UWCSEA Teachers

For as long as I have been involved in education, the focus for finding the key to fixing education has always been about providing professional development for the teachers and administrators. The philosophy is top-down with the intent that knowledge will eventually trickle down to benefit the students.

Group texting, silent in-class discussion (using texts), live polling

"We all know that we can share via iTunes over USB to any Mac/PC with a recent version of iTunes. Well would you believe the same thing works without a cable and it doesn't have to be the Mac/PC that manages the devices. It means that any teacher can access all the students files on a device that has been "Saved to iTunes".  You can even pick up the work, mark it and hand it back to the iPad whilst the iPad is still being used by the kids (unbeknown to the user!). As consumers we can sync over wifi and share files via iTunes. You can do this with a class set of iPads by attaching each device once to the teacher's computer and checking the "sync over wifi" option and "enable". Don't sync -just unplug each device. Provided you are on the same network, you can then open and close files on the class set from your computer."

Discover rock secrets through these activities. Create a rock collection as you learn about the three main types of rock, find out how to tell the different rock types apart, and see how rocks change from one type into another!

"There are thousands of apps out there that allow you to compose music, here are 10 whether you're a current producer or simply a production enthusiast, you'll be able to get some use out of them"

To help schools with the tasks of creating an iBook using iBooks Author an iBook has been created that you can download here that provides the following information:What is an iBook?Content and Design of your iBookiBooks AuthorPreviewing and Publishing your iBookHow to share your iBook copyResources

a couple of word cloud ideas

101 ways to use Tagxedo

some great ideas

Going deeper into the education sphere, YouTube has just launched a digital citizenship curriculum for teachers, which includes training in things like how to report content, cyberbullying, safety modes, and copyright. In order to be more easily accessed in schools, last year YouTube started offering a service that redirects all YouTube links to its Education channel, YouTube.com/Education. Check out the new digital citizenship curriculum

Educational Flash web sites aside, the iPad is a great device for browsing the internet. At the heart of this is Apple's flagship browser, Safari. Overall, Safari is a capable browser on the iPad but there is some functionality missing from the app when compared to its big brother on Macs. Fortunately, iOS has enough tricks available for third party apps to fill in the gaps that Safari for iPad doesn't address. Here are three alternative browsers that I use regularly to perform tasks I think are necessary for educational use and general use that I can't do using Apple's default browser.

Teaching Activity PDF. By Naomi Shihab Nye and Linda Christensen. 4 pages. A teaching idea utilizing famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's work to inspire students.

What do Jeff Kinney's popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 have in common? What about Gossip Girl: A Novel, Cicely von Ziegesar's catty romance and The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson's 1979 Newbery Honor book? While clear distinctions exist between each book's literary merit, age appropriateness, and reader appeal, these titles possess one similarity--they sit within the same Lexile text complexity band.**

"In recent weeks I have playing with the exciting combination of Easy Portfolio and Coaches Eye inside of the PE classroom. This has enabled the easy recording and storing of video analysis activities. Check out the apps working in concert together below."

Super-cool woman who is researching how women are portrayed in video games. She is doing great things! So interesting. 

"Below are some of the top web apps for students looking for helpful tools to focus while online, as selected by Google's Chrome Web Apps Guru, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. StayFocusd - StayFocusd is a productivity extension that helps you focus on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.  You can restrict entire sites or just parts of them for as long or short of a time as necessary. Todo.ly- Todo.ly is an intuitive and easy to use online to-do list and task manager. It helps you get organized and get things done by organizing your tasks into projects and subprojects, adding customized icons and labels, and assigning due dates to your tasks. Read Later Fast - This app lets you save pages to read later - online or offline, and fast. All you have to do is right click and save the page for later to avoid having too many open tabs on your browser. Write Space - Write Space is a customizable, full-screen text editor that lives in your browser. It is designed to minimize the distractions that come between you and your writing.  This app also auto saves your work and works offline. StudyStack - StudyStack helps students memorize anything with millions of flashcards that have already been added to the site or the ability to create your own.  There are dozens of flashcard categories including foreign languages, math, LSAT and GRE. Graph.tk - An app for math majors, Graph.tk is an app that brings the graphing capabilities of your calculator to the browser. It's easy to use and good for plotting graphs based on equations. WordReference - For anyone taking a foreign language course or studying abroad, this extension gets you the translations you need in a fast and easy way.  Since it's an extension and placed right next to the address bar, you don't even have to leave the site you're on for a quick translation. BONUS APP: Panic Button - Ok, this app won't help you pass your class, but it might just come in handy during

"there is most certainly an extraordinary array of options for videos which expand educators' understandings and inspire advances in 21st century learning."

For all your stop watch needs! Timing class activities, 30 sec discussions, think-pair-share ...

A chrome extension that helps you stay focused on the web. Great for MS/HS students especially.

Seeing many possibilities with this - like a QR code but transmitted by sound, great demo video on this site