June 25, 2014

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.
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June 22, 2014

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.
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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.
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 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).

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 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.


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 What are your sources for infographics that you can use for teaching and learning?
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June 15, 2014

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.
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June 9, 2014

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…
EDUCATORS’ TECHNOLOGY…
EDUDEMIC…
EDUTOPIA…
FREE TECH 4 TEACHERS…
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…
LIBRARY GUIDES…
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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?
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