Diigo Posts (weekly)

• Copy of TCEA-Recommended iPad Apps
  
  
• Dialogue New Literacies 2011: How to Use New Media to Teach Writing, Research and Analytical Skills
  
  
• All apps for Netvibes, your desktop (Mac OS X, Chrome, Opera, Windows Desktop) and your favorite web services (iGooggle, Blogger, OpenSocial) in one place.
  
  
  Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Making the NetVibes Shift

I have always loved and used iGoogle as my feedpage so when I learned in August that Google was retiring iGoogle in October of 2013 I was a saddened.  I had created iGoogle tabs to manage my RSS feeds, student blogs, teacher blogs, etc... and the thought of losing this tremendous service was daunting and cumbersome.  Enter NetVibes, another feedpage service I was familiar with but not nearly as comfortable.  I had used it previously, to create a CMP for 6th grade teachers.

It's a month later and I have slowly transferred my feeds and am in the process of creating student portals for 5th - 12th grades.  I like NetVibes because the app is intuitive, plays nicely and shares nicely with others.  This is especially handy because I can create various dashboards/tabs and share the public link with students.  I can easily email tabs to students and they can add them to their NetVibes dashboard.

Here's a snapshot of the work in progress.  Right now, everything is in one dashboard - soon I'll create multiple dashboards specific to my needs.

Going Mobile with the iMovie App for iPad

I am continually looking for ways to make public the content students create on their iPads via student blogs.   I love the iMovie App for iPad but it takes a bit of maneuvering to make it "mobile" in order to develop a sweet student/teacher relationship.  The iMovie App for iPad is amazing in that anyone can easily create digital stories, tutorials, book trailers, etc... within a short period of time.  However, sharing that movie with others is easier said than done.  Once a movie is longer than a minute, (pretty easy to do,) the movie cannot be emailed to another user in it's entirety.   This presents problems for teachers who are hoping to easily access student created content, including iMovie.

Our students are too young to have their own YouTube account.  And, even though we are a Google Apps for Education school, the user agreements for YouTube do not fall under the Google Apps for Education umbrella.  So, to get around this dilemma, teachers have created an additional google account to be used specifically for the uploading of video content to YouTube.  The username and password of this account are shared with the student and when these students finish an iMovie they send their movies to this account via the action icon in iMovie.

The teacher is in charge of monitoring the site, making sure posts to the site are appropriate and fall within acceptable guidelines.  Each teacher has their own account for this purpose.

The nice thing about hosting YouTube accounts in this matter is that the teacher can then use the video manager on YouTube to stitch together student created videos into a longer movie.  Recently, a teacher had each student create an iMovie detailing a specific chapter to a novel the class had finished reading.  The teacher pieced the clips together and created a ten minute retelling of the book and shared that on their blog site.

In addition, YouTube also provides each account with an email for mobile uploads.  When a user has this email, they can easily email video content from their media library directly to the YouTube account.  Students can then access the URL of the video from YouTube and post the video to their blog.

Finally, using various blogging apps (we use BlogPress) the student can share their newly created iMovie to their camera roll.  Once the teacher created YouTube account is connected to the BlogPress App (in Blogpress Settings) the student can directly post the movie to their blog post and it will upload the iMovie to both to YouTube and to their blog.   Once on a student blog, anyone can easily access the video content.

Here's an "unrelated" iMovie about Diigo I made using this method.

Diigo Posts (weekly)

• Curriculum Banner2.jpg
• Subscription
• ICTmagic - Languages, Culture & International Projects
• The Top 10 Educational Livebinders for 2012
  
  
  Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

How Do You Communicate?

Synchronous Communication - Participants connect with each other live or at one given time. This type of communication may be accomplished via text and audio/video technologies.
Examples:
Video:  Skype, FaceTime, Blackboard, WizIQ
Text:  Instant Messaging, Social Networks, Back Channels (Today's Meet)

Asynchronous Communications - Participants communicate regardless of time and space.  This type of communication allows multiple participants to access, view, edit, listen and contribute to the conversation anytime or anywhere, regardless of other participants.
Examples:
Video:  Recorded Meetings, YouTube,
Text:  Google Docs, Wikis, Blogs, Collaborative Calendars, Email, Social Networks

Knowing and understanding the technologies that support both of these types of communications does more than increase the chances for a successful project, they make them fun.  They do this because they build on the social aspect of collaboration - building relationship.  We, as humans, genuinely want to know people from other places.  Most of us value the cooperative group effort toward a common goal.  Using online spaces to connect students around a standard makes sense.

Here's an example 
I was assigned the task of creating a blog post about Teacherpreneurs with three other people.  Once the topic/groups were assigned, class ended.
We had a week to:

1. Decide how to get started
2. Organize our thoughts in a common place
3. Share our blog post with the class

Communication tools were essential in the success of the project.  Here's how:

Decide How to Get Started
We used a social network (the FCP ning) to get the ball rolling on this project.  A group member shared a chat with all members of the assigned group - checking in, basically starting a hand-shake.  This was the first time anyone had worked together and it was essential to say hello and introduce.  From there a plan was born.  One group member would start a google-doc and we could all jot down our thoughts on the topic in one place.  

So far all communication was asynchronous.  

The google doc allowed for each participant to work independently, yet collaboratively in one space.  

Organize Thoughts in a Common Place

Google docs allows the ability to work in a collaborative environment on one document.  Here we could easily write, edit, and revise.  

At this point, we were still missing a group member.  We used additional forms of communication to attempt in contacting the missing member.  Group members chatted synchronously on the ning using the instant messaging feature.  From here, members emailed, tweeted, and sent messages to the missing member.  

We also used the instant message feature to continue the direction of the post, refining the editing process.  We could have done this on the google doc itself, but the immediate feedback the instant message feature allowed for quickened the process.  

Share the Blog Post

The post is written, the google doc made public, and the link to the document is shared with the rest of the class.  A cooperative and collaborative effort that enhanced the definition of teacherpreneur to all members of the class.  

Diigo Posts (weekly)

• Update Your Browser | Facebook

  Hi, Facebook friends. This image shows you. Or, rather, it's from a detailed analysis of my Facebook peeps in... http://t.co/cNPYsMim

• Technology "look for's" in teacher evaluations - Home - Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

  tags: Lookfors technology_lookfors

• The Mobile Native: QR What?

  tags: qrcodes

• MSHS Media Center - home

  tags: media_center mssd_wikis

• techcoachchat - home

  tags: #techcoach

• TweetChat

  tags: twitter twitter_archive

  • hello - post by sheela remetio

• 2011-2012 Webinars - Digital Educator Program

  tags: pd_list Professional_Development professional development #techcoach

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

Information Management in an iPad 1:1 Environment

Managing the quantity of student data quickly becomes overwhelming when implementing a 1:1 iPad program.  Typically, the focus is on app selection and integration of the technology into classroom practices and the topic of information management is frequently overlooked.  This neglect often leaves teachers with with the inability to view student created content with ease and with full email inboxes that quickly become overwhelming.

There are a few ways we've managed to ease this burden.

1. Evernote Premium accounts for teachers, Evernote Free accounts for students.
2. Dropbox accounts
3. Annotation apps
4. Classroom Management System (CMS) like Wikispaces
5. YouTube accounts (either teacher or student)
6. Student Blogs as portfolios / Netvibes for monitoring

Evernote premium allows a user to create an unlimited number of notebooks and share them with free Evernote subscribers.  We use Evernote like this: 

A teacher creates a notebook for each student and both the student and teacher can contribute new notes to that notebook.  Think of the notebook as a folder and the new notes as a document.  The shared notebook feature allows both teacher and student to add content to a notebook at any given time and though not as seamless as the desktop version of Google Docs, Evernote quickly becomes a close second in that it gives student and teacher the ability to work on one version of a document.
The note feature of Evernote has word processing features with the added abilities of including audio and other media including web content.
Lastly, many apps are beginning to integrate with Evernote meaning that after content is created or viewed, a user can easily end the content to an Evernote notebook.

Dropbox accounts allow a user to upload and access documents easily on an iPad.  Once a document is uploaded to Dropbox a user can open it in a variety of apps on the iPad.  Dropbox also allows a user to easily create a link to a document or to the entire folder.  This link can be posted on a CMS like Wikispaces and another user can click on the link using their iPad, and either complete a direct download by choosing an application to open the file or downloading it to their personal dropbox account.  And, like Evernote, more and more apps are beginning to integrate nicely with Dropbox.  Soon, maybe everyone will play together nicely.
To learn more about using dropbox to share files visit my recent post.

Annotation apps are essential if you are uploading PDF documents to the iPad.  These apps let a user download the document onto their device and easily annotate the document.  I like neu.Annotate+PDF for students.  It's cheap, $0.99 and works great.

A CMS is essential.  My favorite is Wikispaces, but whether you use Blackboard, Moodle, Edmodo or wikispaces is irrelevant.  A teacher needs to have a platform for collaboration, communication and delivery of content and ideas.  At our school we use the Wikispaces Private Label, a secure wiki environment which allows for the creation of unlimited wikis with a similar domain.  Wikispaces is rumored to be working on an iPad app, which, if it happens, will allow make the process of creating, collaborating, accessing and communicating with content even easier.

YouTube accounts make disseminating video content a breeze.  Unless your students are creating small and short video clips, the option to email video content becomes mute.  The files are simply to large to email and personally, I don't want my inbox filled with student content.  Many video creation apps offer the "Send to YouTube" option.  For students old enough to have a YouTube account, this isn't a problem.  For students in the younger grades, we created an additional google account for each teacher.  This is the account the teacher shares with students for the purpose of uploading video content.  It's not used for much of anything else.  After a student creates a video, they send it to their personal, or teachers, YouTube account and then provide the link on their student blog, Evernote notebook, or wikispace page.  

Student Portfolio - A place for the student to personalize their learning journey is essential.  Each student creates a school blog in which they record this journey.  Our younger students use Edublogs, our older students use Blogger.  This gives them the opportunity to work in both platforms though we may revisit this next year.  Apps like Blogpress and Blogsy allow for easy post creating and editing, including the uploading of media content to blogs.
Teachers can easily monitor student blogs by using a feed page like Netvibes

Finally, as you are choosing apps for the iPad, look for those that integrate with DropBox and Evernote.

We are in year 2 of a 1:1 iPad implementation and we are still learning.  I'd love to hear from those of you who have innovative ways to access and share created content using iOS devices.