Edgaged

Last year, Zack and I tried to promote Google Drive heavily due to the collaborative nature of it. In fact, since then I know of teachers that have made entire presentations without meeting face to face. This is a huge time saving tool for those of you that have a tight schedule that does not always allow you to come extra early before or extra late after school. We did run into a speedbump. Most East Noble teachers will remember it being a little bit of a mess because we could not use our East Noble School Corporation email addresses to create Google Drive accounts. Many teachers had started, but it was put to a pause as Google noticed an abundance of users signing up with email addresses ending in eastnoble.net. So the solution was to use personal gmail accounts. That temporary fix also came to be a problem since you had to know the email address of others within the district to share documents. This was not that tempting since it was taking extra steps to accomplish the task. Th...

The Indiana Department of Education is providing a free reading resource for all Hoosiers for the summer of 2013. MyOn will provide students with the opportunity to read to self as well as listen to read since many of the books include audio. Directions on how to log in are posted below. If you are an East Noble Teacher, feel free to promote this opportunity as you wish.

Get Smart - Home . Get Smart  is a great resource for teachers that have interactive whiteboards. This website provides a vast amount of interactive web-tools that would be great for introducing topics or having students practice on your whiteboard. Thanks goes to Peggy Demchak for coming across this valuable find. I'm glad she thought of me!

Story has quickly become a very popular app amongst teachers. Students can quickly create a high quality presentation or digital book with the app. It allows the user to put in pictures, captions, and full pages of text within the book. Here is an example that Mrs. Yoder had her first graders build. For several days, the students collaborated and built a list of animals for each letter of the alphabet. Mrs. Yoder sent the list to me and I used Morgue File  to gather royalty-free photographs. I then sent her about four or five letters worth of pictures to her so that she could forward them to her students. (Yes, teachers can email fairly large amounts of photos to students. In this project, I was able to send 26 pictures .) The first graders downloaded the images to their camera roll, imported them into the Story project, and if students had additional time, they added facts about animals. There was one little hiccup though. Mrs. Yoder quickly found out toward the end of the pr...

I was recently provided with a copy of a video that the East Noble Theatre department created to promote digital citizenship. It is primarily targeted toward our laptop users in upper elementary, middle school and high school, but I think that it is full of reminders that would be good for all the staff as well. Reminders about updating the laptops  is a good one as I've noticed a lot of laptops running sluggish lately. (A resource is linked here to share how to update your PC laptop.)  Yes, it will take a lot of time to get your machine up to speed, but if you make a habit of doing it at least once per month, you'll find that it will not take as long and your machine will run faster. Another good reminder is the subject of pirated materials. You need to make sure that you do not have illegal downloads of music, movies, or even...teaching resources. Believe it or not, if you have paid materials from Teachers Pay Teachers  that a "friend" gave you, you are stealing...

Story Kit  has been around for quite some time. It was one of the first applications that the teachers of East Noble really jumped on using to have kids create projects with their iOS devices. Now there are so many options for students to produce work and send to their teacher. However, instead of looking for a new tool, Mrs. Carroll of North Side contemplated how the tool could be used. Here she has provided two examples of her Butterfly project. The students recorded the events that occurred with their own butterflies as well as reported about facts and vocabulary that they were learning over the course of the project. Overall, I am very impressed with the quality of work from these second grade students. Story Kit worked well for her students because it allowed them to save their projects on a daily basis, take quick pictures and insert them into the work, and record briefly each day. Try looking at the examples that she provided:

Here is a blog-post by Mark Brumley about this fine webtool called "Jog the Web.   For the sake of not stealing his thunder, I will keep this brief because I'm sure he would much rather you visit his blog to find out more information about it. Jogtheweb.com allows you to create a collection of websites with descriptions. They all are previewed on one page, so the viewer does not have to get lost in a bunch of links. This would be a great tool for webquests. Here is a video to show you how you can make your own "jogs:"