8 Tips and Tools for Organizing Your Digital Files for Teaching

File Cabinets / Jared and Corin / CC BY-SA 2.0

I taught two graduate workshops for teachers this Summer. Both included ideas for organizing teachers’ digital files. (Organization was not a main feature of either workshop, but instead a by-product.)

#1
In the SMART Board 101 workshop we talked about keeping teaching units organized with the Attachments Tab in Notebook software. When you create a unit with Notebook software you can place other (from Notebook or other applications) files in Notebook’s Attachments well. The next time you teach that unit you will have all the files you need at hand.

#2
In the Teaching in a Digital World workshop, the teachers learned how to create and use wikis (and other tools). They liked the idea of creating wikis to organize their work. They also decided they would like to create wikis with information for substitute teachers.

#3
Looking online for organization ideas for teachers, Evernote, of course, stands out as a major tool for organizing. But other tools and techniques can also be found.

#4
The Organized Classroom Blog describes a method for using Pinterest as a filing cabinet for your teaching ideas. For this project you create pins that do not have links to websites.
Get Rid of Your Filing Cabinet?
http://www.theorganizedclassroomblog.com/index.php/blog/get-rid-of-your-filing-cabinet

#5
Techie Teacher & Character Coach also includes a post for organizing digital files. Ali, the blogger, describes her file and folder system.
Resources #1: Organize Your Digital Files
http://techieteacher-charactercoach.blogspot.com/2013/01/resources-1-organize-your-digital-files.html

#6
A guest blogger on Owl-Ways Be Inspired uses apps and applications to help her organize her files. She likes the iDoceo App for student grades, attendance, and anecdotal records. She also uses an online lesson planner that allows you to tag the Common Core Standards. She likes and uses Dropbox, Notability, and the Common Core app from Mastery Connect.
Getting Organized: Go Digital
http://owlwaysbeinspired.blogspot.com/2013/08/getting-organized-go-digital.html

#7
I use LiveBinders for curation, but it’s also an excellent tool to collect your unit resources and organize them!
LiveBinders – Your 3-ring Binder for the Web
http://www.livebinders.com/welcome/home

#8
Laura Santos at Core Inspiration likes to use Symbaloo and Blendscape to organize her online resources. Both tools are web-based, have visual appeal and are classroom-friendly.
Tools for Organizing Your Online Teaching Resources
http://coreinspiration.blogspot.com/2013/10/tools-for-organizing-your-online.html

How do you organize the digital files you use for teaching?

Finding Appropriate Images for Blogs and Other Web-based Projects

#455572129 / gettyimages.com

A blog post is usually more interesting to read if images are included to illustrate the text. I'm frequently looking for sources for images to use in my blog, my class wikis, and other web-based projects. My interest in finding good photos is one of the reasons that I am doing my Project 365/2014 this year. In effect, I am creating my own folder of stock photography to use.

I still use many photos in addition to my own, however; so, I was impressed with Dan Leeman's resource on The EduBlogger blog. He has compiled The Ultimate Directory of Free Image Sources (http://theedublogger.com/2014/07/09/the-ultimate-directory-of-free-image-sources/). His criteria are subjects, high resolution, license, and safety. His categories are search engines, large crowdsourced collections, U.S. Government collections, unique collections, specific subjects, and clipart.

If you use photos to illustrate your writing, I recommend that you check out Dan Leeman's blog post.

Summer Plans

Vacation / jonycunha / CC BY-SA 2.0

What are your plans for this summer? Do something just for yourself? Improve lessons and procedures? Learn something new? Read? Reflect on the past school year? Rest? Spend time with family and friends? Take a workshop? Travel? Work? So many choices... so little time!

Here are some suggestions from Vicki Davis, Reading Horizons, and about.com: Secondary education:

Top 12 Summer Tips for Top Teachers
http://www.edutopia.org//blog/top-12-summer-tips-teachers-vicki-davis

The Teachers Guide to Summer Break: Tips for Fun, Relaxation, & Professional Development
http://www.readinghorizons.com/blog/post/2012/04/27/Teachers-Summer-Break.aspx

Top 10 To Do’s for Teachers During Summer Vacation
http://712educators.about.com/od/teacherresources/tp/summer_activities.htm

My favorites are Davis’ revitalize your physical health, Reading Horizons’ create family time, and About.com’s try something new. Of course, I’m going to do the school-related items such as reflecting, improving lessons, and preparing for the new year. But, it’s important to take care of ourselves, too. Enjoy your summer!

Demonstrating Creative Commons

Martha Joining in the Fun of a Maths Lesson! / Mrs eNil / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Edited Note (6/28/2014): This post is part of a workshop lesson about using Creative Commons to find photos and to share proper attribution for their use.

Finding Good Education Infographics

Infographics are helpful for those of us who are visual learners. I use them to help explain concepts (see Education Hashtags in Twitter). I have played with Infogr.am (see Creating an Infographic) and Piktochart (see Considering Another Infographic Creation Tool) to create my own. Collections of pre-made infographics can also be found.

27 Ways to Greet Students / Mia MacMeekin / An Ethical Island

Mia MacMeekin at An Ethical Island uses infographics in the courses she teaches. She shares those and other infographics on her blog. Her infographics are organized into these categories:

• courses I teach,
• my workshops and such,
• online learning,
• student success,
• teacher,
• teaching anyone, and
• team.

Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

The eLearning Infographics site is "user-generated" and "dedicated to the best education infographics" according to Christopher Pappas. Creators of education infographics are invited to submit their work for consideration. (Note that submitted infographics may reflect bias toward an organization's products.) The categories that are supported are:

• gamification infographics,
• MOOC infographics,
• mobile learning infographics,
• social learning infographics,
• special education infographics,
• adult education infographics,
• distance education infographics,
• educational technology,
• preschool infographics,
• K12 infographics,
• higher education infographics,
• continuing education infographics,
• elearning infographics,
• instructional design infographics,
• teacher infographics, and
• student infographics.

______________________________________________________________________

Where else might we find infographics to use?

Pinterest provides many examples of infographics (http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=infographic).

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has a very good collection of educational infographics (http://www.educatorstechnology.com/search/label/inforgraphic).

______________________________________________________________________

If you are using infographics with your students, you will appreciate Kathy Schrock's video, Infographics as a Creative Assessment. It is an outstanding lesson in the use of infographics with students.

______________________________________________________________________

What are your sources for infographics that you can use for teaching and learning?

Drones, Research, Twitter, and Blogs... Teaching Tools!

Shoulders of Giants / Cody Erekson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As an educator I enjoy creating activities, lessons, and curriculum to help my students learn. Sometimes I borrow ideas from others. Nowadays it is so much easier to learn from other educators because we can use blogs, wikis, and Twitter to share and to borrow.

Here are some resources I discovered recently from some of the blogs I follow...

We are familiar with seeing other locations via Google's street views. Now we can visit some locations around the world from a drone's perspective. Mashable shares information about this site at Interactive Map Site Lets You Travel the World Through the Lenses of Drones. You can try it yourself at Travel By Drone and explore on your own. Today I traveled to Paris, France; Queensland, Australia; and Pittsburgh and Detroit in the USA! This looks like a useful (and fun) site for both teachers and students.

When I introduce ideas and techniques new to workshop participants I like to support what I teach with research as well as with anecdotes and personal experience. Larry Ferlazzo frequently shares research studies, so I am pleased to see that he is now writing a "round-up" of these studies every week or so. See his Research Studies of the Week post. This will be a valuable resource.

Vicki Davis' post Twitter: Best Practices for Educators #ReinventingWriting
on Edudemic includes apps, hashtags, and tips for using Twitter in the classroom. Davis' useful tips are based on research and personal experience. I think I will have to determine my Twitter "magic number" to figure out the maximum length my tweets should be! In fact, I will include several ideas that I learned from this post in my workshops.

And, finally, two posts about blogging on the LangWitches blog caught my eye: Blogging as Pedagogy: Facilitate Learning and And You Thought It Could Not Be Done: Blogging in Math. Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano writes two excellent posts about blogging in the classroom. In my opinion you do not need to be a teacher of language arts or mathematics to benefit from reading these two posts! Tolisano writes that "blogging can be a strategy to facilitate learning" and then goes on to detail how educators can use blogging... not as a one-time activity or project... but as a basic strategy in our teaching toolboxes. These two posts are must reads!

I appreciate that educators support each other... and that it has become easier to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Using SMART Boards in the Classroom

Some educators think that SMART Boards are great tools to use for teaching and learning in the classroom... and others consider them to be "glorified chalkboards." As with many teaching tools, I believe it's the educator who makes the difference. In my opinion, an excellent teacher will use a SMART Board well.

Smart Board / Brandon Dill / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Personally, the Notebook software that comes with SMART Boards is one of my favorite applications. It's so easy to design activities to meet the needs of your students and the curriculum. And, if you don't have time to create your own activities, there's bound to be appropriate ones available--for free--created by others.

I am selecting resources for an upcoming summer workshop that serves as an introduction to using SMART Boards and Notebook software. I searched for appropriate resources for this workshop using my educational sandbox (a Google custom search engine for a select list of blogs discussed at How Do You Search for Information on a Topic?). Because I have taught this topic recently I want to add just a few outstanding resources to what I already use.
 
I categorized the resources I found by the blogs where they are located. I hope that will encourage the workshop participants to explore those blogs for other ideas, also.


CYBRARYMAN…

• Smart Board ... http://www.cybraryman.com/smartboard.html ... Cybraryman’s SMART Boards site
• Educational Hash Tags ... http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html ... includes hashtags for SMART Boards
• Dinosaur ... http://www.cybraryman.com/dinosaur.html ... dinosaur resources for the SMART Board
• Dr. Seuss ... http://www.cybraryman.com/drseuss.html ... SMART Board resources for Dr. Seuss
• Insects ... http://www.cybraryman.com/insects.html ... includes SMART Board resources for insects
• Rain Forest ... http://www.cybraryman.com/rainforest.html ... includes rainforest resources for SMART Boards
• Thanksgiving ... http://www.cybraryman.com/thanksgiving.html ... Cybraryman’s Thanksgiving site… includes SMART Board resources

EDUCATORS’ TECHNOLOGY…

• Great Resources for Smart Board Users ... http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2011/05/smart-notebook-search-engine-great.html ... custom search engine for SMART Board resources… searches a specific list of sites… you could make your own custom search engine for the sites that you want to check!

EDUDEMIC…

• Halloween Resources For Your SMART Board ... http://www.edudemic.com/halloween-resources-for-your-smart-board/ ... Halloween resources for SMART Boards

EDUTOPIA…

• Smart Ways to Use the SMARTBoard ... http://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/stw/edutopia-stw-s.carolina-differentiated-instruc-smart-ways-to-use-smart-board.pdf ... list of categorized links for SMART Board resources
• Technology Combined with Good Teaching Leads to Success ... http://www.edutopia.org/interactive-whiteboards-technology-success ... some specific information about Marzano’s results when he researched iwb’s in 2009
• Kindergartners Explore Through Project Learning ... http://www.edutopia.org/kindergarten-project-based-learning ... using a SMART Board with kindergartners

FREE TECH 4 TEACHERS…

• Dozens of SMART Board Tutorial Videos ... http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/05/dozens-of-smart-board-tutorial-videos.html ... SMART Board tutorials (videos)
• Two Excellent SMARTBoard Blogs to Bookmark ... http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/03/two-excellent-smartboard-blogs-to.html ... Teachers Love SMART Boards blog by James Hollis… last post January 2013 ... and The Whiteboard Blog by Danny Nicholson… posts are current
• Make Your Own PBS Cyberchase SMART Board Game Show ... http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/10/make-your-own-pbs-cyberchase-smart.html ... free template to make a mathematics game for students in grades 3 through 5 
• Five Places to Find Thanksgiving Lessons and Activities ... http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/11/five-places-to-find-thanksgiving.html ... includes Thanksgiving lessons for SMART Boards
• SMART Notebook Search Engine ... http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/03/smart-notebook-search-engine.html ... search some specific sites for SMART Board resources

LEE’S SUMMIT…

• Lee's Summit R-7 Instructional Technology ... http://www.lsr7.org/its/ ... school district instructional technology resources site… includes SMART Board resources and many other instructional technology resources

SPEED OF CREATIVITY…

• Podcast67: Engaging Math Students with Smartboard Technologies ... http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2006/07/08/podcast67-engaging-math-students-with-smartboard-technologies-and-resources/ ... podcast… interview with a grade 4 mathematics teacher who uses a SMART Board
• iPad as an Interactive White Board for $5 or $10 ... http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2011/03/24/ipad-as-an-interactive-white-board-for-5-or-10/ ... using an iPad instead of a SMART Board
• Separate Wifi Access Point Works Best with Apple TV on Busy Network ... http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2012/04/15/separate-wifi-access-point-works-best-with-apple-tv-on-busy-network/ ... experiences mirroring iPads

LIBRARY GUIDES…

• Interactive Whiteboards - New Tools ... http://sdst.libguides.com/content.php?pid=192765&sid=1618991 ... multiple resources for SMART Boards (and other instructional technology topics)

_______________

Will I use ALL these resources in the workshop? Most likely not. However resources that do not become part of the workshop activities may find themselves in a list provided for the participants to access on their own during the workshop or later.

These sites should help facilitate some interesting and useful discussions. How do you help other educators discover the benefits of using SMART Boards?