Design Your Digital Self - Promoting Digital Literacy
An activity intended for all
My Digital Self - blogmaster
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Digital Literacy Badges
Set a Goal and Earn a Badge! It's simple.
In an attempt to promote digital literacy and contribute positively to implementation of the Common Core I am pleased to introduce Beye Badges.
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Class Badges for 1-1 Goal Setting
Class Badges is a free online tool designed to help teachers use digital badges as rewards for accomplishing learning goals. The badges can be a useful tool for teachers to keep track of individual student accomplishments as they help learners...
A Google Docs Template for Multimedia Research
The Google Docs Presentation is well-suited for use as a starting point for short student driven research projects because of the availability of efficient integrated research tools right on the page. To introduce students and...
An Updated Digital Differentiation Model
This is part of a Digital Differentiation model, my way i of weaving a web of flexible tools together for teaching and learning. To keep the model relevant, frequent updates are required, as new tools and trends emerge.
To access the most current...
A Guide to Facilitating an Interactive Learning Project
I have been creating a lot of student projects that use ThingLink as a tool for learning. I have also received a handful of questions from teachers who are highly interested in facilitating a similiar project of their own, but need help with the management...
A Playlist: Avatars & Internet Safety
For as long as I can remember I've been using avatars to teach Internet safety. It's a fun and engaging way to teach students the importance of protecting their identities when they are online and a great prelude to using a variety of web 2.0 tools...
My EduBlogs Nomination & Thank Yous
I am very honored to be nominated for EdTech Blog of 2012!
My blog is an essential part of my workflow and it is my most important tool. I would like to thank some amazing people who have kept me blogging.
Janet Barnstable
Thank...
Edmodo & ThingLink: Extend the Walls of Your Classroom
Edmodo is a free and secure social learning platform for teachers and students to collaborate and connect in the 24/7 classroom. The design and functionality of Edmodo is similar to Facebook, but the focus is on teaching and learning within...
An Interactive Tutorial: Google Presentation
Google Presentation is a great tool for helping students construct knowledge about a topic as they create. Here is an interactive tutorial designed to demonstrate how to use some of the handy built in features.
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A ThingLink Toolkit for Teachers
I am excited to share a ThingLink Teacher Toolkit of Resources.
The toolkit is designed to provide teachers and students with all the resources needed to use ThingLink as an efficient and effective tool for teaching and learning.
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An Interactive Thanksgiving Image
I used ThingLink to create an interactive graphic for Thanksgiving.
Feel free to use it, embed it into your own site, and use the comments section of the blog to send me links you feel would be great additions to the graphic.
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Edublogs 2012 Nominations
Nominations for 2012 Edublog Awards are open.
The purpose of the Edublog Awards is to
"promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media."
The nomination process supports the goal of the contest because it requires...
Research Tool Added to Google Presentation
Good news for Google Docs users! The powerful integrated research tool made available in the Google Document last spring has made it's way to the Google Presentation at last. The tool couldn't be easier to use. Just pull down the Tools menu,...
Digital Tools for Differentiating Vocabulary: K12Online
If you're looking for innovative ways to use free and user friendly digital tools to help students acquire vocabulary, please check out my session, Digital Tools for Differentiating Vocabulary Instruction at the K12OnlineConference. While you're...
TeachEm: Create Guided YouTube Lessons
TeachEm is a free and user friendly digital tool that allows users to capture YouTube content, organize it, and add time stamped flashcards to guide the learning. It's simple, smart and efficient which makes it a good tool for busy teachers interested...
Common Core Connections: Using Multimedia to Present Knowledge & Ideas
Technology can be a powerful tool to help us meet the Common Core Standards and move our students forward to prepare them for success in school and beyond. In general, the Common Core calls for the seamless integration of technology into the curriculum....
327 Common Core Aligned Playlists from MentorMob & LearnZillion
MentorMob and LearnZillion have teamed up to create a comprehensive collection of Common Core aligned learning playlists perfect for providing students with easy access to guided learning experiences. Currently there are 327 Common Core aligned playlists...
The Social Side of ThingLink
The folks at ThingLink have recently released some social features to make sharing and collaborating on interactive images a breeze. Please roll your mouse over the image below to explore this ThingLink image and learn more.
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Explore the Great Barrier Reef: Google Wonders Project
The Google Wonders Project is an interactive website that allows visitors to discover many of the wonders of the world. Virtual visitors can get off the beaten path and explore wonders from 6 continents up close through Google's amazing street view...
Spin Xpress: Search for Creative Commons Images
Students today have had easy access to a tremendous amount of multimedia content for their entire lives and it's fairly safe to say that they can be careless about using it. When asked to create multimedia projects for school, many students simply...
Electing a President - An Interactive Graphic
I created an interactive graphic to provide students and their teachers with flexible paths to learn about electing a president and the electoral college. The image was created with ThingLink. I used some of the new storytelling icons to identify different...
Common Core Connections: Unpacking Academic Vocabulary
Are
you wondering where to begin to adopt the Common Core Vocabulary Standards?
While there are many specific vocabulary standards clearly listed in the K-12
Language strand, it's helpful and important to look at Academic Vocabulary
from the big...
Google Docs New Integrated Research Tool
Google Docs has many useful features for helping students develop writing skills. When I recently opened a Google Document to plan a teacher training on Using Google Docs to Facilitate a Writing Workshop I was pleasantly surprised to find a new and...
Back to School With Google Docs
Last year all of the students in our school district received Google Docs accounts and I was kept quite busy all year getting students up and running and then finding innovative ways to use the tools for learning. Upon reflection,if I got the opportunity...
ThingLink & Mentor Mob: Nice Integration Feature
Last week I learned that the folks at ThingLink and MentorMob had done some work together to integrate their tools, making it possible to embed a MentorMob playlist directly into a ThingLink graphic. After experimenting a bit I decided to remix...
Avatar Adventures: An Interactive Learning Opportunity
I created an interactive learning experience designed to provide students and teachers with opportunities to focus on digital citizenship while engaging in constructive play. I hope many will enjoy using it, contributing to it and interacting with...
10 Minute Tech Tools on Pinterest
A few years ago I decided to wind up the school year by offering busy teachers the opportunity to collaborate with me to learn to use a powerful tech tool in 10 minutes or less. I must admit the idea was appealing to many teachers at that very busy...
Top 10 Tech Tools: An Interactive Graphic
With so many free and user friendly tech tools available for teachers, it's hard to know where to begin to put together a list of the best tools for teaching and learning so I decided to take a look at my own resources to determine which tools I use...
Explore the World - Google World Wonders Projects
If you can't visit the great wonders of the world in person, Google's new World Wonders Project can get you pretty close. The World Wonders Project is an interactive website that uses the same street view technology used...
21st Century Research & Information Fluency on Scoop.It
Scoop.it is a free and user friendly content curation service that allows users to collect information about a topic of interest and display it as an attractive visual magazine. The handy bookmarklet allows users to add content to a magazine with...
Wallwisher Senbazuru - A New and Improved Digital Wall
Wallwisher is a free and user friendly online tool that allows users to create a digital wall of multimedia sticky notes. In addition to text, the notes can include images, links and videos. Create a wall, then invite others to add stickies.
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Vokis in the Classroom
Summer is a time for constructive play. You might want to have a bit of fun and try creating a talking avatar with My Voki. Once you see how easy it is to create one, you have the rest of the summer to figure out how to use them in your...
A Day of Learning
The folks at SimpleK12 are hosting several Days of Learning this summer featuring free webinars for educators which are certainly worth exploring. I'm excited to be hosting one again on June 20th that will continue to explore digital...
An Interactive ThingLink Launcher Unveiled
Check out this fantastic interactive graphic created by the folks at ThingLink featuring contributions from real users. Keep creating and sharing!
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A Playlist of Search Engines
I have created a MentorMob playlist of tools to help students efficiently find information using a variety of digital tools to match unique learning styles. If you would like to use this with your students, click the Share Playlist link at the...
InstaGrok - Visual Search Engine & Interactive Learning Tool
InstaGrok is an intelligent visual search engine and interactive learning tool that collects educational content and displays it in the form of a cloud of related words. The tool is very appealing because it offers a variety of multimedia...
Thinglink in the Classroom
Thinglink is a free and friendly digital tool that provides users with the ability to turn any image into an interactive graphic. Users can create multiple "hot spots" on specific parts of an image and turn the image into a multimedia launcher. Embed...
Wikispaces Features: An Interactive Graphic
A wiki is a website that allows members to easily edit and contribute content. Wikispaces is a teacher and student friendly tool that supports multimedia for collaborative learning.
A wiki provides teachers with a platform to design learning experiences...
Google Docs: New Fonts & Templates
Google Docs is making the transition to Google Drive and with that they have recently announce some improved features for Docs users. Most notably is the addition of 60 new templates and 450 new fonts.
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Google Search Education
Searching for information and making sense of it is a process that involves critical thinking. Google has many tools to help students sift through the overwhelming abundance of web content, but those tools are often not utilized by students and...
Cool Tools to Curate Content
Content curation is one way to find and share useful knowledge efficiently. There are plenty of user friendly push-button digital tools to help you collect, organize and store web content in flexible ways to allow for shared resources that are accessible...
Digital Notes: Combine Readability & Google Docs
One of my favorite tools to share with students and teachers is Readability. This handy bookmarklet tool scrubs webpages clean of distractions by eliminating the ads and creating a more readable version of digital text. By itself, it's a really useful...
SlideRocket Sample: Cool Tools for Vocabulary
As someone who creates and shares presentations frequently, I'm excited to add SlideRocket to my tech toolkit of cloud-based presentation tools. It's slick, collaborative and available for free with a Gmail or Google Apps for Educators account. A...
Promoting Visual Literacy
Visual literacy is a 21st Century Skill that requires students to interpret, use and create media in ways to encourage critical thinking, decision-making, communication and learning. With easy access to copyright-friendly digital images...
Mentor Mob Playlist Sample: Maximize Instructional Time
Mentor Mob is a cool tool to help users create digital playlists of related content. I like this curation tool because it's visual, user-friendly and can be embedded into a blog, wiki or website. All you need is a theme, some websites to highlight...
EasyBib: One Click Access to Google Docs & More
EasyBib is a free and popular tool for creating citations. By using this tool, students no longer need to learn to format citations, which means they can focus on the reason for creating the citations and the importance of giving credit to...
Great Ways to Use Google Docs - Presented Visually
These days a good way to capture the attention of an audience is to present information visually. For this reason, I created a glog of popular ways to use Google Docs for Learning to share with the teachers at our middle school. Just look at the glog,...
Use Glogster & Screencasts to Maximize Student Presentations
If you're a classroom teacher using technology to helps students uncover knowledge and create something original, you are certainly making good use of technology as a tool for learning. Unfortunately; however, you may be struggling with time management...
Design Your Digital Classroom
I have just returned from the Illinois Computing Educators Conference where I had the opportunity to facilitate a full day session titled Design Your Digital Classroom. This session wasn't about the ratio of students to machines, nor was it a...
Digital Differentiation
This Digital Differentiation model is my original example of weaving a web of flexible tools together for teaching and learning. The model was designed in February, 2012. To keep the model relevant, it is frequently updated as new tools and trends...
Use GoogleDocs Self-Grading Quiz as an Exit Ticket
Update 3.3.13:
Try Flubaroo to automate and add functionality to the GoogleDocs Self-Grading Quiz.
View new post on this blog
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The GoogleDocs Form is an efficient way for teachers to collect...
Wikispaces Projects Feature - Manage Projects Efficiently
Last fall Wikispaces added a new feature to the free education version of their collaborative website platform called Projects. Designed specifically for classroom use, this new feature has streamlined the process of organizing and...
Oolone and More Search Engines for Students
Oolone is a new visual search engine that displays results as web previews instead of text, offering a nice option for efficient and intuitive searching. An oolone search displays the top four results in a grid that allows uses to scroll over...
Screencasts -Tech Support to Maximize Instructional Time
As educators in the 21st century, one of our goals should be to design student driven experiences that offer flexible learning paths, using a variety of tools to meet the diverse needs of all students. Fueled by essential questions, technology...
