Fisher's Landing Elementary

It never fails-you're gathering materials for an upcoming class or presentation and all you can find is the pdf version of an important document. You need to make some changes but that is not easily done in PDF format, so what do you do?

Imaginine a classroom, before the bell rings, students walking in for 50 minutes of instruction, and a video playing, with no audio besides some appropriately spacey music, illustrating The Known Universe. How compelling can you be?

Visions on Earth is one of those resources that I'd be inclined to let students just browse through and let their imaginations wander. Ask your students to pick out some favorite photographs and write out some questions that the pictures prompt in their minds. Then have students try to find those answers online or in books.

Aviary offers the most complete set of image creation and editing tools of all the services.

FlauntR is a suite of free, web-based image editing tools. There are five tools included in the FlauntR package. In EditR you can touch-up your digital photos. StylR allows you to apply digital effects like backgrounds and frames to you images. PicasR gives you the ability to blend colors, effects, and images. TextR can be used to add text and banners to your images. And PrintR provides a postcard, poster, and printing service (you do have to pay for the printing).

Individual or Batch

Any Meeting could be a great tool for delivering lessons and tutorial sessions online. Activate the recording option so that people who miss your live lesson can watch it at their convenience.

AccuTeach could be a nice place to find other educators with whom you can share lesson ideas and materials. As the video above points out, the blog and calendar option is useful for keeping parents informed of their students' assignments.

Turf Mutt's lesson plans offer some nice ideas for hands-on Environmental Science learning activities.

Another must see Mastery Connect is both an online standards tracking tool (parts of it are free) and a free iPhone/iPod/iPad app. Because the app is truly free, I'll start with it. The Mastery Connect app is a handy way to keep the Common Core standards accessible while you teach. The app sorts the common core standards by grade level, subject and strand. This is REALLY nice for quickly locating and referencing standards. Mastery Connect the website is the real gem. The site is brilliantly designed, easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing and best of all, it works the way you think it should. With the Mastery Connect Master Tracker, teachers can assess core standards, monitor student performance and report student progress to parents and administrators. Master Tracker makes formative assessment that is standards based manageable to keep track of. Rearrange standards in the Master Tracker based on the order that you teach them in. View only the standards you are currently assessing, and view the entire standard as a pop-up. Within Mastery Connect, teachers can create and share common assessments. Similar in feel to other social networks, Mastery Connect lets you connect with other educators to share assessments, interact and offer each other support. It is easy to expand your PLN into the space, just find teachers with similar interests and goals and start sharing! And now for my VERY favorite part- bubble sheet scoring. Mastery Connect uses GradeCam technology to make assessment about as quick as it could be. Just hold up bubble sheets to your webcam or a document cam and it is instantly scored and entered into the Master Tracker associated with the student it belongs to and the standard it is addressing. Seriously cool. I am not a big fan of multiple choice testing (mostly because I think it is a lazy way to find out what a student knows and doesn't give a true picture of what a student knows or can do) but I think I have figured out ho

Especially for music teachers.