TCC Summer: Summertime Fun?

I am a fan of Alice Keeler's blog, Teacher Tech, which is in My Blog List at the right. She is very knowledgeable in all things Google and shares tutorial information at Teacher Tech. Since our junior high and high schools are going one-to-one with Chromebooks things Google are helpful for those staff members who teach at those schools.
Another site new to me is Google for Education which offers training on the requirements to become a Google Educator. All courses listed are: Android Tablets for Education, Calendar, Chrome,  Chromebooks,  Classroom, Digital Citizenship, Docs Suite, Docs, Drawings, Drive, Forms, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Play for , .Education, Implementing Google Apps, Search, Sheets, Sites, Slides, and YouTube. The advanced portion of training for some of the offered lessons are required for the assessments for Certification, but the basic lessons are also there if you need that help  Each lesson also gives you an

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!