Tips from your TIS

If you’d like an online space to store, organize, and access all your favorite web sites or if you have a number of bookmarks on Safari and would like to transfer them easily to a PC, check out del.icio.us.

‘del.icio.us’ keeps an online record of all the web sites you would usually ‘bookmark’ in Safari, Internet Explorer, or Firefox. Because it’s online, you can access your account from any computer, anywhere. Each time you bookmark a site, you have the option of ‘tagging’ that bookmark with a keyword. This creates an organized and cross-referenced list of all the resources you bookmark.

What makes del.icio.us unique is your ability to share your bookmarks with others, and follow what other people bookmark. Each ‘tag’ creates a unique web address to which you can direct colleagues or students easily. For an example, check out the account I created of resources for social studies teachers. To see what others are bookmarking, click on the ’saved by …’ link under each bookmark. This opens up another page where you can choose to browse what other people have tagged with similar keywords. What began with one bookmark connects you with a network of resources organized by people all over the world.

If you are interested in learning more about this tool, visit the help page or contact a TIS.

Groupwork. It can be a powerful learning experience for students, but a headache for teachers to manage. So much so that I was often tempted to avoid assigning group projects rather than develop new ways to keep students interested and individually accountable. Yet, many companies depend upon results from teams of people working in distant places, and even more so as the world becomes smaller, technologically speaking. Teaching these life skills may be almost as important as teaching our content.

Wikis are a large part of this new global collaboration trend. Many of us may know of Wikipedia, but this extraordinary example is only one of many wikis online. In fact, many teachers are now using wikis as tools for group work in their classes. Lee LeFever and the Common Craft Show provide a good introduction to this Web 2.0 tool. As you watch this short 4 minute film, be thinking about how this tool could be used to redefine groupwork in your classroom.

With a wiki, students can add and modify content to pages you set create. They can have discussions, ask you questions, and post new resources. And, an added managerial bonus, every change a student makes is recorded, easily viewable from their profile or the history of a given page.

Group results, individual accountability.

Two popular hosting agencies for wikis are WetPaint and Wikispaces. Each are now offering ad-free versions of their commercial wikis, with settings that keep your students’ identities and work secure. WetPaint hosts its own education support page and Wikispaces is offering its premium services to K-12 educators free of charge. Visit these sites or contact your technology integration specialist for more information about using wikis in your classroom!

If you would like to view examples of wikis created in each of these wiki providers, I recently created this wiki with a group of elementary teachers in wikispaces, and WetPaint is highlighting this teacher’s work with 9th graders.

Ever try to explain something over the phone? It just doesn’t compare to actually showing someone what they should do — it isn’t as effective as being there.

When I would introduce students to a task I wanted them to complete with the computer, I sometimes felt stuck with a similar dilemma. If I explained it to them in the computer lab, many would be off task, distracted by the computer. Yet, if I explained it to them in my classroom, often I was required to use a chalk board and then some would inevitably forget what they should do. What if there was a way for me to record my audible directions, visually demonstrate the required steps, and provide those directions at the click of a button?

Jing makes this possible.

The Jing Project has created a tool that allows you to take pictures of anything that is displayed on your screen. It can also take video, capturing sound from a microphone (often embedded into your machine if you are using a laptop). What sets Jing apart from other screen capture tools is that it can …

1. Store the image or video on a remote server space, and
2. Create a link to that image or video that you can easily include on your web page or in an e-mail.

This means that you don’t have to worry about e-mailing large videos to people and that the videos you create are easily shared with others.

In the scenario above, if I was going to have students complete a number of activities on one or two websites, using Jing I could record myself navigating to those activities and dictating directions. I could put a link on my web page and direct the students there for directions. Their first task when they get to their computers would be to listen to my directions, as I take attendance.

Jing can be used to share anything you can see on your desktop. Here’s a link to their online tour.

Telling a story, in English or a foreign language, is a learned skill. It requires fundamental language skills and creativity. If you’ve asked students to add visual elements to those stories, perhaps you’ve felt some frustration as students concentrate more on their drawing abilities and less on the words that they use.

Kerpoof is a Scholastics website that allows students to create scenes or stories that can be e-mailed or printed. It uses drag-and-drop flash animations that remove the painstaking time students spend sketching and erasing. Students can walk in with their written stories, choose their scenes, drag characters and props to the appropriate scenes, add text boxes and dialog bubbles like those found in comic books, and print out their final products.

Scholastics also provides a teacher resources page with application ideas and lesson plans. Some Kerpoof sponsors, like the Butterfly Pavilion in Broomfield, Colorado, and Northwest Trek in Tacoma, Washington, have sponsored scenes of real places. In these scenes, students can choose pictures of flora and fauna native to those areas, creating accessible reviews of predator-prey patterns or prompting discussions about different environments.

Kerpoof offers a unique educational resource, whether it be to students sprucing up their stories or teachers leading class discussions.

Surveys. It seems we’re getting a lot lately, and the process can be tedious at times. However, the feedback can be valuable, especially if we ask well-crafted questions and receive honest answers. Surveys can also give us the feeling that we have people interested in what we are doing, a verifiable audience whose opinions can impact the way we perform in the future.

Fo.reca.st is a free survey-creation site with customizable features that give your survey a unique look. You can make a multiple choice, multiple question survey with no limit on responses, ideal for surveying multiple classes or opening up your survey to the whole school. The results are displayed in a bar graph accessible from your account.

Fo.reca.st could be a tool for informal assessments on content mastery or students’ prior knowledge of a subject. But students don’t have to test only their own knowledge with these surveys — they could also evaluate the work of their peers. Paired with other Web 2.0 technologies, e.g. slideshows from Slideshare, fo.reca.st surveys could be used to evaluate digital projects.

With Web 2.0 technologies, students can produce work for the world to view, and the world can give some feedback.

Here is a sample fo.reca.st survey

Students create presentations all the time, sometimes well, sometimes very badly. We often attempt to set the bar high through modeling our own work or displaying exemplary projects other students have completed. But what happens after your students leave your classroom? Too many students often forget. Slideshare, paired with your blog or website, can reconnect students to a solid visual standard anytime they access your online resource.

Slideshare is a web-based application which allows you to upload presentations to the web and then display them to as many or as few people as you would like. If you would like to keep your audience small, you can e-mail individuals a secret web address where they can view your show. Or, if you’d like to broaden your audience, you can paste your show into your website or display it to the members of the Slideshare community. Students can review your presentation anywhere they can access the internet.

Used in your classroom, Slideshare may actually increase your students’ engagement by giving them an authentic audience. After certain Internet safety measures are taken, posting student work on the web can encourage students to produce works they can take pride in, and it enhances the perception that correct citation is an issue of honesty, not simply a requirement of the rubric.

Here’s an example of one publicly available presentation from Slideshare, embedded into this blog:

Here’s an interesting way to communicate concepts to students even after they’ve left your classroom.

Sketchcast.com is a site devoted to the creation and sharing of sketches, with or without audio. A great feature of this site is that each sketch you create is given an embed code, so you can attach it to your blog, wiki, or website. Share sample problems with students, record concept-mapping instructions, illustrate a lecture, and more.

Teachers with interactive tablets or SMART Boards will find this technology most accessible, but a successful sketch can be created with only a mouse. For the example below, I used my touchpad to demonstrate simple division.

Keeping student groups on task can be difficult, especially working in the computer lab. How do you keep kids accountable for being involved? Google Docs may be a solution.

In Google Documents, students can work simultaneously on a project–writing a paper, peer editing, inputting data–and a log of participation is created. You can reward students for their hard work (and know which ones were hardly working) all from a click of your mouse.

Visit the site yourself and invite a colleague to collaborate in real time!

http://docs.google.com

We’ve had some requests for additional keyboard shortcuts. Some of you may not know it, but there are many shortcuts that can be done using the “Windows logo key” by the “alt” key on your keyboard. Here are some of the things you can do with it.

– Windows Key — Using this key alone displays the Start Menu.
– Windows Key + E — opens a new Explorer Window to navigate amongst the many folders on your computer.
– Windows Key + D — Minimizes all windows and shows the Desktop, do it again and it will restore your previous windows and takes you right back to where you were.
– Windows Key + F — Displays the Find all files dialog box to allow you to search your computer for those “missing” files.

Interested in engaging reluctant learners in reading and writing? A “Historical Blog” may be the answer.

Developed by Herman Wood, a tech specialist in Georgia, this project challenges students to research with a purpose. Students engaged in “historical blogging” study a person or event in depth, creating concept maps as they understand the motivations and environment that shaped this person or event. From here, students assume the role of someone whose life touched upon this subject, and they craft statements from their perspectives. These statements are posted to the blog. Then the students, still in character, react to the posts of their classmates.

Additional elements can be added to this project, such as student illustrations, podcast creations, and biographical journal entries (in the case of studying a person). Teachers have found this project engages struggling students and provides a context and purpose to writing.

You can listen to Herman’s podcast of this topic on this link:

http://edtech.typepad.com/ed_tech_using_technology_/2007/06/historical_blog.html

An example of the his ‘historical blog’ is here:

http://dowell.typepad.com/harriet_tubman/