Category: Teacher resources

Ecolleague Mike Daugherty has over seventeen years experience in educational technology serving a variety of roles.  He was recently awarded the OETC (Ohio Educational Technology Conference) Technology Innovator of the Year award and received honorable mention in the national DILA awards. In his current position, he is the director of technology for a high-achieving public school district in Ohio.  His site, morethanatech.com, looks at EdTech from the district administration point of view.

He is also lucky enough to have a 3D printer. I asked him if he’d share his experiences with you. Here are his thoughts:

Similar to many school districts around the country, we decided to dip our feet into the 3D printing waters this past school year. 3D printing, Maker Spaces, and Fab Labs are the latest darlings of the EdTech world and for good reasons. The potential of these devices is almost limitless. There are a number of industry experts predicting that 3D printing will have a larger impact on the world than the Internet itself. It’s crazy to think about that, but when you read their predictions, it hard to ignore.

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Alice Keeler is sharing a Google Doc of favorite educator tech tools. It’s crowdsourced, so view, add to it, come away richer thanks to your online colleagues:

Link to the crowdsourced list.

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It’s summer, time for teachers to recharge their cerebral batteries. That could mean reading, going on field trips, spending time with online PLNs, or taking calls from family members who usually end up at voice mail. For many, it means attending conferences like ISTE and NEA to learn how the heck to integrate technology into their lesson plans. If you aren’t a veteran conference attendee, you may wonder what you should bring. That’s a fair questions considering learning is no longer done sitting in auditoriums nodding off to the wisdom of a guest speaker behind a podium. Now, you might be asked to scan a QR code and visit a website, access meeting documents online, interact digitally, or use a backchannel device to share your real-time thoughts with the presenter. Besides a toothbrush and aspirin, what should you take to your upcoming conference? Here are five tools that will make you look and act like the Diva of Digital:

Google Maps

Some conferences take multiple buildings spread out over several blocks, and depending upon the number of attendees (ISTE last year had about 15,000), your hotel may not be around the corner from the Hall. Bring the latest version of the Google Maps app on your smartphone or iPad, complete with audio directions. All you do is tell it where you’re going, ask for directions, and Siri (the voice behind the iPhone) will lock into your GPS and hold your hand the entire way. If friends are looking for a Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts near the conference, Google Maps will find one. If you want Chinese, use an app like Yelp to find one patrons like (although I’m becoming a tad leery about Yelp. Anyone have a good alternative?)

Conference App

Most educational conferences have one. I find these more useful than the conference website. They are geared for people who are manipulating digital device one-handed, half their attention on the phone and the rest on traffic, meaning: they’re simple and straight-forward. Test drive it so you know where the buttons are, then use it to find meeting rooms, changes in schedules, and updates.

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Every teacher I know juggles an exhausting teaching schedule with parent conferences, administrative tasks, and specialized student needs. They take work home evenings and weekends and often are forced to choose between family and job when it comes to allocating a finite quantity of time over what surely seems to be infinite needs.

The teachers I know are also positive thinkers. They always start the new school year with a promise to be more organized, work more efficiently, use available tools to complete tasks faster, and prioritize needs.

There’s a problem, though: Where does one start? Scholastic offers a list of one hundred tips, but most require set up time (yikes!)–and worse, non-existent classroom real estate–before they can be used. For my short list, I looked for:

• a net savings of time
• a way to quickly accomplish common tasks
• easy access from digital devices that teachers commonly carry
• simplicity, so even when my mind is somewhere else (like on the child across the room or the admin peeking in my door), it performs flawlessly
  

Here are three that meet all of these qualifications:

Waze (http://www.waze.com) Free

Waze is a free navigation app for GPS-equipped smartphones that bills itself as ‘the largest community-based traffic and navigation app’. It includes spoken turn-by-turn directions and the ability to search for destinations by address, category, place name, or landmark. Thanks to its over fifty million users, Waze gives you real-time crowd sourced reports about which highway is jammed, the location of  accidents, where to find the cheapest gas, and when your friends are arriving at the same destination as you. You can even send an ‘I’m on my way!’ comment to whoever needs to know with a click.

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A wide variety of topics, with one thing in common–they teach you about technology in education:

1. Common Core training–the Hunt Institute
2. Common Craft--videos on wikis, phishing, etc.
3. How-to videos–technology, reading, math, more
4. How to Videos for Web 2.0
5. Internet Movie Database
6. K-8 school-related videos. Tons 
7. Learn Zillion—teaching videos
8. Teacher Training Videos   
9. Teaching Channel
10. YouTube Education
11. YouTube Pure—removes comments

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Mentoring Minds is an education publishing company and resource site created by former teachers. Their goal: Critical thinking for life–

” to develop affordable, effective learning tools that help children think critically, giving them the skills to succeed not just in the classroom, but in life.”

• Materials enable differentiated instruction, student practice, and teacher evaluation of progress. Through their dashboard, teachers can identify which students have mastered specific standards, what learning goals should come next for each student, and which students require in-depth interventions to meet the standard(s) being assessed.
• Professional development is available for teachers on core concepts like differentiation in the classroom, rolling out Common Core Standards, best practices for instruction, formative assessment strategies, and more.
  

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If I’m trying to get from Los Angeles, California to Minot, North Dakota, I start with a map. I build a route that includes the sights I’d like to visit, shows me the connecting roadways, and gives me a rough idea of how long it’ll take.

The same is true with teaching a class. I need a map to show how best to blend my curriculum and the school’s standards, scaffold skills on each other, and connect to all stakeholders involved. In education, that’s called a Curriculum Map.

What is a Curriculum Map?

According to Education World, a Curriculum Map is…

…a process for collecting and recording curriculum-related data that identifies core skills and content taught, processes employed, and assessments used for each subject area and grade level.

 —Education World: Virtual Workshop: Curriculum Mapping

A Curriculum Map first and foremost is a planning tool, a procedure for examining and organizing curriculum that allows educators to determine how content, skills and assessments will unfold over the course of the year. It is an in-depth view of topics teachers will instruct over the school year, their pacing, and how they blend with other subjects. In an IB school, that includes the learner profiles that are satisfied. In a Common Core school, that covers the math and literacy standards addressed. In other states, it’ll be how lesson plans meet their unique state standards.

In general terms, a Curriculum Map includes:

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After you’ve looked at these 28 sites, there’s no reason to print student work and stick it on a wall. You have too many options:

1. Book Cover creator
2. Create a magazine cover
3. Flipboard—organize ideas into mag
4. Go animate
5. Issuu (http://issuu.com/)
6. Newspaper—create a newspaper
7. Newspaper—create a newspaper clipping
8. Newspapers around the world
9. PhotoPeach–online slideshows
10. Poster maker—like an eye chart
11. Posters—8×10 at a time–simple
12. PowerPoint games for kids
13. PowerPoint stuff
14. PowerPoint Templates
15. Prezi
16. Print Posters One Page at a Time
17. Publish the magazines 
18. Scoop-it—organize webpages
19. Screen Capture—full webpage
20. Screencast-o-matic
21. ScreenLeap—screen share for free
22. Turn short stories into books
23. Wideo–create videos online
24. Youblisher to make your pdf documents flappable

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Daylight Savings Time is back today. Watch this video for background information:

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Here’s a good collection for both summative and formative assessments:

1. Class badges
2. Grading automatically w G. Docs–Flubaroo
3. Hollywood Sq/Jeopardy Templates
4. Jeopardy Labs
5. No Red Ink–track student learning, create quizzes, CC-based–free sign-up
6. Online quizzes that you create, online grades 
7. PollDaddy
8. Puzzle maker
9. Quizbean–make and take quizzes online
10. Quizdini
11. Rubrics I
12. Rubrics II
13. Rubrics III
14. Rubrics/Assessments—create–KSchrock
15. Rubrics—for CCSS
16. Socrative
17. Technology use survey—interactive
18. Test creator—online
19. Tests—create fill-in-the-blanks
20. Padlet

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