Tech Tips
December 2014: Volume 2 Number 8
Holiday Greetings!
Happy Holidays!
Piktochart
"Piktochart is a great web app that allows students to create products that other students will actually WANT to read. It lets students combine visuals, text and interactive web elements into a dynamic, eye-catching presentation."
FrontrowED
"This works on all platforms and I don’t think I can say enough about how groundbreaking this program has been for us. The students work on different areas. If they miss a question, it shows them an immediate video and tells them two other students in the classroom they can ask for help. The coins add up to go to the piggy store to make the hottest fashion piggy. The Students pretest in all the math domains from k-8 and then let the learning begin."
Skoolbo
"The third blended learning tool rocking my classroom is a reward that the students absolutely love called Skoolbo. Our classroom was contacted last week as we are approaching “Super Classroom status” having answered over 22,000 questions correctly. Students can play through a software download on the computer, web or as an app. Students make their own avatar, choose a plane and off they go. It switches between literature and numeracy and starts very basic."
Studying for the Test by Taking It
"The beauty of broadening testing beyond basic assessment is that the approach can be applied at home, easily, for students of all ages. Most young children squirm through their homework, but many love to play teacher. By cutting short “study time” and asking them to be the teacher, parents can make the session more fun, more interactive and a richer learning experience. Teaching is self-testing of an especially potent kind.
Ditto for making an outline of a chapter (with the book closed), or discussing the material with a friend or roommate. One reason scientists suspect that studying in pairs or groups can be helpful is that students are forced to talk to one another about the material — or better yet, argue about it. These are all forms of self-examination, and as such deepen learning more than passively rereading or reviewing the material."
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8 Uplifting Quotes for Discouraged Students
"Some students excel under pressure, and there are those who crumble beneath it. It’s easy to praise the students who continuously work hard, but let’s try not to berate those who find it difficult to focus."
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20 Tips for Putting Google's 20% Time in Your Classroom
"Two innovative educators share tons of tips for creating innovative, inquiry-based classrooms in only one day a week"
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Web Literacy: Where the Common Core Meets Common Sense
"Research shows that students primarily use one search engine and then only look at the first page of results. They can quickly give up or settle for something “close enough” when they don’t find the information they’re looking for. Huge amounts of time are being wasted in searches void of the rigor of research."
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36 Online Games Kids Can Play to Learn About Engineering
36 Online Games Kids Can Play to Learn About Engineering
"Try Engineering is a site that hosts lesson plans and games designed to get students interested in engineering. The lesson plans, more than 100 of them, are arranged according age and engineering topic. The lesson plans can be downloaded as PDFs."
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A Blueprint for Twitter and Cell Phones in Class
Excerpt:
"10. Some tools make using social media in class easier. Joe uses TweetDeck to view tweets from class and keep them organized. His students gather tweets in one place to display them using Storify. He uses Tagboard to display his class’s tweets on a projector for everyone to see.
11. Social media in class can draw out the most reluctant participators. “Those students who are super shy and don’t normally raise their hand — and that is almost all of them because they’re eighth-grade students — I saw a huge jump in engagement,” he said. His English language learner population especially appreciates using Twitter in class because they can think about how to word questions before posting them."
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Why There's No Such Thing As an "F" in Computer Science
"It’s arguable that no matter the context, the root of fear is always the unknown. The unfortunate reality, though, is that opportunity and innovation also lurk in the unknown. Growth, change, and innovation can only come from having the courage to challenge the unknown, and make it known."
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The Epic BYOD Toolchest
"You've got every device under the sun in front of you. Now what apps are you going to use? Here are the apps or app categories that I recommend you test for your school. There are lots of apps, and these are just my opinion based on what I've used with my students or successfully tested."
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Studies Show Video Games' Impact on Face to Face Teaching
"“Formative assessment is thought of as one of the most important classroom practices to support student learning,” said Barry Fishman, professor of learning technologies at the University of Michigan School of Information and School of Education. “And our study indicates that teachers who use games for formative assessment conduct assessment more frequently and report fewer barriers.”
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Read and Download 250+ Art Books from the Getty Museum
"Six months ago I shared with you theMetropolitan Museum of Art's collection of nearly 400 free art history books. Now the Getty Museum has put more than 250 art books online for anyone to read online and or download. You can find all of these books in the Getty Publications Virtual Library. You can search through the collection by author, keyword, or title. Alternatively, you can simply browse the collections. All of the free books are also available on Google Books."
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Reflection, Conversation, and Socratic Spaces
"Learning communities are networks, systems that themselves grow and learn, propelled by the interactions of their members. Socratic spaces are a vital network element enabling learning for both individuals and groups, created by a collection of mindsets -- respecting a conflicting point of view,empathizing with the speaker, understanding cultural perspective -- and methods of knowing when to ask the probing "why" and "how" questions to drive thinking deeper. Paulo Freire identified these critical discussions as essential to learning: where our ideas conflict, our potential to learn is greatest. Where two beams of light intersect, their brilliance is most intense. In developing the minds of the future, we add the lever of technology and potentially move the earth."
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10 STEM Apps that Teach You Math
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Strongsville City Schools Instructional Technology Information
Contact me if you have any questions or would like help using these tools.
Email: turner@strongnet.org
Website: http://www.strongnet.org/InstructionalTechnology
Phone: 440-572-7067