Entries from November 2008 ↓

I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! I am not much of a sappy ‘let’s be thankful’ kind of girl…so I thought I would post a “crappy graph” I made with an awesome new site Sue Waters (the edublogger) posted about today…

**I am going to create a post in the next few days discussing this chart and how you can use it in your classroom**

I haven’t had much time to hunt for goodies online, but I have stumbled onto two finds that I want to share…

Bubbleshare

Bubbleshare.com is a great slideshow service. Here is what they have to say on their site:

Create a free account and upload photos to share with friends, family, or the world. Unlimited storage means you’ll never run out of space to keep hundreds, even thousands, of your favorite pictures.

Add fun clipart, audio captions, video captions to your albums. Perfectly frame your photos with over 20 themes. Print stunning photo books, calendars and more!

This service can be used when creating digital stories in your classes and if the students create accounts, they can work on their assignments from home if they have access. You could also take powerpoint presentations, save the slides as pictures (file>save – in the save as file type area at the bottom, choose .jpg from the list) and create a bubbleshare slideshow of your powerpoint to post to your website or blog.

BubbleShare: Share photos – Craft Ideas

Box.net

Box.net is an online file storage service that offers various levels of online file storage plans. They actually have a free plan with 1GB of online storage space. This is great and all, but the best service is box.net’s widget creator. The site allows you to upload files to their site and widget code is created. You can then place the code on your website or blog. See the sample in my previous post.

When you go to the site box.net/widget you can create an account quickly and upload 3 files. You can adjust the way your widget will look. When you are done, you will receive the widget code in the page. If you have more files, all you have to do is go to box.net, log in, and go to the my files tab. Here you will see a folder that has been created; open the file folder and upload any additional files or delete unnecessary files. This is a great service for those of you who want to include handouts on your sites!

I wanted to thank those who were at the NW ECS training last Wednesday for your participation in the blog training! There were some great comments and ideas posted to my blog. Hopefully you learned something new and went away with an idea of how you can use blogging on your campus to enhance the curriculum.

For those of you who weren’t in attendance, hopefully this info will get you started if you were looking to add blogging as one of the tech integration tools you use on your campus.

I am currently working on a set of training modules that will walk you and your teachers through the process of setting up classroom blogs, but until then I wanted to give you some instruction sheets that will get you going. **See the box.net widget at the end of this post for handouts**

I also wanted to send you all a few helpful links:

1. I don’t know if any of you get THE Journal, but the issue I got in my mailbox last Friday has an article on blogging (great timing!)..anyway, here is the link to the article.

2. A few elementary ECSs were concerned about how blogging could be used in the elementary setting…I have seen some amazing stuff done on elementary blogs. Here are a few examples:

http://teacher102.edublogs.org/
http://strettonhandley.edublogs.org/
http://2mgems.blogspot.com/

3. There is a woman named Sue Waters who is known as http://theedublogger.edublogs.org. She posts helpful tidbits on using edublogs in the classroom. She currently is compiling a list of educational blogs broken down into categories. Check out the post with her list of blogs here, there are over 100 blogs listed. This may help you see how blogging can ‘fit’ for your school. If you have teachers that already have blogs, have them leave a comment with their blog information here so that The Edublogger can add them to the list.

good luck and please email me if you have any questions!

edublogs tutorial sources:
http://www.willard.k12.mo.us/co/tech/blog.htm 

Please submit a comment with the following information:

your name:
school:

How can you see blogging as a tool to enhance the curriculum on your campus?

What can you see as a problem when it comes to implementing blogging on your campus?

The goal of today’s training is to leave you with a basic knowledge of how edublogs.org works and the technology integration possibilities that blogging opens up to you and your teachers. Also, with an idea of how to go about implementing blogging with your teachers. Most of the session will be hands on, so I will post more information than what is covered and some other tidbits here for you to look at later and refer your admin and staff to.

Getting your teachers to ‘buy into blogging’:

1 No papers to grade. The teacher reads the comment and assigns the grade.
2 Discussions that could never be completed during class can be done with a blog.
3 A blog gives the students a voice. It is escpecially powerful for the students who are too shy to share during class. You will see these kids come out of their shells online.

Getting your admin to ‘buy into blogging:

1 No money needs to be spent, the only investment needed is time for professional development.
2 The communication lines between home and school widen.
3 Blogging extends the school day…the discussion doesn’t have to end when the bell rings.

Next Steps:

*Once your admin is on board, get a core group of teachers that are willing to jump in and get blogging with their classes.
*The teachers need to determine how blogging will enhance their curriculum when deciding how to use it. It has to be authentic.
*After you get your core group of teachers blogging, start touching base with someone in their department. Show them what their colleagues are doing.
*You now have a small group of teachers who can now help train others.

Your job: once you have teachers blogging, you will need to check their blogs periodically to see how they are utilizing them. If a teacher is not posting regularly, help them find a way to integrate their current concepts/standards into a new post.

Videos/Presentations promoting online collaboration:
A vision of K-12 students today
A Brave New World Wide Web

Escobedo Classroom Blogs:
Joanna Martino – Algebra
Meredith Allard – US History
Sonja Wooten – Life Science
Susan Dain – English

Other Classroom Blogs:
http://integratingtechnology.edublogs.org/
http://lgeslibrary.edublogs.org/
http://mr-fisher.edublogs.org/
http://africacolony.wordpress.com/ 

Helpful Blogs/Blog Posts:
Blogging with a Purpose
David Truss
Weblogg-ed

Books to read:
Blogs. Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Tools for Classrooms

Online Edublogs Resource:
Edublogs.org
Getting Started Guide
The Edublogger
Video Tutorials

Our school has purchased the licenses for Study Island, an online standardized test practice program. So far it looks pretty cool and the kids who have used it so far have found it to be pretty fun. I will be holding a training on Tuesday after school for any teachers wanting to learn more about the program.

For the Tuesday training:

We will log in and explore the site from a teacher’s perspective. I will show you how to create a class, add your students, and start assigning practice to the kids.

Here are some handouts that should help you when you are on your own.

Click here for the link to the handouts.

After the training:

I will need an excel file that has all of the students you think will use the program so that I can create the accounts. Once your accounts are made, you will want to create your classes, add the students, and create assignments.

With my job as tech strategist, there are monts at a time where it is go go go…all day…that has described this last month for me. So, I haven’t been able to post a thing.

I have been spending a lot of time in classrooms with teachers on my campus working on their blogs and am seeing some amazing things.

We have a health class that has been discussing the effects of drug use and Mrs. Torres had her students post a message about a situation where drugs entered their life and how they would handle it. They will be conducting a debate in a few weeks for National Smoke Out Day and will be posting their thoughts.

Mrs. Wooten’s science blog is broken down by period with thought provoking questions based on current units. Her main blog includes class announcements and an absent page to increase parent communication.

Ms. Martino has created a true online community with her algebra blog. She has students respond to problems of the week with their description of how they solved the problem; then commented on how the other processes posted helped them ‘get it’. She is also in the process of training classroom reporters who will creat posts based on concepts covered in class.

Finally, Ms. Allard and I have been working on getting her US History blog up and running. Our staff participated in a training on constructed responses, so she wanted to encorporate her blog into it. She is using her main blog to post assignments, then created a blog for each period as an area for students to post their work. She will have her kids respond to a discussion about the Declaration of Independence, then have the students comment on each others responses.

Just like anything new, the teachers have spent time getting their blogs up and running. However, the increase in the level of engagement of the students is amazing. Mrs. Dain, posted a quiz on her ELA blog earlier in the year, and the kids keep asking her when she is going to give another quiz on her blog!! Imagine that, the kids WANT A QUIZ!! WOW…