Sunday, May 6, 2012
Google Search Education
Google recently announced the launch of Search Education. With it comes the promise of bringing educators the tools they need to help students become savvy searchers and independent learners. The site for educators includes lesson plans that are tied to A Google a Day, a daily puzzle designed to develop complex search skills. The lessons are aligned with NETS and Common Core Standards, connected to content area subjects and differentiated on 3 levels. In addition to lesson plans, Google offers live trainings and archived videos of past trainings to provided educators with the background knowledge
Providing students with strategies that makes it easier to find relevant information more efficiently is a skill we need to teach our students. Check out this video to learn more about Google Search Education.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Cool Tools to Curate Content
Educators can use content curation tools to streamline instruction by providing students with easy online access to a variety of resources to meet the needs of diverse learners.
Possible Uses in Education:
- Use handy bookmarklet tools to quickly create collections of content-related resources for students, parents or coworkers.
- Embed collections of resources into a webpage, blog or wiki for easy access.
- Create packages of content for student research, inquiry and project-based learning.
- Design guided-learning activities that include digital text at a variety of reading levels and multimedia resources to meet the diverse learning needs of all students.
- Create collections of published student work that are easily available for sharing and reflection.
Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Digital Notes: Combine Readability & Google Docs
One of my favorite tools to share with students and teachers is Readability. This handy bookmarklet tool scrubs webpages clean of distractions by eliminating the ads and creating a more readable version of digital text. By itself, it's a really useful tool for students, but when combined with Google Docs, it can be part of an effective and efficient method for taking digital notes.It's important to note that the strategy offered here is not meant to replace traditional methods of note-taking. Rather, it is meant to be one of many note-taking strategies that can be introduced to students throughout the year as they engage in frequent everyday research experiences. If the goal of research is to find information, use it and properly cite sources, then introducing students to multiple strategies and allowing them to take flexible learning paths will help them become independent researchers and life long learners.
Risk Free Ways to Try Digital Notes:
- Content related article reviews
- Sharing current events
- Preparing a script for a podcast or narrated slideshow
How To Combine Google Docs and Readability for Digital Note-Taking
Friday, April 13, 2012
SlideRocket Sample: Cool Tools for Vocabulary
As someone who creates and shares presentations frequently, I'm excited to add SlideRocket to my tech toolkit of cloud-based presentation tools. It's slick, collaborative and available for free with a Gmail or Google Apps for Educators account. A refreshing change from Google Presentation, SlideRocket is feature-rich and fast. Here are a few of my favorite features:
- Vivid themes
- A sophisticated Inspector Panel which includes opacity and pinpoint rotation of images, text and videos
- Access to stock photography or options to upload your own images
- Embedded video
- Fun plugins which include a real-time Twitter feed.
If you decide to try this tool yourself, remember to be diligent about saving. I did experience some problems with this, perhaps because I've gotten spoiled by not having to save a Google Presentation, or perhaps because I kept getting logged off due to inactivity, but it is something to note:
I'm a newbie with this tool, but I'm sharing a quick presentation I put together to guide a recent webinar, Cool Tools for Vocabulary.
Click the X to view full screen
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Promoting Visual Literacy
It's always a good idea to start with an Essential Question to drive the learning experience. Students can work in pairs or individually to create images that answer the question visually, then all of the work can be published online for an engaging culminating activity to allow students to share knowledge and develop a deeper understanding of the whole.
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| Mosaic Maker combined with Motivator |
- mosaic maker
- motivator
- magazine cover
- movie poster
- captioner
After the images are created there are plenty of ways to publish and use them in the classroom for a culminating learning activity. Assigning an engaging learning task related to the Essential Question to be discovered through the sharing of projects will give students an opportunity to bring it all together and develop a big-picture understanding. Here are a few suggested tools to use for a culminating activity:
- Pinterest: Create a Pinterest Board specifically for the purposes of displaying and evaluating the projects.
- VoiceThread: Upload the images to VoiceThread and have students hold online conversations about the media.
- Wikispaces: Publish the images in Wikispaces and utilize the discussion feature to generate focused discussions about the individual or small group contributions.
Finally, when engaging students in this type of project, it's important to take advantage of opportunities for addressing Digital Citizenship by including appropriate lessons on Internet safety and copyright.
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