Resources for Teaching & Learning

I’ve been thinking about what to post for a while now to inspire you for the summer, while you have a second to breathe. Since we can’t enter the OLS for the month of July, I thought I’d share some must-see tools and resources you should check out whenever you have a chance.

1. Free Technology for Teachers. This is an excellent blog that I read almost daily.  It is maintained by Richard Byrne, a teacher from Maine, who writes about various technology integration tools, and much, much more.

2. Google Docs.  If you’re not already using Google Docs, you should be.  Google Docs is a collaborative tool that makes it easy to store documents, share documents, work on documents with others, make presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings too.  The third grade team and I have been using Google Docs all year to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets.  Here are some useful resources to help learn about Google Docs and what an amazing tool it is.

• Tour of Google Docs from Google
• Google Docs in Plain English
• New improvements to Google Docs

3. Edublogs.org: I started using Edublogs this year and love it so far.  Consider a blog as a website for your classroom, or as a way to get students to write more, in a reading response journal for example. 4St has been doing this for 2 years.

• List of teachers using Edublogs.
• The Edublogger is a great blog to check out also.

4. Ed.Voicethread.com: I’ve written about Voicethread in a previous post, so I won’t go on and on, but if you haven’t gotten a chance to check it out, I highly recommend it.  It offers so many potential learning opportunities for students. We found it extremely useful this year in the foreign language classroom. And, Grade 5 did a fantastic project in science using Voicethread. Here are some further links:

• Voicethread4Education
• Voicethread Digital Library

5. Edu.Glogster.com: Glogster is an online poster creation tool.  We used this tool in third grade this year and the students took off with it showing their creativity and imagination in ways I never could have predicted.  Check out their work!

Hope to hear about something that I shared with you that inspired you as much as these tools and resources inspire me. Happy Summer!

I am so excited about our use of VoiceThread this year.  We have integrated this fabulous tool into several grades and many different curricular areas.

VoiceThread is a collaborative tool that allows you to have a conversation around images, videos and documents, and allows you to comment in five different ways.  Teachers are able to create an educator account which allows for unlimited VoiceThreads.  Students are able to use the tool by logging in as the teacher to create their VoiceThreads.

What is a VoiceThread anyway? gives a good description of what the tools is all about and worth a view.

At Runkle, we’ve completed VoiceThreads in Kindergarten, Grades 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8.  One area that has really benefited from this awesome tool is the Spanish language classroom.  The teacher has found that Voicethread is an excellent way for students to practice and for the teacher to assess their oral language skills. One example is below.

I’ve been using Web 2.0 tools for what seems like forever and I’m just learning about a very cool tool!  That’s what’s so exciting about Web 2.0 — new things to learn all the time…

BigHugeLabs is one of the coolest photo enhancing sites I’ve seen in a while.  At first glance, I see so many opportunities for education.  We do so many project with images in education and using a tool such as this, that you don’t have to log into, you can just use, then save your work, is a teachers dream tool.

Lately, I’ve been using VoiceThread quite a bit with students.  Sometimes, students want to gather multiple pictures together in a collage format before uploading them to VoiceThread.  BigHugeLabs is a perfect place to do this in a creative, nice-looking way, instead of plain old PowerPoint, which is always their default application.  There’s a link on the homepage called Mosaic Maker.  You upload all of the pcitres you want to make a collage out of and it makes a nice collage that you then take a screen shot of and save to your computer to use anywhere.

Check out BigHugeLabs and all the tools available on the site.  It looks very promising.  I wonder what other uses for education I’ll find as I explore the site more…

The iPod nano 5th generation is very cool and affords us fantastic opportunities in education.  I was lucky enough to receive an iPod nano for Christmas, and ever since I’ve been discovering new possibilities for its use in education.

In my war with what I think is a faulty Flip Video camera (it’s frozen on the startup screen), I turned to my handy iPod nano.  I can take video with this!  And the screen is bigger and clearer, so why wouldn’t I just use this instead of the Flip?  Duh!  I can also transfer the movie files to any computer without launching iTunes.

Another dilemma solved… I have several classes starting VoiceThread projects.  I’m thinking to myself, hmmm, how are all of my students going to record their comments in my one educator account?  I know, my iPod!  Yes, folks it is true.  I can record voices using VoiceMemo on my iPod nano, plug it into any computer, and drag the voice memo files off.  How cool is that?

I am so excited about these possibilities.  Now, to share with my students and teachers!

I recently attended School Reform Initiative’s Annual Winter Meeting in Cambridge, MA.  It was two and a half days of pure joy, learning, facilitation, feedback, probing questions, and smiling.

Ever since I attending Critical Friends Group Coaches Training in August 2006, I have learned so much about myself as a learner, an educator, a facilitator, and my profession. My facilitators were Gene Thompson-Grove and Beth Graham. When I started school that September, and gave a presentation about Critical Friends Group, I remember reflecting on that week as one of the greatest professional learning experiences I have ever been a part of.

However, as I continue facilitating, learning and growing, the experiences just keep getting better!  That is  how I describe my learning at Winter Meeting 2010.  I saw some old friends, and made some new ones, but most importantly, I opened my mind and LEARNED!

Wordle is a great tool that all teachers can use in their classrooms and use with students.  Wordle is a tool for generating word clouds.  The greatest thing about this Web 2.0 tool is that you don’t need to log in to anything.  You simply go to the website, click Create and start creating your word cloud.  When you are done you can take a screen shot (command+shift+4) of the image and save it to your computer, then print it or add to your website or blog.

Ideas for Classroom use:

• brainstorm starter to a new unit/KWL
• reflections
• poetry
• spelling words
• synonyms
• characters in a book

This is a fabulous  slideshare presentation with many ideas for integrating Wordle into your teaching.

Good luck and be sure to share your wordles with me!

Printers & Printer People

We have 4 main printers in our school, on each floor.  In the spirit of being green, it is important to know where you’re printing to help save paper.  Each of the printers has a unique naming structure specific to our school: RUNK_printername_ipaddress.  Here are the names of the main printers and the person on each floor responsible for adding paper and reporting when it needs toner (ink).

RUNK_1stFloor_ (Mrs. Paris)

RUNK_2ndFloor_ (Mr. Sugarman)

RUNK_3rdFloor_ (Mr. Ola)

RUNK_TeachersRm_ (Ms. Sokoloff)

RUNK_Lab_ (Mrs. Murphy)

Setting Preview as your default .pdf viewer

Many emails we receive have .pdfs as attachments.  On the Mac platform, we have a convenient tool called Preview that is built to view .pdfs and .jpgs pretty nicely.

To make Preview your default .pdf viewer, control + click (which is equivalent to right-click) on any .pdf, and choose Get Info.  Or, click once on the .pdf and hit command + i (Get Info).

In the section Open with: Change the default viewer from Adobe Reader to Preview by selecting Preview from the drop-down list.  If it’s not in the list, click Choose Other… which will bring you to your Applications folder.  Then choose Preview.
To use Preview as the default, click Change All… at the bottom of this window.

Runkle School Conference in FirstClass

FirstClass is the email client we use in Brookline.  When you log into FirstClass, you see your FirstClass desktop.  This has many icons on it.  One icon that you should see is the Runkle School conference icon.  A  FirstClass conference allows users to exchange messages, documents in a common location.  This conference often has school announcements from the central office, superintendent, principal, other teachers, and much more.  In the conference there are folders located at the top.  These folders contain documents that might be helpful to you at one time or another.  Two folders that I remind people about each year is the Technology & Library folder.  and the Forms and Such folder.  Check them out!

I hope to use this as a place to share various things… student work, teacher work, my own technological and/or educational wonderings, and things that inspire me.

A little bit about me… I am an Educational Technology Specialist at the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, Massachusetts.   One of my yearly goals has been to make more of my students’ work public, so I began doing so on the Runkle Technology wiki.  My thinking for using a wiki to share student work is so my teachers can also post any student work on the same wiki, eventually.  It’s all a work in progress, but I have posted some work from this year.  I hope to do the same on this blog.