EdTech@NSCD
All the Tech & Innovation News You Can Use • Issue #9
EdTech@NSCD News
New News
- I attended a Chicago Humanities Week lecture at Northwestern on Sunday featuring a former colleague, Nichole Pinkard, who is an assistant professor at NW. She held a discussion with UC-Irvine cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito on their work with the Connected Learning Theory. I'm intrigued by both Nichole's and Mimi's work which is intertwined and the potential implications for our direction with technology. Here's a recent keynote by Mimi if you are interested in learning more.
- Caitlin McLennan and Claire Detjen hosted two Mystery Skype calls last week with schools in Wisconsin and in New Jersey. If you are not familiar with this activity, check out this Edutopia article and let me know if you're interested in trying this out in your classroom. I can find classes for you to connect with.
- This Monday, I will not be hosting an afterschool drop-in session. Attendance has been low and I'm re-thinking about how to do similar sessions during the school day.
- I'm looking to visit more classrooms just to hang out and see what's going on. Let me know if you're open to a visit!
Old News
- NSCDS middle school and lower faculty should email me (Lucy) with requests for apps to be installed on their school or student iPads. I will then approve the request or ask for more information and the IT department will install. Lower school should email Jeff with their requests and he will approve. Please cc me so that I can see the apps that are of interest to you.
- For subscription services, generally speaking, you should go through your department for these purchases. For example, if you need (and will use) a particular subscription-based tool or app such as Quizlet, purchase it and seek reimbursement from your department. Over the course of this year, I am planning on developing a process for requesting subscriptions prior to the next school year so that we can obtain bulk pricing or negotiate pricing based on users with specific companies.
Using the iPad to Create Art
How do you curate and organize websites of interest?
I'm constantly exploring how to improve my workflow and hopefully, I can provide some ideas for others on how to manage their own. I've been a big fan of bookmarking resources to web-based tools such as del.ic.ious and Diigo. The newest tool in this genre is Wakelet which is web-based and offers an IOS app. I copy and paste links on the website to make collections of materials; additionally, there is a Chrome extension so that I can bookmark websites while browsing the internet. These collections can be made public and embedded on other websites or kept private. The best part of Wakelet is that it's FREE!
Bookmarking resources as I stumble upon them is useful because I can always go back to my collections of links and find something when I need it. See below for how I've been organizing iOS apps and more to share with our school community. I've also included a video overview of this tool.