Tech Tips
October 2015: Volume 3- Number 18
“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Plotly
"Plotly is a dream come true for stat junkies: an easy, user-friendly Chrome app for creating beautiful graphs and charts, complete with analysis tools and easy data importing. Plotly can take in and analyze data from Excel, Google Docs... rendering data in a variety of visualizations, analyze data with a variety of tools, and work on projects collaboratively with other users. A flexible tool used by everyone from students to professionals, Plotly is worth a spin if you deal with charts, numbers, and data visualizations on a regular basis."
Pixlr Express
"Pixlr Express is a fun and powerful photo editor that lets you quickly crop, resize, and fine-tune any picture, all in a completely ad-free experience. Choose from over 2 million combinations of free effects, overlays, and borders to further personalize your images. Pixlr Express makes you look like a pro, even if you’ve never edited a photo before. "
Permanent Clipboard
"Allows you to store and access multiple elements in clipboard
How many times you wanted to keep important, but hard to remember, information at your mouse click without leaving the browser? Now you can achieve it with Permanent clipboard. This extensions allows you to save browser clipboard element with friendly name at your fingertips. "Google Tone
Broadcast any URL to computers within earshot.
Google Tone turns on your computer's microphone (while the extension is on) and uses your computer's speakers to exchange URLs with nearby computers connected to the Internet. You can use Google Tone to send the URL for any web page, including news stories, pictures, documents, blog posts, products, YouTube videos, recipes—even search results. Any computer within earshot (including over a phone or Hangout) that also has the Google Tone extension installed and turned ON can receive a Google Tone notification.Seen on Twitter: @adnanedtech (Alphabet Taught to Kids These Days)
Google Drawings Interactive Posters
Excerpt:
2. Images: Don’t run to Google Images and do any old image search! Many of those images are copyright protected, and letting students do that isn’t encouraging them to be good digital citizens. Instead, within Google Drawings, go to “Insert > Image” or click the image button in the toolbar. Then select the “Search” tab at the top. This will search for Creative Commons-licenses images, which students can use and publish. (For more on that, see my post “How to get and use free images the RIGHT way in class“.)
10 Ways to Help Students Become "Future Ready"
Excerpt:
Here are 10 ways we can help students prepare for the workforce of the future:
1. Give students as much control of their learning as we can. If the workforce is shifting constantly, students will need to be able to learn on their own. We can empower them to find what they need when they need it. We can help them tailor their education to what works for them so they’ll know how to do it later.
2. Help students become adept at learning new tools....
DOK is Hard: Let's Talk about It #DOKchat
"Technology is NOT DOK Levels
It drives me batty to see a mapping of DOK levels with technology, as if the tech creates critical thinkers. You can use Google Slides at DOK 1 or DOK 4. It is simply a platform to display your thinking. Use a Google Hangout to recite your spelling words is DOK 1. Use a Google Hangout to interview a book author can be DOK 2, 3 or 4 depending on the types of questions asked and how the student responds to answers. Is the student engaging in deep critical thinking, extending the conversation or just gathering facts?"
GoNoodle
“We LOVE GoNoodle in my first grade class! It really helps us get moving and improve our moods. Thanks for providing an amazing free classroom resource like this!”
Using Tech & Twitter
"Learning does not improve when you use technology. You have to change the task. How does technology make a student-centered environment more feasible? How are your students collaborating together and with other people around the world? How are you able to give high-quality feedback faster? To build critical thinkers, you need to be able to give feedback often, technology makes this possible. Where do you get enough professional development to make using technology in your classroom truly transformative?
There are thousands and thousands of educators on Twitter who you can ask questions from and get ideas from. Shifting your teaching to include technology is too hard to go it alone. Luckily you do not have to, utilize Twitter to ask questions 24/7."
The Seven Habits of Highly Affective Teachers
"Want to make your school a better place for everyone? Make emotional health a habit.
Anxious, overconfident, curious, indifferent, angry, amused, lonely, hopeful, embarrassed, empowered, afraid, excited, diminished—teachers have seen all these emotions emerge from students as they engage with classroom content. Emotional responses to lessons often go through students' minds before they even begin to think about the material: This stuff is stupid/awesome/beyond me. I'm not comfortable with this. Finally, something I'm good at. Maybe somebody will notice I can't read. Let's see her find a mistake in that one—it's perfect. Does the teacher know I didn't study this last night?"
The Paperless Trail #LessonUP
"#LessonUP is a Twitter chat that was born out of a discussion between ourselves (@eduappsandmore) and Alice Keeler (@alicekeeler) about supporting teachers on lesson planning. #LessonUP will be a forum where teachers can bring their lesson ideas and seek ways to “upgrade” the lesson using EdTech or simply working to increase the DOK level of the activities/questioning.
Some expectations of #LessonUp:
- Realization that we never have a perfect lesson plan. The input of others can potentially make it better.
- New ideas, new technologies, new strategies are always coming up in teaching. We get better with feedback, seek it and accept it, but be polite about it.
- Create your lesson plan in a Google Doc or other platform that allows for commenting.
- We recognize we do not know everything and there are a lot of good ideas out there that we want to know about.
- Make sure your document is publicly visible and anyone can comment.
- Each week there will be a topic that focuses on one specific part of lesson planning.
- The chat will revolve around lesson planning ideas and strategies for that topic.
- Participants are encouraged to tweet their lesson plans.
- Participants are highly encouraged to provide meaningful feedback on the lesson plans.
- Make a commitment to help a teacher improve their lesson plan each week!
- Please be sure to share all plans with eduappsandmore@gmail.com prior to beginning of each chat.
- 21st century teaching methods are new to all of us"
SCS Instructional Technology Information
Contact me if you have any questions or would like help using these tools.
Email: vturner@scsmustangs.org
Website: http://www.strongnet.org/InstructionalTechnology
Phone: 440-572-7067
Twitter: @vturner8