Wideo: Cool Web Tool For Creating Animated Videos

I was looking at some sites that allow you to make animated videos when I stumbled across Wideo. It is a cool online video tool that allows you to make videos similar to the "... In Plain English" videos. Creating an account is quick and simple.  You can even find Wideo in Chrome App Store so you can easily get a link to it. Some of the tutorial videos leave a bit to be desired, but the Wideo works well as a whole.  You are not limited to the images and sounds that are available within the took, instead you can upload whatever images and/or sounds you want. Needless to say, I tried it out.  The biggest chunk of my time on this video was finding and downloading all of the little logos and icons in my video.  I used GarageBand to blend together the background audio and my voice over.  In the end, I uploaded it directly to YouTube.  

Scrible: An Online Tool for Bookmarking & Annotating Web Resources

scrible is a new tool that helps simplify Web-based research.  Users can bookmark sites, highlight and/or underline text, create sticky notes, and more right within the browser.  Users can also easily save, share, and collaborate with other users, making it an excellent tool for group research projects. 

scrible also provides a bookmarklet  that, when clicked, adds functionality to your browser. When the scrible Bookmarklet is clicked, it loads the scrible Toolbar atop the current webpage you're viewing so that you can start annotating.  

When you return to a site you bookmarked with scrible  it will appear just as you left it displaying all of the alterations you made.  Like most Web 2.0 tools, sharing your annotated bookmarks with others is a key feature that scrible provides.  Students are also able to get a free scrible account that has twice the storage capacity of the standard account.

Making a Prezume (a resume with prezi)

I received an email from the good folks at Prezi this morning letting me know that they had created some new templates specifically for creating web-based resumes.  It had been a while since I had played around with Prezi, so I thought I would give it a go and try one out.  I chose the desktop template.  I really liked this.  I think this could be used by students as a beginning of the year activity where they could let their teachers know what they need to know about them.  Check out my resume below:

What Does Teaching in the 21st Century Mean?

I just viewed this video that was posted on  Educational Technology and Mobile Learning called What Does Teaching in the 21st Century Mean?  I thought it was very well done and that I might want to use it in the future, possibly at our next Summer Technology Institute, so I am embedding it here so I don't lose it.  Enjoy!

A Must Have List of Resources for Teaching Digital Citizenship and Safety

In a week or so, the other technology integrators will be hammering out a scope and sequence for  instruction on digital citizenship and safety that will be provided to our students K-12.  So, it was very timely that I found this post on Educational Technology and Mobile Learning titled, "A Must Have List of Resources for Teaching Digital Citizenship and Safety." You can view it below or click on the link in the previous sentence.

Cyber bullying

• 
  1- "She Used to Be Pretty": Schoolyard Harassment Goes Online
  The wounds cyberbullies cause can run deep.
• 
  2- Techno Prisoners: Musings on the New Bullying Paradigm
  In the age of cyberbullying, a Stone Age tormentee looks back.
• 
  3- Social-Networking Sites Draw Teens In
  In the largely unsupervised digital world, youths set the rules.
• 
  4- Cinema vs. Cyberbullies: Using Filmmaking to Fight Online Harassment
  Filmmaker Debbie Heimowitz employs the power of movies to promote online empowerment and awareness.
• 
  5-Google+: The Dark Side of the Circle
  Google's social network is built on the idea of social stratification. How does this translate to the classroom?
• 
  6-Anti-Social Media: Educators and Parents Take on Cyber-Bullying for "Spirit Day"
  On this Spirit Day Edutopia's former senior producer Ken Ellis suggests that social media is becoming a bit too anti-social.

The Importance of Netiquette

1-Teaching Digital Citizenship in the Elementary Classroom
Blogger Mary Beth Hertz believes that teaching digital citizenship and internet safety is a lot more meaningful when students can engage in authentic online experiences.

2-The Importance of Digital Citizenship in Social Media
Blogger Andrew Marcinek reflects on social and digital media integration into the lives of teachers and students.

3-Behaveyourself.com: Online Manners Matter
Netiquette becomes a key part of education.

4-Beyond Emily: Post-ing Etiquette
Educators offer guidelines for promoting good online behavior.

Internet Safety

1- Social Media Guidelines
Instructional technologist Steven Anderson suggests integrating social media into education, district by district, through a sensible best practices approach.

2- How to Talk About Life Online
Tips for teachers to help students be safe on the Internet.

3- Common Sense Tips for Digital Generation Parents
Five practical pointers from Common Sense Media to help parents understand and manage the lives of their digital kids.

4- Sage Advice: Child Safety on the Internet
Edutopia users weigh in on how they teach their kids to be safe online.

Teaching Bullying Prevention

1-Bullying: How Educators can Make Schools Safer
Schools can reduce incidents by adopting a schoolwide anti-harassment policy with a social and emotional perspective.

2-Fear Factor: Harrassment Hurts
The effect of bullying goes beyond simple schoolyard scuffles to cause lasting emotional wounds.

3-Michael Pritchard: Lessons from the Heart 
A champion of social and emotional learning reaches out to students.

4-Student Pledges: Preventing Harassment and Bullying at Your School
Kids taking pledges in fall can help prevent harassment and bullying throughout the school year.

5- Peace Helpers Become Classroom Problem Solvers 
At Brooklyn's PS 24, fourth and fifth graders resolve playground conflicts and train younger students to be peacemakers in their classrooms.

6-Teaching Tolerance: Meet the Teacher Who Started Gay-Straight Alliances
 Teacher Bob Parlin launched the first gay-straight alliance in a public school. Today, this national network provides a powerful dose of social and emotional learning for students of every orientation.

7-Resources to Fight Bullying and Harassment at School
An educator's guide to websites, organizations, articles, and other resources for combating bullying.

Two Tools for Working With PDFs

The great thing about .pdf files (short for Portable Document Format) is that regardless of what platform  people have on their computer or ios device, they are going to be able to open and read it.  The downside of .pdf files is that it is often difficult to work with them if you want to do more than just read them, like add text to or edit them.  Wouldn't it be nice if it were simple add text to a .pdf document, like say science or social studies quiz or exam? a form? a rubric?  Imagine if you sent your students a link to your next quiz where they could download it as a .pdf file, complete it, and then email it back to you as an attachment or send it to your dropbox. Think of the paper you could save.

Well, below are two ways to work with .pdf documents beyond just reading and/or printing them out.

1. Preview
For those of you who are using a Mac, Preview is Mac OS X's application for displaying .pdf documents.  Preview gives users the ability to Annotate text.  Once text is added, one just saves the document with a different name and then they can print or send to those people who need to read it with the new text.

Here's how:

Open the .pdf file in Preview.
Click the Annotations icon at the top of the window. When you do this, a set of annotation tools appears on the bottom of the window that looks like this:

Click the text box icon.

You can then draw a text box by clicking and dragging from NorthWest to South East where you want the text to appear.  You can manipulate the color of the text and the font as well using the icons available to you in the Annotate toolbar.  (Unfortunately, text you type in a textbox is center-aligned and you will need to move your textbox to make your text appear where you want it).

2. PDFescape

You can use PDFescape for free to edit any .pdf document that you can read.  Simply upload your file, or you can enter the url of an online .pdf file, and then you can add text, free hand writing, add images, or create drawings.  When you have finished altering your document, you download the finished product to use as you wish.  Have your students bookmark this site, and you'll be a little closer in your journey to go paperless.  

The Differentiator

Sometimes I have the attention span of a raccoon when I am reading an article from my rss feeds. I never finish up on the topic I was originally reading about. While reading a very interesting blog post mass customized learning I clicked on a link that led me to an article about flipping the classroom, this had a link to an article about standards, which led me to this pretty cool site called "The Differentiator". No, it is not the name of Arnold Schwartzenager's comeback movie, but an online tool that helps one write standards. It is really hard to explain in a blog post, so just check it out for yourself when you get a moment. http://byrdseed.com/differentiator/#

ReadWorks.org

This morning a colleague shared with me her recent use of ReadWorks.  As a special education teacher, she often needs to find resources that cover the topics of Middle School classes but that are written at a much lower level.  She was thrilled to have discovered ReadWorks, a nonprofit organization that provides reading and reading comprehension materials to educators for free. Registering with ReadWorks was quick and easy, and in no time at all, you can be downloading lessons, reading materials, units, and worksheets that will help your students succeed.  My colleague logged in, selected the non-fiction tab, then reading passages.  Next, she selected a reading level and finally typed in the topic she was looking for, "immigration". The materials she found were appropriate for her 8th grades students, but were written at a 4th grade reading level.  Check this out yourself to see what ReadWorks has to offer your students. Below is an introductory video about ReadWorks.

blubbr: quizzes from youtube clips

blubbr is a site I learned about today from Danny Nicholson's blog The Whiteboard Blog.  At blubbr, you can play quizzes or create your own where a YouTube clip is played, and then a question is asked.    These quizzes are called trivs, and many of them are broken into categories, including Education.  Creating my own triv was quite simple.  Try you hand at the triv I created about the 1960's.

Guroo: Flipped Classroom

You may have noticed that Guroo was the Web 2.0 tool I included on day 25 of my 2012 Web 2.0 Advent Calendar. While Guroo calls itself a "Search Engine for Learning" it is soooo much more. I recently had the opportunity to use Guroo and showcase its features while presenting to a teachers collaborative group within my district. The group was discussing and learning about Flipping the Classroom. I used Guroo to create my own collection of "Flipping the Classroom" resources and then used it to present the information to the group.  I found this to be a wonderful and dynamic way to present information and resources to a group.

The Year in Rap

As 2012 comes to a close the folks at Flocabulary have created a look back at the events of the past year.  What makes this summary different from those you will see on television is that it is done with a rap.  You can see a number of videos created by Flocabulary on their site or on their YouTube channel.
Enjoy!

2012 Web 2.0 Advent Calendar

I was asked by a colleague in late November if I was going to do an advent calendar again of my favorite web 2.0 tools. I had actually forgot about this and hadn't realized the time for putting that together had snuck up on me so fast. For those who don't know this, last year I put together a web site in the form of an advent calendar. Each day was a link to one of my favorite web 2.0 tools that could be used in the classroom. So, I have put together a new advent calendar for all to enjoy. Feel free to open one each day. If it is something you might want to use, bookmark it.  As an added bonus, I have placed on the new calendar a link to last year's advent calendar. I hope you enjoy opening a new tool each day. 
 Here is the link: http://ryanpalmer.wix.com/adventcal12

Happy Holidays!

infogr.am

Infographics are really becoming a popular way of presenting information to visual learners. Being able to not only read them but create them as well is becoming an important part of literacy. Infogr.am is an online tool where teachers and students can create their own infographics. There are several different chart types that you can create on Infogr.am. You can enter in data directly on the spreadsheet for your chart, or you can upload a spreadsheet from your computer in order to make the chart display your data. The information in that spreadsheet will be displayed in your customized chart. When you place your cursor over your completed chart the spreadsheet information will appear in small pop-up window. You also have the options of embedding a video or using a map for your infographic. When you have finished creating it, your Infogr.am charts can then be embedded into your blog, website, or wiki. Below is and example I made using data from a math activity I taught to some sixth grade students.

Incompetech: Royalty-Free Music

Incompetech provides users with royalty-free music that they can use in just about any way they wish as long as provide attribution to the site.  One of most dynamic aspects of the search page is the ability to search for music based on Feel.  This allows you to search for music that fits the mood of your project. I have had students use this site to find music pieces to be their soundtracks to presentations about novels they have read.  They are able to find music appropriate to the mood of the novel.

Grammar Bytes

When I was teaching in the elementary grades, my students would spend some time each morning editing sentences and then we would discuss the corrections together (Daily Oral Language).  I think that if I were teaching Language Arts today, I would replace that activity with having students use Grammar Bytes.  It offers teachers and students a glossary of language terms, worksheets, presentations, and (my favorite thing) interactive exercises.  Each interactive activity comes with a handout where students can record their scores and measure their progress.  I could have students view the presentations at home on their own and then have them do the activities in class where I can support them (flipped classroom.)