Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I am following a Seesaw teacher's Facebook group  and one of the teacher's posted an animated avatar message she left for her students using Memoji which is available on the iPhoneXS, iPhoneXS Max, and iPhone XR. It was super cute but sadly unavailable to me with my sad iPhone 7. This got me thinking about other ways I could use leave creative messages for students if I was going to be out. I couldn't find another free avatar program that made a close approximation of my face so I branched out to messaging apps.  I made the two videos below using the Facebook messenger app (you could also use Snapchat as well). Both allow you to save videos to your phones camera roll. I put the Seesaw app on my phone and uploaded it from there but I could have easily emailed them to myself from my phone and uploaded it via my computer.  If you are looking for a fun way to leave messages for your students you might want to give these apps a try!   ...

Picture Source If you have not heard of the app Novel Effect you may want to give it a try for Read Across America Week. The free app brings popular kid's books to life by playing sound effects, music, and character's voices as you read out loud. Novel Effect works when you read aloud from the corresponding book using voice recognition. I heard about the app while attending the TCEA conference in San Antonio earlier in the month. I was recently a guest reader in a fifth grade class and decided to give it a try. I downloaded the app to both my iPhone and iPad. I looked through the list of books in the Novel Effect library of soundscapes and found a corresponding book in our school's digital library (Overdrive). If I had a hard copy of the book it would have worked as well. I then practiced at home. I had the book  (Rosie Revere Engineer) open on my laptop and the Novel Effect app open on my iPad. I also tried reading the book from my Overdrive app on my iPad...

Every Valentine's Day I would see several teachers use the fun conversation heart candies to have students create friendly letters (example below) Source Link You can imagine the sadness that fell after Necco announced they would not be manufactured this year. In an attempt to help teachers go digital, and see the value in Google Drawings, I made a conversation heart friendly letter template . I made a sample letter to test it out, and in theory it should work (see first picture).  The ideas is that students would write the letter using a combination of text and conversations hearts I have provided (I made the body of the letter default to 3" spacing so the hearts could easily be placed within the context of the letter). Students could change the words around on the hearts if they needed to as well.  Once they were done they could use the clipart around the hearts to decorate their letter (all clipart is from Pixabay so it is labeled for reuse). Once...

I liked the idea of having students create fake Instagram posts but really hadn't got past the "idea" phase. Last week in my Classy Graphics course with Tony Vincent he had us working with pictures and gave us free reign on the assignment. I used several of the techniques he taught us to FINALLY create a sample Instagram post that could be easily duplicated by students. I used Google Drawings, which is an under utilized tool in our district, to create the final product. This is a great activity to showcase several "how to's" in Google Drawings. I also used Pixlr to edit a photo of myself to remove the background I was standing in front of. I made a "how to" video as well as the simple screen shot "how to" . The video is a little more in-depth for any teacher wanting to try it out first. If you wanted students to make an Instagram post you might want to make a more specific video for your students to reference back to, particular...

I recently got tagged in a funny Facebook post about a cat texting his owner. While the post made me laugh (I am a cat owner) I really liked the idea of showing texts back and forth in a non-traditional manner (i.e. cat and human owner). After a quick Google search I found the app TextingStories. It is free (there are some in app purchases if one wanted to upgrade but I did just fine with the free version). I thought it could be used in a middle or high school class to show dialogue or understanding of the plot and characterization in a story. Here is my attempt at create a texting story between Romeo and Juliet: It was pretty easy to use and the video of your text gets saved to your camera roll. My camera roll is linked to my Google Drive so I was able to easily transfer it to my laptop (students or teachers could also use a free wifi transfer app). My only complaint is that there isn't a Windows version of the app. It has to be used on an iOS device.  The iOS limitat...

Flipgrid is one of my new favorite tech tools for collecting responses from students. It allows the user to set up a question or topic that students then answer using video. Think of it as a video messaging board. There is a free (limited) educators account but it has enough features that one can easily use it with students without having to upgrade to a paid account (for a step-by-step guide to setting up your account and creating your first topic you can flip through my Google Slideshow above or click directly on this link ). I've seen our teachers using it in a variety of different ways: - Asking students an "exit" slip type question - Asking students to record their response to a literary prompt. - Having students respond to a prompt about how to keep schools safe (this was on the "walk out" day) - One teacher had students draw political cartoons and hold them up to the camera and explain their drawing. Flipgrid offers a variety of suggestions ...

I have been enjoying using the new Google Sites for creating websites with students. It is much simpler to use than its predecessor and the students like learning how to create a website without any hassle. We are a Google Apps For Education district so all students have access to the GSuite of creation tools in their Google Drive. For this project I created a sample website to model the expectations and to give students a reference point in case they needed something to refer back to. I choose the book Me and The Pumpkin Queen. This project was done with a fourth and fifth grade book club group. Prior to starting the book the teacher had me come in and explain the technology component of their club. I showed them my sample site and walked them through how to set up their sites. During that meeting they started the outline of their site by making the home page and all the sub-headers across the top. Under the chapters tab they created sub-pages with a grouping of chapters. Eve...

One of our schools is having a superhero themed curriculum night and in one station (in the media center) students can wear capes and masks and will have a picture taken in front of a green screen superhero background. I used the green screen app Doink ($2.99) on my iPad to take the sample shots pictured here. I have used the app before and I am very familiar with it (I like that it has both a video and photo option and three layers to add overlays). The media center had a green screen wall but the color didn't extend to the floor and we needed the feet showing in most of the backgrounds. We set up a table with a green screen cloth and had a step stool and someone helping students up and down. We do have one school that painted the baseboard green and added green turf to the floor to solve their problem.  When we were setting up the project I started looking for ideas online when I came across this blog  and really liked how she used editing too...

I was in a classroom today and the students were brainstorming goals for the New Year. Later I was randomly emailed a post about students creating digital vision boards using Google Slides...or Google Drawings (which I thought was pretty cool). The picture above is the vision board I created as a demo (I used Google Slides). I added the two add-ons Kasey Bell suggested in her article but I didn't use them so I think you can ignore those. I just used "insert" "image" "search the web". Typically vision boards are made by cutting out pictures and words from magazines, and I have done quite a few in my lifetime. I have to say I really liked the digital version (less mess and having to solicit a bunch of magazines from co-workers!). The article does give some good tips and tricks for how to introduce the activity as well as completing and sharing. Enjoy and Happy New Year!

One of my favorite sites to use with students is duckster.com . It is a great site that has lots of student friendly articles (I use it mostly for the history articles). It is a free site, and as such, has a lot of distracting ads and sidebar information making it easy for students to click out of the intended article. In order to keep students focused on the information I need them to be I use a Google Chrome extension called Print Friendly & PDF. The extension allows you to make a downloadable PDF of the website and delete any extraneous information you don't want. This way the PDF can be shared with students via Google Classroom without sending them to a website, or it can be printed for their Social Studies or Science notebooks. It also works great if you need the information for a lesson but the website is blocked for students. To add the extension simply follow the steps below: To use the extension:

If you are looking for a techie way to schedule parent/teacher conferences, instead of sending home slips of paper asking parents to choose a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice, try using the free site  https://calendly.com/ .  The site (which I only use for this purpose) lets you adjust your time in whatever increments you want, as soon as parent books a spot they get an email confirmation, and then the time slot disappears so other parents can't see it.  I made a 6 minute video (above and linked HERE ) walking you through how to set up an account, create a parent/teacher calendar, what the parent sees and what you see when your times start booking up.  I shared this with our teachers but I thought it might help others as well. 

This week I have been working with several schools as they start putting together their morning news program for the school year. Almost exclusively schools are using Touchcast to produce their morning show. It is super cool free software with lots of templates and green screen capability (plus so much more...really I need to apply to become an ambassador!). The only downfall is that it is an app and software only for Apple devices (most schools have bought an iPad to record their shows...it is that good!). We have one school that just started their morning show and the person in charge (Mr. Blaine Peltier at Robert Smalls International Academy)  has done an OUTSTANDING job. I went in to see how he is doing some of his graphics and learned he has been doing them on his personal Mac at home (which, sadly, I do not have). My favorite effect on his video is the Pledge of Allegiance where he has a two video overlays with words scrolling on the screen. I was determined to fi...

I love the idea of Blackout Poetry. The basic premise is using existing text and finding words within the text to create a poem...then blacking out what you don't need. There are many internet posts, pictures, and videos on creating Blackout Poetry for those interested in looking into this cool genre. Many years ago I tried it with a Girl Scout troop of fourth and fifth graders and they found the concept difficult..and I have to admit that I probably didn't do a good job of explaining it. I tried a variation of it using magazines where students cut out words and created a poem using their "found" words. That went a little better (maybe because they can tangibly rearrange the words?). Anyway...I haven't had much of an opportunity to work with students and poetry in several years and then this video came across my Pinterest feed and I got excited about using technology with blackout poetry. The video was super easy to follow and I created a blacko...

Exciting Technology Upgrade #1 - Google Classroom This week Google Classroom announced that they have added a way to assign work to individuals, or groups of students, within Classroom. This is a HUGE deal, as it has been an issue of complaint not only in our district but also in the Classroom community forms. They have a couple of other upgrades as well (but this is the one that made the teachers I work with jump for joy!). You can read about the updates  HERE . What we would love Google Classroom to add is an inking feature for our touch screen tablet users (that would be users in grades 6-12 this year and 3-5 next year). Right now our 3-5 users have iPads and Google Classroom allows students to open assignments and use the inking tool to write on documents with their finger (very handy!). However this isn't a feature available on our touch screen tablets. The Classroom developers do allow for teacher feedback and I definitely submitted the suggestion (and asked a...

This week I tried a Mystery Skype for the first time with at 2nd grade class.They have a serious amount of mapping skills in their standards...and the teacher asked for a tech project tie in. I first wrote about Mystery Skype in this post . In preparation for the activity I had my super nice boss order these place mat maps on Amazon (we ordered 12 based on a class size of 24 so that students could pair up). This was a two day lesson (the class has a 40 minute Social Studies block and I took two days of it). The first day was reviewing what the class had learned and then (focusing solely on the United States) we taught them the four regions of the U.S. (NW, SW, NE, SE). We had them draw it out multiple times on their map. Once we did that we played a mystery state game. I left the classroom and the students came up with a state I had to guess when I came back in. This was done so that I could model questions a couple of times (crossing out states that I had projecte...

With parent/teacher conferences coming up, you can use https://calendly.com/ to manage your conference schedule (and it is FREE!!!). Using Calendly will allow you to create a calendar where parents can view and sign up for available time slots online (none of that dreaded paper and shuffling of time slots).  Parents receive email confirmations and have the option to add the appointment to their personal calendar. For an overview of how to set up a calendar in Calendly for parent conferences, please watch this short, step-by-step video (please note that I used the dates of Oct. 20 and 21st as a reference point since those are the dates for our district) - https://goo.gl/RUwZHh   Looking for a quick parent/teacher conference checklist? Check out this form on Google Docs . The list is a reminder of what might be covered during a conference; please feel free to change the form to meet your needs.     Have student’s evaluate themselves and use the...

Recently at a conference the sponsoring company (Discovery Education) posted some fun snap chat filters. This lead to the "How did you do that?" question from many of the teachers in attendance. Lindsey Hopkins, the DE employee who created the filters on the above pictures, lead an unconference class on how she created them. It was very good! The discussion in the session also focused on how to use them in schools and there were a lot of good ideas -  Spirit Week - Homecoming - Prom - Back to School Nights - Professional Development Training or Seminars. People also make them for events like weddings and parties. NOTE - These aren't the crazy filters with rainbows coming out of your mouth and giant eyes these are more like branding and location filters. I went ahead and made a test filter for a meeting with my supervisor to discuss possibly using it at one of our summer institutes (and to see how easy or hard it was to set up). It takes about 2 days to be ...

I am currently at a conference specific to users of the Discovery Education website and I have been going to a number of classes. In yesterday's class, how to use green screen with DE resources, the instructor Dave. T. showed us this fun chrome extension. The extension basically lets you display text (in this case his website address) in a huge banner like format across your screen (see last picture). This is a great tool for directing students to websites that they normally couldn't see on your screen (in the past I just copied and pasted web addresses to a Word document and blew it up - this is much better!).  Below are screen shots on how to get the extension and how to use it. 

As always there is way too much information at tech conferences to the point of shutting down (that happened to me in Atlanta at my first ISTE conference). Focusing on trying to get a specific number of ideas/tools has really helped keep me grounded (make no mistake though... I am still overwhelmed but at least I come back with things to focus on). I have to prioritize my notes but there are always items that are left over that deserve an honorable mention...or at least a  blog note so I don't forget them. These are: www.brainrush.com -  A FREE web tool for teachers to create games to be used in the classroom You can create your own games or use premade ones. The site allows the teacher to associate their own voice with correct answers. https://www.edu.buncee.com/home - I heard Buncee mentioned enough times that I made a star next to it in my notes to explore when I have time. It looks like it is a place to make and store lessons to share. h...