Conferapp

Jennifer Barber told me about this AWESOME app that you can use to keep notes on your students during small group time. It allows you to upload your students, then type in notes on your iPad. It also has an option where you could share the notes if you needed to with another teacher. (For example: Tam if she works with your students.) Watch the short video to see how it works. I hate to be redundant but it is AWESOME!

e-Books

Blog Assignment

In one of my graduate school classes I was given the assignment to "post about best practices in use of blogs in K12." One of my favorite things to do is read education blogs. I like to see the new tools that people have found and I also like to read their opinions on what is going on in education. I went to Google and searched this assignment topic. One article that popped up was "The Honor Roll: 50 Must-Read Education IT Blogs," which I thought would be a good start. I decided I would look through these top blogs to see what made them stand out from the rest.



I clicked on the first blog which was titled 2 cents Worth. The author of this blog is David Warlick. I immediately was entranced by his blog and spent at least an hour reading through his past posts and the comments from other readers. It wasn't because his blog was flashy and had pretty colors, it is actually very plain. It was his choice of topics that had my attention. He wrote about things that teachers want to know about and that will help teachers become better at what they do. Which led me to understand one of the best practices in blogs...posting about topics that motivate teachers to be better. It's not always about posting a new tool that will excite the kids and make the teacher's job easier, but it's also about motivating teachers to want to do better! One of his posts was titled, "It's not about the technology." This post immediately got my attention, but what he was saying was, it's not about the technology that we choose to use, but more about what the kids get from it and what they ultimately learn.

A couple others on this list, The Cool Cat Teacher and 21st Century Principal also do the same thing. They make you think about what you are doing as an educator and what you can do to be better.


A blog of a different kind, and one many people already know about, is freetech4teachers.com.  This is my go-to blog if I am looking for any new digital learning tool for my students or for the teachers at my school. This blog is written by Richard Byrne.  He is always on the search for great digital tools and posts new ones each day. He only posts tools and websites that have substance and I know I can trust the things he posts. That is another best practice for blogs. If you are giving ideas for digital tools, be sure they work well and have substance. If not, people will not trust the things you post.

PBL: Explained

For the Teachers

Here is an awesome resource that aligns with the common core and is broken up by students' RIT scores. I don't know if some of you have already seen it, but there are tons of great things on this site. If you click "Common Core Curriculum Ladders", then on your particular subject, there are activities broken up based on student RIT scores. There is also a lot of good ideas under "Instructional Strategies: New Ideas and Old Favorites."

http://www.fortheteachers.org/

Google Tidbit: Research Features

Friday's Google Tidbit: Research Features

Do you or teachers in your school use Google Search to find information and then use Google Docs to type the information for a research paper?  Why not flip the process?  Type the paper and search within it.  Here's how:

When you are in your document and get to a word that you want more information about, right click and use Research from the menu to look up the word in Google.

Once you have clicked on Research, the Research panel will be open, which contains basic information at the top and Google search results at the bottom.

If you select a page from the Web Results, you will have 3 options:  Preview, Insert Link or Cite.

If you select Cite, 2 things will happen: (1) a small footnote number will be placed in your document wherever your cursor is and (2) a Citation will be placed at the end of your document.

Sample Number: 

Sample Bibliography Citation:

If you want to adjust the format of your citation to MLA, APA or Chicago, you can do that by selecting your default format.  Simply click the drop-down arrow below the search bar. Use the drop-down menus to choose from MLA, APA, or Chicago citation formatting, and customize other settings (like image filtering preferences for images or language settings for the dictionary). Your selected citation format is applicable to citations for web results, images, quotations and article citations.

HAPPY RESEARCHING!

THANKS TO KELLY SIEGERT FOR SHARING THIS TIDBIT SHE PICKED UP AT NCTIES

There's an App for That!!

Here is a list of apps worth checking out. I will update this list as people send them to me or I find them!

Reading 

Collins Big Cat Stories

Cambugs

Reading Monster

Reading Raven

WWF

Math 

Native Numbers

Writing 

Jumbled Sentences

Misc.

Air Sketch

 We Want Apps