September 21

2017 Student Blogging Challenge

Looking for a way to get your students writing? Blogging allows them to reach a wider audience, work on their writing and communication skills, and provides an interactive platform where students can read each other’s’ work and provide feedback.

The Student Blogging Challenge is starting soon! It is a great way to connect your students with a global audience while developing their blogging skills.

Source: Join the 2017 Student Blogging Challenge – Starts October 1 – The Edublogger

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April 21

Going paperless

As students were printing articles this morning, in a not-so-printer-friendly fashion, I asked them whether it couldn’t be done digitally. One student said they needed a hard copy because they needed to annotate the article before turning it in. In my curiosity, I wondered how they might do that digitally.

Here’s one possible way (would someone be willing to try it out with a student?):

  • Have students open the OneNote App on their laptop
  • They may need to log in; use their login for Office 365 (s____@stu.fwisd.org)
  • Find their article online
  • Highlight the text of the article
  • Copy
  • Paste into a OneNote Notebook
  • Copy and paste the URL, as well.
  • Within OneNote, you can edit the text pretty much as you would in Word. You could establish norms for annotating, such as using particular highlight colors, what to underline, etc.
  • If they have already logged into the Outlook app at some point, they can then email their annotated article to you from within OneNote; you’ll receive the full text of the article with all their annotations. If it tries to open the regular Mail app, that won’t work.  They’ll need to set up their Outlook app.

If you try it out, let me know what you run into and I can update these instructions.

October 21

Article: Do Your Students Know How To Search?

Do Your Students Know How To Search?

From the article:

There is a new digital divide on the horizon. It is not based around who has devices and who does not, but instead the new digital divide will be based around students who know how to effectively find and curate information and those who do not.  Helene Blowers has come up with seven ideas about the new digital divide – four of them, the ones I felt related to searching, are listed below.

The New Digital Divide:

January 22

One thing at a time!

We tend to think our students are capable of multi-tasking. That is, at least, the myth tied with them being ‘digital natives’.  Research has and continues to show, however, that most people cannot and ultimately end up doing none of the tasks very well when we do. Here’s some of the latest research and a companion inforgraphic:

This Is Your Brain on Multitasking

 

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February 3

Sting 24 FWISD Technology Conference

The FWISD Technology Conference went well and I made it through my sessions ok; here’s the presentation I gave. (It may be slow to load)

  

I have a wiki with the information from the session and other resources.  I hope to continue working with this topic and continue refining that wiki page.
If you missed the conference, here’s the page that has all the presenter materials from the conference for you to look at.

January 18

Sting 21: trying new resources- easier than that exercising resoution!

A New Year, New Resources!

from Free Technology for Teachers:
11 Social Studies resources to try in 2011
11 Language Arts resources to try in 2011
11 Science resources to try in 2011

11 Mathematics resources to try in 2011
11 Health & Phys Ed resources to try in 2011
Architect Studio 3D

Webcams.travel webcams from around the world- make foreign locations real to students by letting them see real-time video.

Top 25 financial infographics from Mint.com

America asks what’s next in 2011– “a six minute video that looks back over the history of the United States, the current challenges facing the US, and then has some experts make predictions about the future of the United States.” (pause it, let it buffer, then play it)

ShopWell – personalized nutritional shopping information based on you.

Mapping America! census data in an interactive map

History for Music Lovers– a youtube group, song parody/remix on historical topics

Using Super Bowl Ads in the Classroom

SnagLearning educational videos and films

FreeOCR– web-based scan-to-text converter (convert your pdfs to editable text) that’s a bit rough, but perhaps useable.

Green Home Guide from the U.S. Green Building Council

MixBook– create photo books, cards, calendars online. Mixbooks also allows group collaboration; students could create a photo book together on a particular topic.  Great alternative product.

Council on Foreign Relations- interactive guides to contemporary issues

50+ sites with free stock photography

Book Trailers for All  Book trailers are a great way to get students interested in a book.  They’re also a great option for student products and could be applied to a variety of content areas and topics.

December 1

Sting 20 “Let’s Get Digital, Dig- it- al”

Digital Magazines

Many magazines are creating digital editions, exact copies of the print magazine that you can view online using a one of several different viewers/players, such as  Zinio (you can get a free trial subscription there).

Digital magazines are a great resource in conjunction with the interactive whiteboards.  See if there’s one that might provide supplementary material for your content.

Sign up for 1 free digital subscription at http://goreadgreen.com/ If you’re savvy, you can figure out a way to sign up for more than one subscription.

yudu– Read digital magazines for free AND create your own.  Decatur High School in Georgia has created one titled “Carpe Diem”.  Categories range from Animals & Pets to Film & Animation to Travel & Events.

coverleaf – Looks like you can preview digital editions of magazines and subscribe to them.  There are some free magazines in there, and subscribers to the print editions seem to be able to subscribe to the digital for free. (Maybe here’s where the promethean board comes in if theres a curriculum-related magazine you use)

Here are some magazines with digital editions available for free to read online:

hospitality design

hospitality upgrade

Architect

landscape architecture digital preview of the April 2010 edition; digital subscription available)

arts and architecture not a digital edition, but I thought it worthwhile- you can view pages (in pdf) of issues from January 1945- to 1969.  The covers are totally mod cool! You can buy a tshirt with selected cover designs.

conduit not really a ”digital magazine’ but kinda cool. Let me know when you figure out what it is.

wend outdoorsy stuff.

popsci Popsci makes its archives searchable via Google Books.

Which leads us to Google Books, offering some magazines in their entirety.  I’m not sure what exactly you call this format that google is using; it is “digital” in a sense, but they’re also scanned in, not produced to be digital(?)
Go to http://books.google.com/. To search only magazines with full view, click on advanced search. In advanced search, click on Full view only and Magazines (highlighted below) and put in your search terms. For a short intro from Google, click here.

google books search box

google book advanced search

Have an online or digital magazine you like? Add it to the comments!

If you’re wondering, the title of this post is a shout-out to all you Olivia Newton-John fans 🙂

September 24

Sting 19: School Spirit is Alive and Well!


south hills scorpion banner

me_nerdy
FASTEST SLIDE RULE SLINGER IN THE WEST
Known to out-calculate the entire math department

people kept asking me why I didn’t dress up for nerd day?!
okay, just because I felt comfortable in that clothing…

Books are being checked out!  It’s awesome! Ask your students what they’re reading; whether they are reading or not, it provides encouragement either by way of appreciating that they are reading OR by reinforcing the idea that reading for pleasure is a normal, and somewhat expected, part of personal growth. (IMHO)

Join the SHHS Library Group on Facebook!

Student lists have been consolidated into a google spreadsheet.  Check your email for the link.

Bing $100,000 contest: Our School Needs “How would you finish the sentence ‘Our school needs…?’ Write an essay. Snap some pictures. Film a video. Rally your class and get creative and get ready!” Science Lab, computer lab,… what could we use?  If anyone wants to send in an entry, let me know if I can help!

SHHS Electronic resources– I’ve placed a pink sheet listing the databases we subscribe to and username & passwords.  If you need any help understanding what they are for and/or how to use them, I’d be ecstatic to talk about it! (We librarians have a thing for databases)

The Week in Rap (you’ll have to watch at home)
The Week in Rap

LINKS:
Sweet Search 2Day “a daily curated assortment of the best content on the Web for history, language arts, science, news, culture and other topics.”
Fun and Games with Google Books
5 Tools for keeping track of your passwords having difficulty keeping track of all your passwords? Check out these tools to stay organized.  Or you could, like me, use pretty much the same password for everything… but then, I’m in big trouble when that one password gets out!
Nine elements of digital citizenship “digital citizenship can be defined as the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use.”  This is what students need to know to effectively live in a digital world, yet it’s not a part of what we teach them in school.  In particular, what is said about Digital Literacy:

“Digital Literacy: process of teaching and learning about technology and the use of technology.

While schools have made great progress in the area of technology infusion, much remains to be done. A renewed focus must be made on what technologies must be taught as well as how it should be used. New technologies are finding their way into the work place that are not being used in schools (e.g., videoconferencing, online sharing spaces such as wikis). In addition, workers in many different occupations need immediate information (just-in-time information). This process requires sophisticated searching and processing skills (i.e., information literacy). Learners must be taught how to learn in a digital society. In other words, learners must be taught to learn anything, anytime, anywhere. Business, military, and medicine are excellent examples of how technology is being used differently in the 21st century. As new technologies emerge, learners need to learn how to use that technology quickly and appropriately. Digital Citizenship involves educating people in a new way— these individuals need a high degree of information literacy skills.”

Discovery Education Science Fair Central: includes an idea finder, project timeline, virtual lab, parent resources, videos on the different aspects of creating a project, and more

On Display Now:

Street Lit / Hip-Hop Fiction

street lit display

Comedy

comedy display

Sports

sports fiction display

Tayshas List

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