Check out this TED talk about a help line for teens set up by Nancy Lublin, someone who understands how teens prefer to communicate.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ category
A text-only help line
April 27th, 2012Google Drive
April 25th, 2012Google Drive promises to be like Dropbox as a place to synchronize files across your devices. The added bonus is that you can set up your files to be shared amongst specific Google users. The downside is now Google, supercomputing powerhouse that it is, would now have access to those files. If I were a comic book supervillain, I wouldn’t take over a building. I would subtly take over Google.
Socrative – A free student response system
April 9th, 2012I know that schools are pushing for more technology use and one of those ways is through student response systems, “clickers” that students can key in their responses and get instant feedback. The positive is that teachers can assess the entire class at once instead of just the one or two students that get called on per question. The negatives are the cost and, closely related, the proprietary nature of the devices. (You have to use that company’s clickers on their software.)
Socrative gets around that. This is perfect for the computer lab or a mobile lab. The teacher creates a classroom and a quiz. Socrative generates the room number. Students then go to Socrative and type in the room number. They type in their name and then are presented with the quiz.
I did my test run with a laptop and my phone, with the laptop being the teacher station. My phone showed a message that said it was waiting on the teacher. Once I was ready on the laptop, it automatically updated on my phone and I answered the sample question. The teacher station then saw what I got and started a grade report. Students don’t see how their classmates scored, which is good. They are able to see if they got the right answer if you set up the quiz to do that. There is also a game mode called Space Race where they are divided into two teams and their right answers fuel their rockets. It’s not a huge motivator, but it still beats a worksheet.
What is great is that the reports export to Excel. There is also a quiz creation template in Excel that you can import so that you can make a backup copy and not have to rely solely on an online copy. The fact that it’s free definitely helps.
With more school districts moving towards a “bring your own teachnology” policy for portable devices, I see a lot of potential for this.
GMail Tap
April 1st, 2012Google always has great April Fool’s Day jokes. Some were pretty far-fetched, like the mind control features of Google Docs, but this GMail keyboard is pretty convincing:
Class books as eBooks
March 27th, 2012Yes, there are things like Kindle Direct Publishing or Apple’s iBook creator, but School Library Journal’s Digital Shift has a great list of websites that can be used to create eBook .mobi and .epub files. We have students that create portfolios online. Imagine a collection of poems or essays in one contained file to load on an ereader.
The caution: What’s to stop an older sibling from giving the ebook to a younger system? You would need a system of checks to avoid plagiarism.
A Common Core search app for both Android and iOS
March 19th, 2012Over Spring Break the Common Core standards came up in conversation (I do, on occasion, hang out with educators) and the people I chatted with wanted links to both the iTunes and Android App Store versions of MasteryConnect’s Common Core App. Where the app excels is in presenting the Common Core standards in an easy-to-read format at a moment’s notice.
The link to the iOS (for iPhones and iPads) is here and the link for Android users is here. If you can find a Windows Phone version, please leave a link in the comments. Also leave a comment if you have a better app. The other ones that I have found are missing one half or the other, making MasteryConnect’s the best option.
Here’s a QR code for the Android version:
Here’s a QR code for the iOS version:
Here’s a QR code for this post:
Feel free to use the images or anything else from this post in a handout for teachers and your educational community.
KONY 2012
March 7th, 2012“We cared, but we didn’t know what to do.”
We know about World War II. We’ve talked to veterans. We’ve heard from Holocaust survivors – but many people have only heard snippets in modern news about the Invisible Children and the name Joseph Kony is pretty unfamiliar.
Kony is the leader of a paramilitary group that has kidnapped 30,000+ children and forced them to commit horrible acts of violence. As an educator, I want to protect my students. As a father, I want to protect my own children. If what happened/is happening in Uganda happened to a child I worked with, I would want the world to know and to intervene.
That’s where Jason Russell comes in. His movie, KONY 2012, is a campaign to raise awareness and to not just be aware but to act.
This reminds me of how U.S. soldiers had only heard rumors of the concentration camps of World War II and then the shock of seeing some of the results of Nazi war crimes.
Check out the movie. Like the director says, you have to pay attention for 28 minutes, but it’s very eye-opening.
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
Speech Resources
February 28th, 2012Another librarian asked for a collection of speeches to use as examples for students. A co-worker of mine recommended these sites that are free to the public.
American Rhetoric – Michael E. Eidenmuller from the University of Texas has gathered a collection of speech audio and video from U.S. history.
Presidential Speech Archive – The University of Virginia organized these by sections of U.S. history.
Recorded Sound Reference Center – This is the Library of Congress’s collection of audio.
Outdated idioms
February 22nd, 2012
A Language Arts class was learning about idioms, figures of speech, today. When the phrase “like a broken record” came up, they honestly had no clue what a record was – and why should they?
Some could picture a DJ turntable and we went with that and explained how scratching actually was that – scratching over the grooves of the record. I then dusted off a record player and brought it to the classroom. It had the red and white audio cords, so I hooked it up to the TV and blasted it. The students were amazed at the needle arm.
My friends will appreciate that the record played was the Broadway version of “1776″.
Impossible Photography – TED Talk: Erik Johansson
February 13th, 2012If you’ve been with this site for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of the TED Talks. Normally, it’s world-changing presentations on amazing solar cells or cures for diseases.
Check out this one from Erik Johansson using Photoshop, planning, and the human imagination to create some M.C. Escher-esque photos.
