Polling Options

No, it's not time for another political poll. But it might be the appropriate time to poll your students to assess their opinions and/or their knowledge on a particular topic. One of the polling options I am investigating is Poll Everywhere, a web-based option.

Poll Everywhere is an online polling application. This is an experiment to see how it works in a blog.

Creating Online Slideshows and Videos

I'm experimenting with web-based slideshows and videos. I have tried a number of applications. Some permit you to use your own photos and/or video clips... others are self-contained. Some are like cartoons. Playing with these applications has been fun rather than work, though.

I eliminated applications that provide demos which include words I would not use in front of my students. The availability of a free account was also a necessity. That doesn't mean that a whole classroom can use the application with no cost. Each application must be evaluated as to usefulness and cost for a particular teacher or classroom or school.

Many applications allow the video that you create to be shared with a link or with embedded code. I have posted some of each (links and embedded code) on this blog post as examples.

The applications I tried came from a combination of suggestions from Richard Byrne's blog (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/) and my bookmarks on Delicious.

I still like videoediting with stand-alone applications (e.g., iMovie and MovieMaker), but I think there is definitely a role that these web-based applications can play in the classroom for both the teacher and the students.

What do you think? What has been your experience?


Photo Peach - Link
http://photopeach.com/album/p0t0wg

Photo Peach - Embedded Story
Spring 2013 in Lake Township on PhotoPeach

Photo Peach - Embedded Spiral
Spring 2013 in Lake Township on PhotoPeach

Animoto - Embed Code

Make your own slide show at Animoto.

ScreenCastle - Link     (Note: You can also use Screenr (http://screenr.com) for something like this.)
http://screencastle.com/watch/4a655e86fd58d2a62c1b95c677b20775

Go!Animate - Link
http://goanimate.com/go/movie/0AgKlLFIcPmg?utm_source=emailshare&uid=


Links in this post...

• Richard Byrne's blog (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/)
• Delicious (http://delicious.com)
• iMovie (http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/)
• MovieMaker (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/movie-maker-get-started)
• Photo Peach (http://photopeach.com/)
• Animoto (http://animoto.com)
• ScreenCastle (http://screencastle.com/)
• Screenr (http://screenr.com)
• Go!Animate (http://goanimate.com/)

Education Hashtags in Twitter

Canary

When I was a child my mother and I kept pet birds. We enjoyed canaries and parakeets mostly. The canaries were lovely singers and some of the parakeets learned to talk. They were fun. Mickey, one of my favorite birds, was a cockatiel. He was very friendly with a personality of his own.

So why am I thinking about birds? I feel like I'm surrounded by Twitter birds this fall! I've enjoyed my students' and my experiment using Twitter in class. I learned a lot about Twitter. I added to my knowledge of educational technology through Twitter. I've also read some wise tweets, some funny ones, and some heart-warming ones.

Twitter Bird

I did not plan to write another post about Twitter for a while because I wanted to explore some other interests, but... I couldn't resist sharing Joyce Valenza's post about educational Twitter hashtags. (And thanks to Vicki Davis for sharing it on Twitter!)

In Educational Twitter Hashtags, the infographic, Joyce Valenza has shared popular hashtags that you can use to focus on your areas of interest. Choose a hashtag that interests you and do a search on it in Twitter. Try more than one. You're sure to find some helpful information... and you may want to visit that hashtag (or two or three) again.


Compiled By: OnlineCollegeCourses.com

One of Best EdTech Conferences Starts Today

Just a quick note! One of the best conferences available--the K12 Online Conference--begins today (Monday, October 15, 2012) with a keynote presentation by Kevin Honeycutt.The strands that will be available next week (October 22 - 25) are Getting Started and Visioning New Curriculum. The following week (October 29 - November 2) the Kicking It Up a Notch and Student Voices strands will be the focus. Each strand has ten speakers, including one keynoter.

If you're interested in using technology in curriculum, instruction, and/or assessment then you want to be sure to attend this conference. This conference provides each year an outstanding collection of speakers and topics. Could anything be better than that? How about sessions that are available when you have time to watch and/or listen? How about the ability to be involved wherever you are--home, school, at a coffee shop, or in a park? What's the cost, you ask? Free. Honest!

I think that these sessions will be some of the best professional development that you can find for instructional technology. If you're curious about some of the previous conferences, they're still online. You can "attend" conferences from 2006 to this year!

Be sure to mark your calendar...
October 15
October 22 - 25
October 29 - November 2

And keep track of the web site...
http://k12onlineconference.org/

And one more thing... think about sharing some of your ideas next year at the conference.

#k12online12

Technology with Intention

Snapshot of Technology with Intention blog

It’s time to start adding my blog roll—the blogs that I read for my own professional development—to this blog. Rather than begin with the blog roll from my previous blog, today I’m adding a new blog, Technology with Intention. I discovered it when I started exploring the list of nominees for the Edublog Awards list for 2011. (They haven’t published their 2012 list yet.) I shared this list with the graduate students in a workshop that I’m teaching online so they could find some educational blogs that they might like to follow.

The blogger, Jac de Haan, is involved with a variety of activities in addition to writing the blog. He shares his resume using several visual tools designed for that purpose. (Note to myself: share some of his visual resume tools with my university students!)  His posts are interesting, current, and useful. One of his interests is using the iPad in the classroom, so if you’re looking for good iPad apps, you will find some recommendations in his blog. His blog has won the best new blog award for the 2011Edublog Awards and the Education World’s Top 25 Blogs for Educators in 2012,

Several of his recent posts (the iOS 6 update, creating a classroom blog, digital identity resources, and cyberbullies) are timely to some of my projects and those of my students. I will share his blog with my students (both undergraduate and graduate) and also use some of his posts for my own interests.

Relevant Links…

Technology with Intention… http://www.techwithintent.com/

Jac de Haan… http://jacdehaan.com/

2011 Edublog Awards… http://edublogawards.com/

Education World’s Top 25 Blogs for Educators in 2012… http://community.educationworld.com/content/education-world%E2%80%99s-top-25-blogs-educators

First Steps in the Twitter World

My students are learning to use Inspiration software. Sometimes they have questions about the software and sometimes their questions concern my expectations. Twitter is quick and easy to use for both our questions and the responses. We will evaluate the use of Twitter as a communication tool between teacher and students when we finish our Inspiration unit.

Roobee (Roba Al-Assi) / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I have used Twitter off and on for a couple years. It seemed that it could be helpful, but I wasn't impressed enough to stick with it. Until now. One of us--either Twitter or myself--has grown enough that it's looking like a more useful tool for education. More useful, in fact, than the limited purposes that my students and I are using it for in our current experiment.

I've been expanding the list of folks that I follow. I follow Obama and Romney since it's election season. I have recently added Edgar Allen Poe and George Washington. I want to add Carl Sandberg and Abraham Lincoln, but haven't decided yet which versions of those two to follow. Just think of the class lessons that could develop from following those four guys. (Hmm... I need to add one--or two--female historical figures.) I have followed Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) for quite a while (she's one of my heroes in instructional technology) and just recently added another instructional technology hero, Scott McLeod (@mcleod). I don't want my list to become overwhelming, but I have discovered that the professional development available from following folks on Twitter can be almost as excellent as what can be gained from following folks on their blogs. (I haven't posted my blogroll to this blog yet, but I will.) The professional development aspect of Twitter was a surprise!

I want a quick look at how other teachers are using Twitter, so I plan to explore Twitter4Teachers, a wiki created by Gina Hartman (@ghartman). She created the wiki to help educators connect with other educators on Twitter. I discovered the Twitter4Teachers wiki when I searched TeachersFirst for their collection of Twitter tools and techniques.

TeachersFirst also led me to The 2012 A-Z List Of Educational Twitter Hashtags. I had not used hashtags previous to the experiment this semester with my students. We have a hashtag that we use on all tweets that relate to our class. That keeps us organized and we don't lose any comments. I knew that we needed a hashtag, but I did not know how large the world of hashtags is! It's another way to connect with others--even folks you don't know yet--that have the same interests. For example, if I have time Tuesday evening I plan to join in a conversation on the #edchat hashtag. This site lists more than 300 hashtags. Let's see... If I check out one new hashtag per week, that will take me about 6 years to get through the list. Oh. My. Gosh. This same web site (The 2012 A-Z List Of Educational Twitter Hashtags) has an embedded Google Docs presentation of ways to use Twitter in the classroom. You can add it to your own Google Docs.

By the way, I am using TeachersFirst to find my way through the Twitter world because of my respect for the quality, practicality, and thoroughness of their research. If they are not one of your favorite web sites, I urge you to go to http://teachersfirst.com/ to check out what is available at their web site.

Links in this post:

Scott McLeod http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org (@mcleod)
Gina Hartman http://www.ginahartman.com/ (@ghartman)
Google Docs http://docs.google.com/
Inspiration http://www.inspiration.com/
TeachersFirst http://teachersfirst.com/
The 2012 A-Z List Of Educational Twitter Hashtags http://edudemic.com/2012/06/2012-twitter-hashtags/
Twitter http://twitter.com/
Twitter4Teachers http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/
Vicki Davis http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com (@coolcatteacher)

Twitter Tips

We're using Twitter in the Applied Technology class that I am teaching this semester. Twitter is a quick way for the students to let me know when they need some help with their assignments during the week. Hopefully, they will also discover that it's a good tool for professional development.

I've used Twitter previously, but I never spent much time with it. Obviously, that's not going to be true this semester! While I was at Edudemic.com this morning I noticed an interesting infographic of Twitter tips. I implemented a couple of the tips immediately and decided to use some of the other tips later.

Cheryl Lawson (http://cheryllawson.co/) has organized the tips well and her writing style is easy reading.

You can find ideas for your profile (why you should use a photo rather than an avator), how to find people to follow (use hashtags), and other good ideas (share photos, pay forward, ...).

Go to http://edudemic.com/2012/08/twitter-tips/ to view the infographic and learn some useful Twitter tips whether you're a newbie or more experienced with Twitter.

New School Years... New Blogs...

For as long as I've been teaching (a long time!) I never fail to find preparing for the first day to be exciting. During the last week I have been tweaking a syllabus, the lessons for my first unit, a wiki, and a gradebook. And I've paid more attention to Twitter than I usually do because I plan to use it with my students during the fall semester.

I usually run a pretty much paperless classroom, but at the beginning I print the photos, majors, and names of my students to help me learn the names of the ones I haven't had in class yet.

I bookmarked (using Delicious) some sites that showed up on Twitter. Here's what the labels look like in Wordle. [The image is no longer available as of 7/7/2013.]

I can easily see what my current interests are: technology tools, web 2.0, IFTTT, flipped classrooms, blogging, Evernote, iPad, QR codes, ... I know! I know! Too many interests and too little time! But I do see some directions I want to go in my next few blog posts.

So, first I meet and begin the teaching and learning process with my new students. And then at the end of the week I'll write the next post for the blog. Sounds like a good week to me!  :)

Getting Ready to Start Up Again!

Brad Flickinger / CC BY 2.0

We continue to find ways to weave technology into our lives... including the teaching and learning process. I enjoy exploring and sharing some of that technology. It is time to share again. I have missed blogging on a regular basis and am looking forward to starting again! (Y6H75C6BCKZD)