Readability

This morning, Kim Cowperthwaite and Paula Eppich did a Language Arts presentation for the staff. One tool that Kim shared with her colleagues was Readability. Readability is a tool that allows you to read and print articles online more easily by removing the clutter of graphics, adds, and other distracting items found on a website. The Readability website provides instructions for setting up your browser to make use of this tool. There is also a FireFox Readability Add-on that can be installed. This tool can make it a little easier to keep students focused on the text at hand.

Another staff member asked me to share the tool QuietTube which can be used to display a YouTube video without all of the other distracting clutter on the page. Click here to read my post about QuietTube.

Wall Wisher: Online Sticky Board

Yesterday, the principal passed out paper to the teachers in the first staff meeting of the year. He then asked people to generate lists of their favorite pedagogical practices to use in the classroom. Teachers were then to find out what others at their table listed and then select one practice they had never used before to try out during the year. As we did this, I was thinking about how we could have used a Web 2.0 tool to complete this task and collaborate not just with the people at their table, but all of the colleagues in the room. I then recalled the site WallWisher.com which allows a user/presenter to create a blank wall, give access to participants, and then participants can then place sticky notes on the board. Once the presenter and parents click Refresh, they can then display/see all of the posted sticky notes. WallWisher is a great tool to use for brainstorming in class, or for back-channeling. Below is a slideshow about WallWisher, created by Tom Barrett, as a part of his Interesting Ways Series.

Back to School

If you are returning to teachers technology toolbox, welcome back! If this is your first time visiting my blog welcome. Throughout the course of the school year I hope to post several times a week to this blog, some of the dynamic online tools that are available to educators that will help students develop some of their 21st century skills. I would love for those who read/subscribe to my blog to provide feedback about these tools after they have used them, or if they have used them before, so that we can all benefit from your experiences with using them in a classroom. As I write this, realize that some of you may not know how to "subscribe" to this blog. If this is you, take a look at the video below:

Trying Out DocStoc.com

I am trying out DocStoc.com because a teacher in the Blog session of our Summer Technology Institute asked if she could post her classroom newsletter to her blog so that parents could see and download it. So, I am giving it a try. Hopefully, you will see my test below.
The document I chose to make available is Richard Byrne's "Google For Teachers" document

Google+for+Teachers -

PollEverywhere

During the summer technology Institute, I learned about a cool tool for getting data from students. We used a polling tool called Polleverywhere.com which had us use a cell phone to text our response to a question that was on a presentation. When we finished texting, the presenter hit refresh and suddenly all of our results appeared in a bar graph on his presentation. Very Cool!

Replace audience response hardware with Poll Everywhere

Dragontape - Education Today

Dragontape - Education Today

This is my first time using Dragontape, which allows you to take several YouTube videos and combine them into one. You are then given a link to the now larger video and you can (as you can see) blog the To try this out, I took a couple of videos that I have seen this summer which illustrate how education has changed since the time that most teachers were in school themselves. You could use this tool yourself by putting together a series of videos for students to watch on a topic you are teaching. You could have students create a DragOnTape video of "Greatest Hits" for videos they found about their research topic.

Trying Out Twitterfeed

Since creating this blog, I have been tweeting each new post by logging into Twitter, or starting up TweetDeck and then manually writing each new post so that those who follow me on Twitter get informed about the new post. Tim Hart shared with me the use of TwitterFeed.com which will look for any new posts I make and then automatically tweet any new posts I write on my blog. Hopefully, it will do so once I post this. Let's find out.