Mister Mak's Learning 2.0

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Give a good teacher a tool and… Screencasting and OneNote

Earlier this week, my school hosted a media event with Intel to showcase how students and teachers are using the ClassmatePC convertibles (tablet netbooks designed specifically for kids) in our 1:1 program.  Whenever someone asks to see a teacher who  uses technology effectively in her classroom, the first teacher I think of is Chris Collins.

Two years ago, she was an early adopter of OneNote, taking a tool she knew could be valuable for her own teaching and creating a structure to make it rock, not only in her own classroom but for other science and math teachers as well.  Now it’s being used in all of our middle and upper grade levels and across most content areas.  Students in our 1:1 program have notebooks they create on our network, shared with teachers, so that students can do assignments at school or at home and synchronize it so that teachers also have a digital copy.  What does this mean for students and teachers?

• Little or no “lost homework” because all of the homework lives in the digital notebook.  It’s easier for most kids to keep track of digital files than paper ones.  No more “my dog ate my homework” happening.


• No need to back up homework files (an ongoing struggle in most 1:1 schools) because it synchronizes with the network.  Even a bad malware infection or hard drive failure would mean no more than one night of homework lost.  No more “my computer ate my homework” happening, either.


• Teachers can see the students’ notebooks during class as students take notes and practice skills for immediate feedback and redirection if needed.


• Teachers can project any student’s work for classroom discussion without special management software or having kids come up to a board.


• Teachers don’t need to collect a notebook to read/assess it.  Both students and teachers can have a digital copy of the work.


• Kids don’t need to stop working when the notebook is handed in.  Often, teachers can give immediate feedback, even while the student is working.


• Content of the notebook can be inked/handwritten (we use tablets).  It can also be typed, “printed” from other files for annotation, pasted (text or images), “clipped” as an image from any application, linked from the Internet, or recorded (video and/or audio) using microphone and webcam. Basic tables and drawings can also be included.


• Teachers don’t need a trolley to bring student notebooks home for the weekend to correct.


• Students and teachers can perform text searches of both typed or handwritten notes.

Late this week, Chris had an idea for having kids use their laptops to create screencasts of math problems as review of various techniques.  She would assign kids problems they would solve, showing their ...

I saw this sign in an 8th grade English class today. It made me laugh.

Final Reflections on TCEA:

1. Despite the trouble of being out for an entire week, the conference is totally worth it. Every year, I pick up so many ideas and find out about new tools that I can use with the students. It’s too bad that it is in Austin every year though – I like Austin, but it would be nice if it was in Houston every few years so I could sleep in my own bed.

1. My number one event – the TATN (Technology Applications Teacher Network) event on Tuesday. If you haven’t checked out their website (http://www.techappsnetwork.org/), you should definitely head right there and sign up as a member. Even if you don’t teach Tech Apps, they have so many good ideas and lesson plans available. Plus – they upload the contents of the awesome CD that they hand out to participants on Tuesday, so you have access to the presenter materials of everyone.

1. The iPhone app – awesome! I didn’t touch my paper program the whole week – of course, that caused a few snafus since bring your own laptop and paid sessions weren’t labeled in the app and the addendums weren’t uploaded. Fortunately, I was able to find other places to go at that time. I also would have liked to see presenter handouts available as downloads and not just vendor stuff. All-in-all, I think that it was a great addition and I hope that they continue it.

1. Most of my presentations were great, but a few were completely off-the-mark. There’s nothing worse than a workshop that’s been misnamed or not described correctly – I went to two different workshops (one paid, one concurrent) that were supposed to be about using technology to enhance the writing process and they didn’t touch on the writing process at all. One of them focused on the tool and had some neat activities, but didn’t touch on the writing process. The other one also talked about some tools (but pretty standard ones) and spent the rest of the time showing examples of student and teacher work – which might have been helpful if there was much of anything on the sites shown. I don’t mind being shown “cool tools” – but that should be what is in the description so I can decide if that’s what I need. Even if it’s a concurrent session that isn’t good, there’s an opportunity cost involved since I could have went to something else that was better. I guess that’s the nature of all conventions though – some stuff is great and some stuff isn’t.

1. The exhibit hall – I like going to the exhibit area, but I wish that it was laid out a little differently. For example, if all the network and security vendors were together, I could just skip that whole area since it isn’t what I’m looking for. I appreciate the fact that the vendors give away prizes and demo copies too – but it’s annoying when they try to get you to scream and do something stupid. I get that they’re giving away product, but they’re also trying to land a big sale so I don’t really feel the need to scream like a maniac in the hopes of being able to demo a product. I suppose that’s not going to change either and I could do like John and only head to the vendors that I’m interested in, but sometimes I don’t know that I’m interested in something until I see it. I also would like to see current sessions that are vendor presented more clearly marked in the program – I don’t appreciate showing up for a session that says it’s about making keyboarding more interesting and having it turn out to be an hour-long commercial for a product.

1. Time Management – I really wanted to go to the model classroom, iPlayground, and Open Source Room, but didn’t have time. It’s hard to manage the exhibits, paid workshops and concurrent sessions and still have time to check out some of the other areas. I wish there was a way to know which sessions weren’t going to work out ahead of time so I could skip them and do something more useful.

1. Keynote sessions – I’d like to see the opening keynote some year. Unfortunately, since paid workshops are scheduled at the same time as the keynote, I inevitably find something that I really want to attend and miss the keynote. It would be nice if no paid sessions were scheduled during that time.

1. Despite the nitpicking nature of several of my items – I really do think that TCEA puts on a great convention. In my previous life as a history teacher, I attended several state social studies and geography conventions – as well as a few national conventions and none of them were managed as well as TCEA. I would like to see the addition of some content strands to make it easier to find the sessions that are most appropriate for your needs. While it’s not that big of a deal for me to navigate the offerings, it can be overwhelming to the content area teachers we bring with us and the introduction of strands would help them navigate the offerings more easily – as would organizing the exhibit hall by vendor offerings.

TCEA Conference was great and I was amazed at all the creative ways that students and educators are using technology in the classrooms. There are some many resources.

I would like to share with you some of the TECHNOLOGY TIMESAVERS  that I learned my last morning at the Conference. 

Delicious Bookmark - Many of the presenters use Delicious to bookmark and share their favorites web sites. You can access them in any computer.

·         Delicious - Watch this video to learn more about the Delicious bookmarking system - http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

·         Delicious site - Go to the Delicious site to set up an account - http://www.delicious.com

Printables

·         Free Certificates - Personalize and then print certificates - http://www.certificatestreet.com

·         Graphic Organizers - Create and print customized graphic organizers! http://www.worksheetworks.com/miscellanea/graphic-organizers.html

Productivity Tools

• Vocaroo - record and then email or embed an audio file - http://www.vocaroo.com
• Sketchcast - record and embed a sketch plus audio! -  http://www.sketchcast.com

Personal TimeSavers

• Password Manager for Mac - Keeps track of all of your logins! -http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
• SplashID - Password Manager for PC - Keeps track of all of your logins! http://splashdata.com/splashid/index.asp
• TripIt - Creates an itinerary for your travel - http://www.tripit.com/home
• WheresMyCellPhone.com - Lose your phone? Make it ring with this tool! –TRY IT!!! http://www.wheresmycellphone.com/

TimeSaving Tools

• FileDropper - easily share a file with others - http://www.filedropper.com
• Tiny URL - shorten a long URL - http://tinyurl.com

Organizational Tools

• Fur.ly - easily navigate a group of web pages - http://fur.ly
• Evernote - will allow you to organize notes, ideas, pictures, text, and more. Can access your info from any computer and from most smart phones.  - http://www.evernote.com/

Handy Utilities

• KickYouTube - Allows you to download YouTube videos.- http://kickyoutube.com
• Online Stopwatch - A stopwatch and count-down timer for your large screen- http://www.online-stopwatch.com
• BibMe - An easy way to keep track of resources and create a bibliography. -http://www.bibme.org/

Use Google as calculator and conversion tool

• Use Google as a calculator. In regular search window
  Type a calculation (2 + 3 * 4 - 1 / 3) and press Enter.
• Use Google as Conversion Tool. Be sure to use the word “in”
  1 mile in feet
  1 cup in tablespoons
  100 dollars in euros
  180 c in f

 Pete's PowerPoint Station - Check out this resource for PowerPoint presentations and templates -  http://www.pppst.com

Thank you John and Cynthia for all your help!! We have an awesome Technology Department here at SLCS! 

Adriana Gutierrez
Spanish Teacher
St. Laurence Catholic School
281-690-5267
agutierrez@stlaurence.org

St. Laurence Catholic School strives to educate the whole child: body, mind, and spirit through the trinity of the child, parent, and educator.

NOTICE OF CONFIDENTIALITY: This electronic communication may contain confidential student record information intended solely for school business. Any disclosure, verbally or in print, by an unauthorized person is prohibited, and violates St. Laurence Catholic School policy. Should you receive this electronic communication in error, please notify the sender and delete the message.

1. THE App: What a great little iPhone app to help organize the week. Not once did I even look at the paper conference program while I was walking the convention center. Everything (well almost everything) in the app was current and extremely helpful. First, I was able to look at all the sessions and their descriptions and then "star" the sessions if I was interested. By "starring" the session, it was automatically imported into the app calendar. Then, immediately after the session, you could rate that session on a scale of one to five right on the iPhone app. This was huge for me as I was able to quickly look at the sessions I was interested in and then dump them all into the calendar.

   The other part of the app I really like was being able to peruse the list of vendors in the exhibit hall, "star" the vendor, and then look at a map of the hall with all my "starred" vendors placemarked on the map. If you've ever been to TCEA and the exhibit hall, you know this is a good thing given that the size of the exhibit hall was the size of five football fields. I generally have a lot of disdain for trolling the vendor area (except when trying to snag schwag for my kids back home). But there were a few I wanted to touch base with. Being able to pinpoint on the map the vendors I wanted to see really helped me stay away from aimlessly walking around the hall.

   Two suggestions for next year's app: 1. Incorporate the program addendum into the app. I had a rude awakening one morning because the session was moved to another day. Yes, I should have referred to the addendum but I was using my iPhone. 2. Mark on the session descriptions if it is a paid workshop. One of my coworkers showed up to a session only to be turned away because he wasn't aware from the iPhone app that it was a paid workshop.

   In the end however, this little app saved more time for me so I could catch more sessions and of course...

2. Hang out in the Blogger's Cave - This year was so much better than last year. While last year, the Blogger's Garage seemed like an afterthought, this year's "cave" was a great environment to relax, converse, and yes, learn! It was tucked out of the way away from conference noise and you could even look through a window down on the exhibit hall floor. Several times during the conference, I found myself either teaching someone something or learning something from someone in an ad-hoc manner that, in my opinion, was a much better way to learn/teach than with a 45 minute sit-n-git session.

3. Our school staff group blogging effort: It's interesting to see that in many schools, conference attendees are expected to come home and share what they learned. While this is a noble way to follow up and share information, I've rarely seen a successful live presentation of a conference reflection stuck at the end of an after school staff meeting. By the time the meeting rolls around, it's several weeks later, the energy has dwindled, and the audience really isn't interested in staying in the meeting longer than necessary. So, this year, we tried something a little different. We have a technology support blog (which this is posting to along with my own professional blog). I gave access to each of the blogs to the staff attending TCEA. Their mission was to create a reflective post each day while all that information is still swimming in their heads. Ultimately, our crew did an amazing job of reflecting and sharing and I hope to use this model to promote other conferences that our school regularly attends. BTW, I use Posterous as the platform for blogging..... simple as email.

Whew – last full day in Austin and it was a big one. I had a workshop right at 8:00 a.m. again and had to hit the ground running. My first workshop was Microsoft Office Projects that Kids Love and I got some really good ideas – I don’t know if I’ll do them in Office, but I can definitely see using some of the other new tools that I’ve discovered to spice up the projects even more. The most interesting one was a round robin writing idea, but instead of having one prompt that the whole class adds to, I was thinking of having each student start with a different prompt, add his or her sentence and then shift one computer over and add a sentence to the next story until everyone is back in his or her own seat to finish off the story. (Was that a run on sentence or what?) I don’t know if that’s too much moving around – I might have to sleep on it and try to flesh it out more.

I had some time before my next session so I hit the exhibitors again and was able to meet with the rep for Lexia and My Reading Coach. She’s going to contact me after the convention and set up a demo of their products with the Special Needs Committee and any other interested parties so we can see if one or both would help us to serve our students who have reading difficulties better. I was also able to meet with the rep for Understanding Math, which is a computer assisted interactive math program for all levels. He showed me a some of the features and is going to set me up with a demo of the software – this program also shows promise to help us differentiate our curriculum and help with both remediation and extension activities.

My next session was about an online keyboarding product and it was pretty much a bust – it has some nice features, but isn’t better than what we use already. So, it looks like my search will continue for a better keyboarding program for 6^th grade.

After lunch at Cisco’s (migas… yummm), it was back to the convention for GIMP’in it Up. GIMP is a free, open source program that has many of the same functions as Photo Shop, but FREE. We’ve used it at St. Laurence for a few years, but I picked up some cool, new introductory projects that I think the kids will really enjoy. If you’re interested in learning about the photo editing software yourself (or for your own kids), you can download it at http://www.gimp.org and you can download her tutorials at http://www.txtechnogeeksrus.com – but they won’t be up until Sunday at the earliest.

After that, John and I headed over to the blogger’s area, where John worked on his blog post and I met some new people and exchanged ideas with them. Mostly, we all decompressed and did a brain dump to try and process it all. After another quick stroll through the exhibits (where I scored some new jewelry), I headed  back to the hotel through the freezing rain (thank goodness I finally remembered to bring my umbrella to the convention center). Tonight is the big closing celebration, but since almost everyone else has headed back to Sugar Land and I’m tired, I’ll probably just collapse in my room and get some sleep. I have two more sessions scheduled in the morning (note to self: stop scheduling stuff at 8:00 in the morning - and why does 8:00 a.m. feel so much earlier here?) and the closing keynote and I’ll be headed back to Katy – hopefully, not in a blinding downpour like on the way here. Anyway, I think that we all learned a lot and that John forcing us to blog daily helped fix it in our long-term memory, so we should have a ton to share when we get back. It is a tiring week, but there is so much amazing stuff going on here that I hope we’ve peaked your interest in attending TCEA 2011.

Beyond Google

Search Terms: google cartoons

There are a bevy of search resources beyond Google.

OMG, he's using a bulleted PowerPoint and just yacking away. Where's the beef? Wow, he just taught us how to use quotes for search terms. Genius! Look, a cartoon on the screen.

This could possibly be the WORST conference session I've EVER been to. I thought we were going to learn some nifty advanced search strategies. Instead, we were subjected to a bunch of bulleted slides and screenshots.

OK Some options in Google Search -- Wonder Wheel, Timeline.

Tips
Use + and - in front of words to force their inclusion or exclusion
quotation marks around a phrase to make sure it is searched exactly as written.
Truncation or wildcards

GIMPin it Up!

GIMP similar to Photoshop but is free! http://www.gimp.org

Alien Faces - using Eye warping.

• select picture. Select rectangular button.
• draw square around face
• crop to selection
• Filters - distorts- Iwarp
• start with Grow tool
• deform radius 25-35
• click on forehead to stretch
• click OK.
• Eyeballs - filters - distorts -iwarp
• use horizontal slashes to make eyes bigger
• shrink in cheeks. use shrink instead of grow
  

selective colorization - color spot
uses layers. copy layer, turn copied layer bw. Colors, saturate. Eraser tool and erase bw layer. good exercise to understand layers better. find 6 pictures and colorize them.
txtechnogeeksrus.com

Cutout names - background pictures see through letters.
Ripples and Warps - simple, start with background.
Puzzle pieces
Lens flares - galaxies