Learning to Go: Lesson Ideas for Teaching with Mobile Devices, Cell Phones, and BYOT Every day, people around the world communicate, connect, and learn digitally on the go. Our students spend hours with their devices and digital tools. Imagine if some of that time was spent learning your content. Chrome Extensions for Educators School Culture and the Library In preparation for tomorrow's edweb.net/emergingtech webinar, Pitching the Library: How to Explain What School Librarians Do, I wanted to share a project one of our New Canaan High School seniors created for his documentary filmmaking class last year. His assignment was to make a video that addressed school culture. He emailed me the day before he came down to capture most of the footage. Here is an excerpt of his email: I am currently taking a Documentary Film class and our assignment is to create a film on a school "climate" Our group decided to choose the library media center as a focus for the film because when most if not all students think of the library, ... the library as enjoyable as it is. We were hoping to interview you about the library media center and factors about it. Hope to hear back from you, Andrew On the day of the interview, I was presented with 3 questions right before the filming. About three weeks later, he sent me a link to this: My response follows: OMG!!!
Hacking Digital Learning Strategies: 10 Ways to Launch EdTech Missions in Your Classroom (Hack Learning Series) (Volume 13): Shelly Sanchez Terrell: 9780998570549: Amazon.com: Books Tips and Tools to Manage Your Twitter Time! Posted by Shelly Terrell on Saturday, July 10th 2010 Part of the Cool Sites series Photo from Brad Fitzpatrick a great flash animator and cartoonist! Do your friends or partner accuse you of being a Twitterholic? Do you fear you spend too much time on Twitter? Daily people ask me how I manage to have a life and spend so much time on Twitter. Define your purpose! Use a Browser! Tweetdeck- I love the several options to save you time in the free browser, Tweetdeck! Helpful Tools & Resources! Twitterfeed- I have several blogs that I read daily that provide me with some of the best resources consistently. Challenge:
10 things classroom teachers need to know about modern school librarians | Trust me, I'm a librarian 1) We hate quiet. Oh, sure, the typical view of a librarian is an older woman, in a cardigan and cat-eye glasses, with a tight bun, shushing everyone who dares to make a sound. That may have been the case a long time ago, and may still be the case with some dinosaur librarians (they still exist, sorry!), but generally, librarians don’t like quiet. Quiet means that no one is collaborating. We would rather have a loud library with tables of students and teachers talking about a book, project, essay, collectible card game, what-have-you, than a library with students just sitting there reading. This isn’t to say we don’t appreciate students working alone or a student reading alone, but the library is a common place where everyone can work together and communicate. 2) We love collaboration. We love to see students collaborating, but we also love to collaborate with you, our classroom teachers! 3) We are technology people at heart. If you have a new Web 2.0 tool that you want to try, ask us.
Not waving but drowning Coping with social media, professional development and information overload Meet Olga. Olga teaches English several hours a day. Apart from preparing her classes, teaching, and marking assignments, in the course of a normal week she also does the following things: She accesses the online staffroom of her school to download material to use in some of her classes.She reads daily digests of e-mails from the five online professional development discussion groups belongs to. Olga is a teacher who knows how the Internet and social media can help her develop as a teacher. How many of the above things do you do? Web 2.0 has brought us many varied and wonderful opportunities for professional development. And worst of all, I worry that it’s just me. So let’s talk about it. 7 Tips for coping with social media: Tip 1: Accept the inevitable. Tip 2: Make a list of all your ongoing online professional development sources (Twitter, discussion groups, blogs, webinars…).
Build Your Teacher’s Survival Kit The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining. – John F. Kennedy When I first began teaching, I remember meeting a veteran teacher who carried a big bag with her everywhere. I forgot what the situation was but I remember her coming to the rescue with masking tape, scissors, and Post It notes. More Resources If you enjoyed these ideas, you may want to get your copy of The 30 Goals for Teachersor my $5.99 ebook, Learning to Go, which has digital/mobile activities for any device and editable/printable handouts and rubrics.
Install Bookmarklets / Extensions of Your Favorite Tools Posted by Shelly Terrell on Sunday, December 8th 2013 Included in the Digital Tips Advent Calendar and part of the Effective Technology Integration category The tools I choose to use habitually or recommend to teachers, usually meet most of these requirements, they provide: a free web versiona free mobile app (a plus if it works on multiple platforms)a bookmarklet or extension for your web browsera way to embed your work on your blog or platform There are many tools I think are beautifully designed, but I refuse to use them because without these features they take too much of my time. These tiny icons, usually at the top of your browser, do magical things when clicked. Luckily, many of your favorite tools have an extension/ bookmarklet. To install, open your browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) and usually under Window you’ll see extensions listed. Challenge: Install extensions and bookmarklets of your favorite tools.
Avoid Burn-Out Posted by Shelly Terrell on Saturday, June 29th 2013 Goal 2: Avoid Burn-Out of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators. Click the link to find out more about the 30 Goals Challenge for Educators. “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”~ Mary Anne Radmacher This year with the 30 Goals Challenge for Educators, our 30 Goals Facebook community is voting on what some of the goals will be. My Take on the Goal Each year as a teacher I struggle with burn-out. Another important way I avoid burn-out is through taking time for myself everyday. For more ideas about this goal, check out the video I did in 2011. Goal Short-term-Take at least one hour for yourself where you don’t dwell on your role as an educator but instead give your time to relax and have some fun. We are pinning ideas on ways to avoid burn-out here. Educational Leadership Goal New Teacher Goal Take an hour for yourself each day for a week.
ELT burnout revisited A little more than two years ago, I talked about burnout, particularly the path towards it that I and probably you were on. My ELT:Other ratio stared glaringly in my face, mocking my attempts at having a life outside of language teaching. It’s then that I realised I was definitely on the road to burnout. Now with Shelly Sanchez Terrell’s cycle 4 of the 30 Goals for Educators, and an upcoming Google Hangout I’ll be doing with her about them, it seems like an opportune time to revisit my path and see if things have changed. The gist of the ELT:Other ratio is looking at how you spend your time in language teaching areas vs all of your other interests. If your #2 & #3 shows over 50% of your time on ELT, you might be heading down that fiery path. One caveat that came out in discussion, however, was the blurry grey (or in this case red) overlap between social media and ELT. What’s there to be done about burnout? If you don’t feel like you’re burning out, go with that. Like this: Like Loading...