.

This week's theme is looking at student work for deeper learning. The resources are outstanding. If you haven't seen it before, watch the video Austin's Butterfly.

So I know that we all have heard about multi-sensory learning for a long time now, but this blog post about multi-sensory study skills has some good insights and explanations about why some of these things work. You can never really have too many alternative, multi-sensory approaches to use with your students and it's sometimes hard to stay fresh with these ideas.

I like the idea of working with the students to figure out which ways they learn best, and how they can customize studying to fit their needs. I think too often we're guilty of pushing methods that have worked for us personally, but they may not work for someone else. It's a good reminder to be open, and to continually ask kids what makes information more memorable for them. I'd also love to see real study skills instruction in the middle school (as a course). I think many times teachers tell kids to "study" for a test, but we haven't really taught them what that means, or what that looks like.

I have not been happy with the output of my Twitter account. I have come to the conclusion that I am not following enough people, and that some of the people I am following are not right for me. I started to do a search on the internet for Twitter and education and came up with this resource. It includes a long, varied, categorized list of people and organizations to follow in education. The categories include such topics as Special Education, Technology, iPads, Design, General, etc. I have started following several of the people/organizations recommended by this resource and am already getting much more out of Twitter.

Jan, this is really helpful. I've had a similar feeling about my Twitter account. I'll take a look at some of the hashtags in the article you posted and hopefully we'll both get more out of it!

It's so obvious! Why didn't I figure this out? Awesome step by step guide in the form of a Google Drive Doc.

Thanks for sharing Kerry - great directions - very easy to follow. I like the format. I was curious as to whose directions they were so I followed the URL at the bottom. It's from Brevard School District's technology page and it has some great information and links for all grades.

Thank you! I'm always looking for new ways to use Edline! I'll be trying this out soon.

Real life skills that I certainly did not learn from school. I think my parents taught me most of them. Others I had to self-teach. The rest I still don't know how to do! Should schools teach these skills? Or should they be parents' responsibility?

The coding caught my eye as we have had a push in the last month or so to expose students to more computer science opportunities. That's a good example of something we should be teaching in school. Teaching any of these concepts in school isn't a bad idea, but what would it replace? Kids could easily practice some of these basic, practical skills within their own families.

Good to know that our business and technology curriculum is relevant. We teach taxes, budgeting, finance, coding, resume building to those who take our electives. I actually had RWPS students come to me this morning asking if it would be viable to teach a business elective on sutainability.

I follow Jerry Blumengarten on Twitter and have had a few Tweet conversations with him. He has great insights about tech integration that change learning, rather than for the sake of tech integration. This page is like his version of a Diigo page for BYOD resourcs. It links to a lot of great BYOD blogs, articles, lesson examples, etc. Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents. Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience.

This is a handy reference tool with easy to read examples for your students.

I'm not sure I agree with the cons here, at least at the high school level. If students want to cheat they will find a way to cheat, whether they have technology or not. They need to learn from those poor choices and mature over time. As far as distractions go, I'd rather have a student respond quickly to a text and move on with their work on their phone in my class than to forbid them from using the powerful tools on the phone entirely.

This is featured on the Edline Help page http://eec2.edline.com/

This is a cool idea. I never thought of using a blog this way. I'm not sure I agree with the say the example video organizes the class Edline website, but it definitely helpful for using Edline to its fullest extend when flipping. Awesome resource!

This is a valuable resource for so many features of Edline. I like the blog aspect and am planning to try this out in our class. Using Edline to flip the classroom is fairly simple but had great enhanced features. Love this site.

Written by a professor at Framingham State. A nice reflection of the benefits and pitfalls of blogging in the classroom. Something I need to work on is how to continue to assign writing (the more practice they get the better they get at it) without making it so overwhelming for me to give meaningful feedback. Also, he talks about how it is hard to get students to comment on one another's posts and how to monitor it online.

This was great to read (and a little satisfying) as these are exactly the same stuggles I face using blogs with my students. Practice has always been a main focus. We always talk about giving students as many "at bats" as possible, but like it was mentioned, with more writing offering quality feedback for every piece is sacrificed. I've experimented with different methods to offset this, but nothing is sticking yet. The student commenting piece is also frustrating because so much scaffolding and monitoring needs to be done for students to do it well that you have to set aside more class time than you have. I would have thought at the college level this would be easier to manage, but apparently not.

This is an interesting and instructive post about one person's revised workflow as a paperless business and household. Worth a read.

This is a quick way to compare different blogging platforms that can be used with students in the classroom. Seventh and eighth grade teachers have had a lot of success with Edublogs at Parker, and we've been looking into beginning blogs with the sixth graders. I've also heard good things about Blogger, from Google, and wonder if others have used it? The students already have Google accounts and use Google Drive regularly to save and revise writing assignments. I believe it's also free, which is the right price in the world of public education, but often free accounts also come with limits. Curious to hear about others' experiences.

The chart mentions a $39.95/year fee for an Edublogs Pro user to access a lot of the features. A partial work around for this is to buy a bulk upgrade for $99 dollars. This gives you 5 credits to update accounts to Pro accounts. They roll over from year to year, so you could update your own blog account for 5 years for half the price.

I love Tumblr as a blogging tool, also. It's easy to use and provides a very polished looking site.

I agree that students should know how computers work and that the "Hour of Code" was a good experience for many students, but I think the focus of schools should begin with web literacy, typing, and how to use basic programs such as Word.

If we look at computer programming/coding as a replacement of the skills you mentioned we will not serve the students of today or the future. The skills you mention are valuable in and of themselves but many of these block based coding applications offer a platform for students to express creativity, develop problem solving and collaboration skills, as well as expose kids to an expanding field of study and career.

Why pit those skills against each other? I don't think you can have one without the other.

During Monday's class I overheard Sharon Burke talk about the possibility (or probabilty?) of the high school getting a 3D printer. I heard her say that one of the kids really wanted it "because it was fun". This article about a middle school experience with their 3D printer included the beliefs of play, passion and purpose. One of the students featured even wrestled with persistance. I hope we hear more about this 3D printer in the future and how our students are using it for their learning opportunites.

We wrote an REF grant and given how cool this technology is and the extensive cross curricula application, I will be very surprised if REF doesn't fund it. It has relevance in almost every subject. So let's make a little bet: if they fund it, I owe you a coffee--if they don't, you owe me. :)