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« January 2011 | Main | March 2011 »

February 2011 posts

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, February 26, 2011 at 06:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

ITSC - Creating Learning Networks in School Communities

Materials for my last session at ITSC!

Download ITSCnetworks

 

 

ITSC - Creating Learning Networks in School Communities
View more presentations from Lucy Gray.
ITSC - Creating Learning Networks in School Communities

Posted by Lucy Gray on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 08:49 AM in Conferences, Ed Tech Resources, Innovation, ITSC, Students, Teachers, Tools, web 2.0 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Sunday, February 20, 2011

ITSC - Beyond Search

Download ITSCsearch

My many, many slides for my Beyond Search presentation tomorrow. I swear this is a hand-on session! Download the presentation from Slideshare or the PDF from Scribd and follow along. Links in these documents should be live.

We also will be creating a search scavenger hunt on this Google Doc. Feel free to add your own items for this.

 

 

Beyond Search - ITSC Conference
View more presentations from Lucy Gray.

ITSC Beyond Search

Posted by Lucy Gray on Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 06:55 PM in Conferences, Ed Tech Resources, Google, ITSC, Presentations, Professional Development, Resources, Search, Teachers, Tools, web 2.0, Web/Tech, Workshops, yolink | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 06:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Going Global Workshop

Below you will find materials for my workshop at the upcoming Instructional Technology Strategies conference in Portland, Oregon. I also thought this would be a good opportunity to re-visit a Google Form survey I conducted last year on global awareness  and 21st century initiatives in schools. Feel free to add your thoughts to this and you can see the collected results here.

 

Workshop - Going Global: Preparing Students for Global Citizenship

Going Global: Preparing Students to Be Citizens of the World
View more presentations from Lucy Gray.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 01:46 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Friday 5: Interactive Sites

Using multimedia in the classroom is one of the suggestions put forth by math teacher Dan Meyer in his TEDxNYED talk from last spring.  I watched the video of his presentation today in preparation for my own talk at this year's TEDxNYED and it's well worth a look by any teacher, not just teachers of math.

If you have other suggestions for interactive web sites, leave them in the comments! Thanks!

1. Interactive Learning Opportunities on the Internet
http://www.techteachconcepts.com/interactive_learning.htm

2. Library of Congress Interactives
http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/Pages/default.aspx

3. Spin and Spell
http://www.spinandspell.com/

4. Interactivate
http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/

5. PhET Interactive Simulations
http://phet.colorado.edu/

Posted by Lucy Gray on Friday, February 18, 2011 at 07:08 AM in Friday 5, Resources, Teachers, Tools, Web/Tech | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, February 12, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 06:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Friday 5: Literacy

Since reviving the Friday 5, my plan is to start with re-visiting basic content areas with a few links worth exploring. In the past few weeks, I've covered math and science; today's featured topic is literacy.


1. Voice of Literacy
http://www.voiceofliteracy.org/

Podcasts by literacy researchers on the implications of their work in classrooms. I think this is a great way to bridge the gap between research and practice and the design of the site makes it very easy to listen and share podcasts. Wouldn't it be fun to have a similar site dedicated to discussing educational technology research?

2. K-2 Writing Interactives
http://www.uen.org/k-2interactives/writing.shtml

Links to some high quality sites for helping kids with writing.

3. Leading to Read
http://www.rif.org/kids/leadingtoreading/en/leadingtoreading.htm

Activities for early childhood from RIF.

4. Kids on the Net
http://www.kidsonthenet.org.uk/

This is a great site for encouraging kids to write and publish. One activity that looks particular fun is their interactive Monster Motel:

http://www.kidsonthenet.org.uk/motel/motel/welcome.html.

5. Woodlands Literacy Zone
http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/literacy/index.htm

Another site from the UK that contains tons of links for every language arts skill imaginable.



Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 12:11 PM in Ed Tech Resources, Friday 5, Literacy, Teachers, Web/Tech | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Sunday, February 06, 2011

Re-visiting My Newsreaders

This is a follow up to Finding and Managing Stuff, a post  I wrote in January about organizing sources of information.  A friend recently mentioned that she wanted to get started following that advice, but hadn't had time. My suggestion for her is to start with developing a newsreader, and attached to this post is a file that will save her a huge amount of time in getting this started.

Newsreaders are tools where you can follow multiple blogs, news, Twitter feeds etc. in one spot. The technology behind newsreaders is called RSS and the analogy that's often used is newsreaders are like magazines. You can go out to the newsstand and purchase a magazine, but it's much easier to have the magazine come to you via a subscription. Newsreaders allow you to subscribe to a variety of sources of information and then you can access this stuff in one spot. New items pop up in your reader as they are published, too, eliminating the need to manually check web sites to see if there's new content.

Back in 2005, I started using the application called NetNewsWire as my news reader. I still like it as I find it easy to organize subscriptions in this tool, although I do use Google Reader as well as it has some other features.  I haven't fallen in love with Google Reader, but it works well enough, particularly on mobile phones.

Over the course of the past couple of years, I've been relying more and more on Facebook as my de facto newsreader (and Twitter somewhat), and it's become easier to manage with tools such as PostPost. Facebook is a great way to stumble upon news items, but I recently came to the realization that I still have a need to monitor some blogs and news sites a bit more closely. I used to subscribe to everything that came my way, but I'm now thinking that a carefully vetted set of resources would better suit my current research needs.

Thus, I'm returning to my newsreaders and plan to spend more time utilizing them in my work. NetNewsWire will still be a place where I subscribe to everything, but a more vetted set of news sources will be in my Google Reader feed. Over the weekend, I went through my current subscriptions and weeded out defunct blogs etc and created  a streamlined set. I exported it into OMPL format and this file can be imported into any newsreader.

To import the attached OMPL file  into your newsreader, download this file (Download LucyRSS). Then, go to Google Reader, login, and click on the Settings link in the upper right hand corner. Select Reader Settings, Import/Export, and then browse to the downloaded OPML file. Click on the upload button, and you'll be good to go.

The selected feeds in my OPML file are a mix with a strong focus on technology, education, and news. I subscribe to a variety of sources (Delicious, Diigo, Twitter, YouTube,regular web sites) to show how one can follow different types of information. If some of the feeds are not interesting to you, delete them from Google Reader by going to Settings>Subscriptions and editing as needed.

Hope someone out there will find this useful, and let me know if you are able to start using Google Reader now that you have some resources to follow!

 

 

 

Posted by Lucy Gray on Sunday, February 06, 2011 at 11:10 AM in Ed Tech Resources, Innovation, Professional Development, Teachers, Tools, Twitter, Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, February 05, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, February 05, 2011 at 06:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Friday, February 04, 2011

Friday 5: Math

Happy Friday! Here's a quick list of some of my recent finds via my Facebook and Twitter networks. Hope you find them useful! Feel free to make other non-commerical recommendations in the comments.  Also, consider joining our Friday 5 Google Group if you'd like these updates emailed to you.

1. Khan Academy

http://www.khanacademy.org/

The Khan Academy is a repository of teaching materials and self-paced exercises that has received a great deal of media attention. I can't attest to the quality of the videos and exercises, but this model may be the way of the future. However, I don't believe a site like this can replace a teacher. Most of the content looks to be geared towards middle grades and up, but the exercises could be used with younger kids. I tried out their addition exercises and I like how the user can use a scratch pad, get hints and track their progress.

 2. Math Maps

http://edte.ch/blog/maths-maps/

This is a very interesting project blending Google Maps and math problems from the ultimate Google Certified Teacher, Tom Barrett. Click on the placemarks to see the various problems contributed by teachers all over the globe, and make sure you zoom in well enough to see that landmarks or areas that the problems refer to.

3.  OCSD Interactive Games

http://resources.oswego.org/games/

Check out the plethora of math games that go a bit beyond the typical kill and drill sites. I like this site in particular because it isn't cluttered with a lot of advertising.

4. PHMS Podcasts: Making Math Real!

http://phmspodcasts.blogspot.com/

These podcasting projects by middle schoolers are a good example of how kids can use technology to explain mathematical thinking. My guess is that the teacher had the students use Apple's Keynote program for this and possible had a template setup for the actual podcast in Garageband or something. If you plan ahead using such templates, you can streamline the process for creating vignettes such as these.

5. PBS Math Games

http://pbskids.org/games/math.html

One stop shopping for all math related games on PBS Kids. Most of these are probably geared towards younger students.



Posted by Lucy Gray on Friday, February 04, 2011 at 10:43 AM in Friday 5, Math | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Thursday, February 03, 2011

Participate Virtually in My Global Collaboration Workshop!

I'll be facilitating a workshop at the Instructional Technology Strategies Conference in Portland, Oregon on February 21 from 8 AM - 11:30 AM PST.

During this session, participants will be exploring a variety of tools as they think about connecting their classrooms to the world. You can participate, too, in a number of ways. The information in this survey will be shared with workshop participants, but will not be open to all to see. If you want to see the resulting spreadsheet, just let me know and I'll add you to the document. Please consider joining us as I think this will be a fun way to make some new PLN connections!

Here's how to get involved:

1. Sign up to Skype with participants for a few minutes during the workshop. This is an informal opportunity to introduce yourself to another educator and relate how you use Skype professionally.

AND/OR

2. Join our group in the Global Education Collaborative to answer questions asynchronously if participants have questions. (http://globaleducation.ning.com/group/itscconferenceworkshop)

AND/OR

3. Sign up to mentor a conference participant or to work on a specific project.

SIGN UP HERE IF YOU'D LIKE TO HELP: http://tinyurl.com/ITSCmentors

Let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks,

Lucy Gray
elemenous@gmail.com

Posted by Lucy Gray on Thursday, February 03, 2011 at 11:28 AM in Global Education, ITSC, Survey, Teachers | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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