April 29, 2012

Edcamp Boston, April 2012

These are a couple of the many Diigo links that I got from EdCamp Boston that I hope to pursue. There were many conversations about "Blended Learning", iPads and learning and other topics. The "smackdown" at the end gave us many links to use with our students. Some of the notes I made are:

  • 6 word memoir in Animoto
  • Edmodo turn in for assignments
  • LittleBirds for writing and drawing
  • Fotobabble for recorded story sent to parents by email
  • Storybird make student accounts within classroom
  • Animoto accounts only last 9 months but can set up for class
  • Prezi
  • Voicethread - kids can do presentation online instead of being live (differentiation)
  • Sliderocket- in google apps marketplace- has voice record, can embed twitter feeds (latest 20)
  • Storify
  • Paper.li - newspaper generator with embedded social media
Alice, Mike and I had a chance to visit with many colleagues from around New England.



April 28, 2012

April 27, 2012

New England Apple Tech Update Spring2012

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

It's been a few years since I attended an Apple Update. Mike, Alice and I all chose to attend this one due to the agenda items. It was helpful to hear about the development of management tools for iPads for schools adding large numbers of iPads. As long as we are adding a few iPads at a time we will be manually setting up iPads with either personal, institutional or hybrid accounts for each iPad. It is somewhat complicated as exploring apps requires access to iTunes cards or Apple Voucher provided apps. Another item on the agenda was the new option to create multimedia texts in iBooks. The limitations are that books can only be created by teachers and they belong to the teacher not the school. This is going to take some working out as we see what the potential is for iBooks and other epub options. In Yarmouth we are often looking for a tool that students can use as a multi-media creation tool. Most teachers are using sites, wikis and blogs for their own curriculum development online.

April 9, 2012

Google Docs for Teachers eBook

Many thanks to Richard Byrne: Free Technology for Teachers

April 8, 2012

April 1, 2012

Learning at edcampme 2012


Saturday was the first Maine "edcamp" sponsored by vendors and held at Waynflete School in Portland. This was a great day of connecting and sharing with other educators whose focus is using technology to support learning. I attended a session on iPads in the Elementary classroom and learned a few new apps and some management tips. The session on Digital Portfolios didn't apply directly to what we want to do in Yarmouth, but some of their methods could be useful. Alice, Mike and I presented a session on Google Apps in the Classroom with Kern Kelly from Nokomis High School. Kern has developed comprehensive digital portfolios of their older students and each graduating senior receives a gift of their name as a web domain so that they can carry their portfolio on beyond their K12 years. He also shared a great strategy for collecting student assignments when a teacher has many students in various classes. The sessions, photos and reflections of the day are archived at http://edcampme.posterous.com/ and the twitter hashtag for the day was #edcampme.