Safety, Integration and a Top 20 List

I hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend (extra long for some of us)!

Digital Safety Information For Parents
An online presentation for parents about digital safety and social media. I like that it explains what some of the common social media sites do, what hash tags are (and do) and the age recommendations. I recommend teachers who are unclear about some of the ins and outs of social media watch this as well. http://goo.gl/goRnT

Using OR Integrating Technology? 
A nice visual about the difference between USING technology and INTEGRATING technology. There is a difference! http://edudemic.com/2013/04/integrate-technology-in-education/

20 Great Websites For Elementary Educators
Found this list “20 Great Websites For Elementary Educators” athttp://edudemic.com/2013/04/20-great-websites-for-elementary-educators/?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer:+@DesignSaunders+on+twitter&buffer_share=04803 I have added my own (usually) brief comments about each.

• goedonline.com - an online teacher store for digital content… money required
• funbrain.com - free educational games, online books, and comics.
• turtlediary.com -  technology-based online educational activities; has advertisements and limits to access content unless you upgrade to a paid membership.
• fuelthebrain.com  - not familiar with this but from a breif poke around it has free and inexpensive  games, printables, interactives to elementary educators.
• mrnussbaum.com - has interactive educational activities. I used this site years ago but have not been back in a while. Nice to see it is updated now but sad to see that he has added a cost element and advertising.
• teachertube.com - basically YouTube for teachers so while there is advertising it is usually related to education. I used to use it more in the past but find many educators use YouTube.
• appolicious.com - new to me, looks like a one stop shop for app reviews across multiple platforms.
• scholastic.com
• learni.st - another new site for me. I think it might be a bit like storify? They say “Use Learnist to share what you know. Create a Learn Board on a subject you understand and add ‘learnings’ by pointing to existing web videos, blogs, images and documents.”
• sesamestreet.org
• www.manythings.org/ - For ESL/ELL students
• storybird.com - use this for digital storytelling
• thecolor.com - from what I can tell, it is a bunch of colouring pages.
• animal.discovery.com (Animal Planet) videos!
• funfonix.com - Phonics worksheets, free printable phonics workbooks; you can customize your own innerbody.com - human anatomy
• arkive.org -  learn about the world’s endangered animals, plants and fungi – it is freely accessible to everyone
• math-play.com - free online math games
• readwritethink.org - love this site
• discoveryeducation.com - EPSB staff get this through SchoolZone.

 

New Distribution List

EPSB went Google this weekend. As a result I had to recreate my Sunday Ideas distribution list. Please leave a comment (your email address will be visible to only me) at any point if you wish to start receiving these emails.  

For those working at EPSB. Welcome to your first week of Going Google!

And now for the ideas: 

————–

YouTube Playlist - I made a short playlist of videos to use as a technology centre to show what Saskatoon looks like. As an EPSB staff member, you already have a YouTube account and you too can make playlists! My Saskatoon Playlist

 

Div1 Edtech in EPSB - new post about movement in the technology classrooom

 

A (grade one teacher) colleague of mine went to a Smartboard PD recently and came back with a list of websites she found useful. Here they are below hyperlinked for easy access:

 

ABCya.com - Kids Educational Computer Games and Activities

Super Teacher Tools - variety of review games, classroom management software, and other miscellaneous tools for educators

Mrs. Meacham’s Classroom Snapshots (calendar math for K-2)

TES iBoard (FYI – 30 days free and then you need to pay)

StoryBots - videos for letters A-Z

BGRS Engaging Students (Black Gold Regional Schools)

2Learn.ca

Utah Education Network

Newseum - headlines and news from around the world

Project Gutenberg (this link takes you to Children’s Literature Bookshelf)

Hot Documentaries - watch free documentaries online

Flocabulary - rap videos for LA and Math. Paid site, has a free trial option

 

I hope everyone enjoyed the wonderful weather this weekend! 

Earth Day

What A Wonderful World with David Attenborough

LearnAlberta’s Earth Day Ideas

 

Google Apps Summit Reflections Part Two – Google Art Project

I shared my thoughts about Google Art Project on the Div1 Edtech Blog.

A Google Love Letter aka My Reflections on my First Google Summit Part One

I will NOT attempt to summarize, think about and process what I learned at the Google Apps for Education Alberta Summit in one post. I have too much to share and to reflect upon about the wonderfully overwhelming, engaging and inspiring two days.

I have used Google Apps for the past few years and, as a result, am a convert to Google Chrome but I truly “went Google” this week. Until this week, to me, Google was a company that created useful tools. Then I learned about the vastness that is Google. Its mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can you not but admire that? It has its own Emergency Crisis Response that makes critical information more accessible in times of disaster. From what I understand, this uses Google Maps and crowd-sourcing. You can read about their past response efforts.

Along similar lines of their Emergency Crisis Response is Google Earth Outreach. Why? Because “you want to change the world, we want to help” is their reason. They recognize the people who DO help withHeroes of Google Earth. One example, Project Kaisei, really connected with me as I remember how completely shocked I was by the garbage that washed up on the beaches of Belize when I was there.

Google’s 20%. Don’t know what this is? It is not free time. From what I understand, Google gives their engineers one day a week to work on things they are interested in, but not tied to their job directly. Another reason to respect Google! I love this simple example of Google’s “20 percent time” in action. Now when I went searching for information from the “source”, so to speak, I could not find any direct mention of this 20% time in Google’s about page, philosophy page or jobs page. Thinking about Google’s 20% of course leads to the question: can you apply Google’s 20% time in the classroom? It also makes me hope that one day teachers will have 20% time for professional development and reflection within our work week or month.

The purpose of me going to the summit was to learn about the many practical Google products for schools. I will get to those in another post or two.

More Links:

• Google Apps for Education Alberta Summit Resources
• Google’s 80/20 Principle Applies to Students
• 20 Percent Time Spent Coding in The Cloud

Favourited Things from Twitter

I have favourited a lot of things on Twitter to go back and investigate when I have more time. I sat down today and finally looked at some of them. In no particular order, here are  some things I think are worth sharing:

• Useful Chrome Web Apps and Extensions for Teaches and Students
• Fascination Pictures (@fascinatingpics) - Fascinating pictures of places, people, animals and nature that you might want to use as writing prompts
• EdTech Cheat Sheet - Understanding New Trends in Educational Technology
• Planning to Teach from A to Z – a creative approach to reflective teaching and planning
• The Ultimate Guide to The Use of Blogs in Teaching - for such a broad statement and content area, this post is surprisingly short and to the point. It has a nice “Webliography” for further reading.
• Why Teaching Digital Citizenship Doesn’t Work - As a Tribes trained teacher working on a digital citizenship plan with her staff, I found this connection back to Tribes very interesting. “Students don’t need more rules; they just need to apply the ones they’ve already got.”

Collecting Math Games for Buddies

Every year my school has “buddy” classes. Older students meet up with younger students once a week. Usually they read together but throughout the year they do other activities. I’m always in charge of creating a technology based numeracy activity. So I’m collecting some math games that are easy enough for younger students to do but engaging enough for their older buddies as well.

Here’s my list.

 means it should be good for kindergarten and up (with help).

 means it should be good for grade one and up (with help).

 means a challenge.

Logic

• Four Piece Tangram 
• Online Traffic Jam – has an easy setting. 

Counting

• by 1 Connect the Dots 
• by 1 Count Animals 1 to 5 
• by 1 Okta’as Rescue 
• by 2s FairyFog 
• by 5s Spooky Sequences 
• by 5s Connect 5 (connect the dots)

Ordering

• Fill in the Missing Numbers from 1 to 12
• Order Numbers Balloon Pop 1-100 

Shape

• Shape Invasion 

Data

• Furbles 
• Animal Island Data 
• Data Picking 

Money

• Buy It 

Patterns

• What Comes Next 

Estimate

• Guess It 

Number Concepts

• Color By Number 
• Mend the Number Square 
• Butteryfly Ten Frame 

images from http://www.clker.com