TCC 5-5 Cindy's Links

Classmill describes its course creation site curated learning. It is another site which allows you to gather all the multimedia for your lesson/course for viewing from one site. MIT’s Future of Education report says, "The next generation of student life and learning, supporting the faculty with new instructional roles, introducing flexibility to the curriculum and in time to degree by modularizing course content"

Intel has some terrific Project Based Learning courses. During the one we facilitate with teachers yearly in our school district we look not only at self/formative assessment but we also look at technology to infuse. This Edudemic post, 5 Ways to Use Wordcloud Generators in the Classroom, has teacher contributed ideas including one which marries KWL charts and word clouds. Another Edudemic post, The Ultimate Twitter Guidebook, this with 100 sites giving lots of ideas and links for using Twitter from beginner tips and educator uses to cautions and student apps. Or 30 Innovative Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom  if that seems too much.

TCC 5-5 Project Based Learning with New Tech (PBL)

In August we move 2 more grades into New Tech which also means more PBL. Our district has been involved through Intel which has additional resources for PBL. Intel Engage site is a community which has tools and courses which are free to teaching professionals. Although not  directly connected to New Tech the basic information is convergent....just terminology is different. There is more information on Intel in TCC Issue 4-4.

At the site click circled for videos

I have had no formal New Tech training, but have been previewing the information at their network site: echo.newtechnetwork.org Even without a login it allows you to click on More About Echo above the login space.
  

There are videos covering schools, projects, samples, and reflections of teachers and students.  Two really good project samples are “The Cart Project” and “Cells Gone Wild” (featured) which were both real issue projects for which the students found real answers. If these aren’t part of official training they are worth a look. Several of the videos are student produced.

TCC 5-5 Producing InfoPics

Tony Vincent offers tutorials on lots of tech topics...beginning with Learning in Hand podcasts.

Screen Capture of Tony's Sample from Ted Talk

“A picture is worth a thousand words” may be true, but add a few words to a picture and you have something even more memorable. In his tutorial on infopic tools and how-to’s Tony features samples from Jonathan Nalder* and others. Students with various kinds of devices could use this skill to summarize, define, persuade, or advertise. His suggested tools are: Canva, Rhonna, Mextures, Over, Skitch, Pic Collage, PicLab, Phonto, Pathon, Color Effects, Color Splash Effects, presentation software (Power Point, KeyNote, or Slides), Pixlr, or PicsArt (has call-out speech bubbles to add). These tools are for various brands of devices so you would select what works on the tool you have. The one which works on the most types is Skitch...which also has a Chrome app for our New
Tech people.

TCC 5-5 Classroom Tech Infusion Classflow/ActivInspire Merge Tutorials

Promethean is improving Classflow...it will look different.  Since our Tech Cluster (Florence School District 3 PD) emphasis featured using it with ActivInspire 2.0 this isn’t too stressful. 

For those entusiasts who wanted to deeper look at what that Classflow/ActivInspire 2.0 combo would do here are some tutorials that will add to what we looked at in March:
How to use the Classflow teacher remote. I was not aware when we started that the remote worked with the software, also. I mentioned it to some, but assumed it was for Classflow. Woo Hoo...it works with the software, too.The app is available for Android, Apple, and Windows devices. A reason for either allowing some teacher phone use, data financing for personal phone use, or providing handhelds for teachers.
How to connect tablets & computers. This tutorial give you the information we talked about quickly during the introduction. It also mentions where to get the student app for those with tablets.

TCC 5-5 Talking QR Codes

April is the month with the QR code and Plickers for Tech Infusion. The article Classroom Tech Infusion for April was in issue 5-4 of TCC and the 2 or 3 posts ago. But in pursuing some of the research I made another discovery about what QR codes can do. Did you know they will talk? Because the blog post I worked from had several boards among its resources I ventured into Pinterest world and there it was...Teaching with Nancy had posted 2 tutorials for making code that talks when scanned. Nancy Alvarez has videos using QR Voice and Vocaroo on this Pinterest board. I have used Vocaroo previously and tried QR Voice successfully at home. They both change the  audio file into a QR code.  One of Nancy’s suggestions was beginning  letter sounds added to alphabet flash cards.

TCC 5-4 3 Writing Tools

One form of writing that may inspire participation is “choose your own adventure.” These stories allow the readers to “write” a different story by choosing different paths. Because of this authors have to have a good outline/overview of their story.  This gives them a good view of each event as it is added and makes for less edits later.

There are 3 online tools which were featured in a post by Richard Byrne at Free Tech for Teachers. The tools are: Twine,  Inkle Writer, and Playfic. He has reviewed them individually, but this article compares their features.
Inkle Writer is the most forgiving for the non-outliner. Paragraphs are done as individual elements and connected together last. The other two need more pre-planning.
Playfic allows preview of the work and helps with logical choice making. It uses directional choices to move through the adventure. Here is a preview of its product. There are lots of game/stories at the site.
Twine’s elements look like sticky notes and this makes connections easier to see. The story is in HTML so it can be viewed in any browser.

A paper-less way to write...

Enjoy!

TCC 5-4 An App for Writing

Fun and Writing? It’s possible with this app. An Edudemic blog post from the teacher’s point of view gives us insight into how to use Writing Challenge for Kids. . The author Melissa Nott has tried the app from Literautas with her 4th grade students. She tried this app as part of her emphasis on brainstorming ability for Common Core. She suggested it for 3rd grade and 7th also since it can be adjusted for range of writing and topic development also. She suggests using the kid version for students K-8, but there is an adult version which she has used personally. She thought some topics not for the younger classes.
The game-like tool provides a timed environment for the steps through the story with a prompt, a character, and a scene. Students are still using paper and pencil to produce the writing. And the prompts continue so you need to set time limits for this process. She suggested it as a great way to motivate the usually hesitant.
She graded the app in three categories: user friendliness (5 from her students), teaching,(4), and customer support(4). Teaching lost a point since there is no teaching about tension, climax, or resolution. This is originally app in Spanish so she also subtracted a point for a slight choppiness in translation.
Even though she only listed  three specific grade levels in her post she thought it would be useful at all levels and in most contents. And it’s fun….sorry, it isn’t our other favorite...free. The Apple  kid version is available at iTunes. And the Android is at Google Play. Both are $1.99. The adult app is similarly priced.

 Enjoy!

TCC 5-4 Plickers:Device-less LRS

Thanks to Val Grace and Pam Williamson from Scranton Elementary School for sharing Plickers with us at Tech Cluster.
They showed us the cards which they had begun using and explained the concept . These cards solve the problem of not enough student devices. Only the teacher needs a device to scan the cards.
Plickers.com is the website which is set up for classes that automatically assign students to the cards numbered 1-40 in the standard set. There is a library for questions to be offered to any of your classes in a click. The question sets only allow for multiple choice or true/false questions.
Once you are in class the teacher device controls what is shared with the class. Whatever is selected on it is fed to Live View in the menu. This page can be projected to show the question, answer choices, and results. Reports are also available.
The cards have a QR-like code that is unique to the student and it is held up to register the answer. Each edge of the square is marked with a small a, b, c, or d. The answer choice should be at the top when the card is held up. Cards are free to print at the site...or can be purchased on Amazon.(Stocking in April is the note.) Card stock and lamination makes them more durable, but a matte finished lamination film should be used since the gloss might make the card difficult to scan.
Scanning results registers the numbers/names of the cards so that any you missed may be added for a complete set of answers.
At this date the iOs apps are not available. The Android app works perfectly and I am sure the Apple devices will soon be up and going again.
Very Enjoyable!