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.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Mentor Mob Playlist Sample: Maximize Instructional Time
I understand the idea behind Menor Mob is to create mixes of web content, but I was in need of a new tool for organizing some of my own content so that is what I used to create my first playlist.
Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!
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Learn more about Cool Tools to Curate Content
Upcoming webinar on April 24th or 25th
Saturday, March 17, 2012
EasyBib: One Click Access to Google Docs & More
Export to Google Docs and More:
Now there is a button to easily export citations to Google Docs. This one-click feature really streamlines the process by creating a Doc, naming it, and popping in directly into the user's Google Docs account for use. If you aren't using Google Docs, you'll notice some alternate, but handy ways to export citations, pictured below.
The EasyBib App features a scanner option to help students easily create bibliographies from book sources. This includes the ability to search by title and ISBN which can be quite helpful when the bar code is not readable by the device. The video below provides a good overview of how the EasyBib app works.
EasyBib supports it's own social search engine designed to shows users a list of sources that have been used on a particular topic. In addition, it shows the credibility of the sources commonly used.
Click on the tab at the top of the screen to access lessons plans to help teachers make the transition from traditional print research steps to electronic research. The lessons plans are simple and they cover a nice range of appropriate information literacy content.
If you haven't visited EasyBib in a while, you might want to take another look at EasyBib.com
If you haven't visited EasyBib in a while, you might want to take another look at EasyBib.com
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