Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

More great blog posts from this past week, lots of resources:

• Free Technology for Teachers: Screencastify Submit Looks Promising – Easy Way for Students to Make Videos

  Thanks to John Padula this morning I learned about a new Screencastify feature called Screencastify Submit. This feature is currently in beta and you have to apply to get access to it, but it does look promising. I’ve applied and I hope to get acces…

• How To Make Teaching (And Learning) Online Easier And Less Stressful – Smart Classroom Management

  The pressure of teaching online can be overwhelming and even more stressful than being in the classroom. There is so much to learn. So much to research and figure out. So many decisions to make.

• 10 Essential Online Learning Best Practices to Help Teachers Move Online

  Teachers are moving from face to face classrooms to online classrooms quickly. Top online course designers who have also taught face to face tell us how. I had so many people ask for the video. Here is the video and infographic to help you. Advancem…

• www.facinghistory.org

• Control Alt Achieve: Whiteboard Tools for Google Hangouts Meet

  When you are in a video conference like Google Hangouts Meet, a valuable tool to have is a digital interactive whiteboard.

• Teach with Magic – Assignments (CYOA)

  Below you will find links to and descriptions of all the assignments we use for Choose Your Own Adventure. Click on the individual assignment links to get the full instructions and printable worksheets.

• SearchReSearch: Using Google Trends to find COVID data

  In a recent article for the New York Times, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz published a fascinating story (Google Searches Can Help Us Find Emerging Covid-19 Outbreaks) about using Google Trends to find coronavirus outbreaks in other countries, as well as …

• Editors Offer Suggestions to Teachers Who Want to Write a Book – Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo – Education Week Teacher

  Find breaking news, analysis, and opinion on K-12 education issues affecting school and district leaders, teachers, policymakers, and ed-tech professionals.

• A proposal for what post-coronavirus schools should do (instead of what they used to do) – The Washington Post

  April 8, 2020 at 1:53 PM EDTWhat will schooling look like when the buildings finally reopen (whenever that may be) and authorities have determined it is safe for children and adults to resume their lives beyond their own homes? Will things simply pi…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Create Online Art Galleries With Wakelet, Padlet, and Google Sites

  In last week’s episode of The Practical Ed Tech Podcast I answered a question from a reader who was looking for a way for students to be able to submit examples of their artwork and have them displayed in a public gallery.

• Schools Matter: Please consider reading, signing, and sharing SaveIDEA.org today!

  Betsy DeVos is trying to use the current crises to impose IDEA waivers, robbing students with disabilities of their right to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE).

• View Activity on Student Work | 50 Things Book

  After assigning a template to students, have they worked on it? From Google Drive single click on the file and press D for details. Click over on the Activities tab to see when it was worked on.

• Mari’s Favorite Chrome Extensions – Mari Venturino

  Productivity is a mindset. It’s not a thing we do, it’s how we think. And, what works for one person does not work for another. Sometimes, one productivity tool works for one area of life, but not for another.

• Steve Hargadon: Day 4 of the Learning Revolution Online Daily Education Conference

  Welcome to day four of the  2020 Learning Revolution  daily online conference, Thursday, April 9th. Today’s sessions are below. Log in…

• Keep The Score: an online scoreboard and leaderboard app

  Keep track of games you play with an online scoreboard. Share the scoreboard with other people Scrabble scores, Jeopardy, arguments won, trivia games, family feuds, quizzes, Quirkle, team goals. Get creative!

• Learning From Home with Book Creator Webinar Series – Class Tech Tips

  This spring I’m excited to partner with the folks at Book Creator for a special webinar series. Throughout the months of April and May I’m hosting seven webinars to share strategies for using Book Creator.

• Steve Hargadon: Day 3 of the Learning Revolution Online Daily Education Conference

  Welcome to day three of the  2020 Learning Revolution  daily online conference, Wednesday, April 8th. Today’s sessions are below. Log in…

• My Amazing Movie Poster: Free Project Plan to Teach Graphic Design to Teach Graphic Design

  Students can be filmmakers in this fun, engaging project that teaches graphic design, photography, the prototyping process and more. I’ve created the unit plan, lesson plan, and rubrics for this project-based learning experience that brings together…

• Gamification In Banking And Financial Services – e-Learning Infographics

  What banks and financial institutions do to understand and motivate customers and employees? Do you know what are the problems caused by the lack of engagement in finances? Once there’s a lack of trust and engagement, customers don’t consume product…

• John Thompson: Beware the Virtual Charter Scam! | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  John Thompson writes here about yet another virtual charter scam, this one in Oklahoma.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Free Webinar Tomorrow – Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support – Take 2!

  Yesterday afternoon I hosted a webinar titled Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support. The software that I used to host the webinar did not work as planned and practiced. And the recording did not come out well either.

• Send a Work Summary | 50 Things Book

  What work has a student completed? This can be answered on the Individual Student Page. You get there by going to the People tab and clicking on a student’s name. This will show you that students summary of work. In the top right hand corner of the …

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use Google Forms With Students Who Don’t Have Email Addresses

  This afternoon someone Tweeted at me at to ask how elementary school students who don’t have active email addresses can view the results of quizzes that they take in Google Forms. There are three ways that that can be accomplished. I made a new vide…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Video Puppet Turns Your PowerPoint Presentations Into Narrated Videos

  Video Puppet is a new tool that you can use to quickly turn your PowerPoint presentations into narrated videos. If you have less than twenty slides in your presentation you don’t even need to create an account on the site to turn your slides into a …

• April 12th Is “International Day of Human Space Flight” – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The United Nations has declared April 12th to be the International Day of Human Space Flight. You might be interested in: The Best Sites To Learn About The Apollo 11 Moon Landing The Best Si…

• ‘Water 100 Project’ seeks to enlist region’s tech industry | Puget Sound Institute

  Few cities in the world can rival Seattle’s combination of money and brain power. It’s a town where the world’s two richest men live within walking distance.

• Free Printable Games – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  Hi all. In this crazy time, I thought I would share a few games that I have made over the last couple of years to either entertain myself or the kids! They are all very simple but might help kill a few hours. Any feedback on them would be also great…

• A complete list of what to do — and not do — for everyone teaching kids at home during the coronavirus crisis – The Washington Post

  With most of the world’s schools shut because of the coronavirus crisis, you can now find a lot of advice on the Internet about the best ways to carry out distance learning at home, where more than 1.5 billion students are now supposed to be getting…

• Control Alt Achieve: How to Keep Students from Joining or Rejoining a Google Meet without You

  Google Hangouts Meet is a great tool for teachers to connect with students in a video conference, for instruction, questions, presentations, and more.

• Control Alt Achieve: How to Keep Students from Starting or Recording a Meet

  Google Hangouts Meet is a great tool for remote teaching and learning, but understandably schools may want to limit how students can use this tool. Certainly there are many other apps that students can use to connect with friends, and that is wonder…

• Mo Physics Mo Problems: Student Portfolios: You’ve Got Time for That

  Give students the time to use Google Sites to create portfolios for assessment and reflection

• Screens kids use, Part 2: Research turning a corner – NetFamilyNews.org

  This subject – at this writing, about 3 weeks after I p0sted Part 1 – almost seems like that of a previous era, with all we’ve experienced since then (see this in The Atlantic from history professor Rebecca Spang).

• Free Technology for Teachers: Five Search Tools Students Often Overlook

  In our new remote teaching and learning environments students may find themselves having to look things up online more than ever before.

• Math Has Prepared Me Poorly for This Pandemic – dy/dan

  Here are two representations of the horror of this pandemic. First, a graph of coronavirus deaths in Italy.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Ways to Make Whiteboard Videos on Your Chromebook

  Last week I published a video on how to make a simple video on a Chromebook without installing any extensions or apps. That video was fairly popular and it prompted some follow-up questions from readers and viewers who wanted my recommendations for …

• Steve Hargadon: Day 2 of the Learning Revolution online daily education conference

  Welcome to day 2 of the  2020 Learning Revolution  daily online conference, Tuesday, April 7th. Today’s sessions are below. Log into Lea…

• 20 Maths Games For Young Children: Free eBook – Kathleen Morris | Primary Tech | Resources to help teachers with technology in the classroom

  This remote teaching/homeschool business is tough for everyone, isn’t it? Teachers are scrambling to provide a remote learning curriculum with little preparation or warning. Meanwhile, parents are adjusting to isolation, working from home, and homes…

• Health and Wellness Choice Boards for Teachers and Students |

  On Saturday, I wrote a blog sharing an offline choice board teachers can use to blend offline activities into their online classes. On Twitter, Barbara McInnes suggested teachers add a wellness activity to their offline choice boards.

• four-core-priorities-for-trauma-informed-distance-learning

  Trauma-informed teaching cannot be simplified to cookie-cutter practices. Take this example: a teacher worked with a student to develop a silent signal that he could use when he needed extra breaks during class.

• Doing more than just treading water . . . three success stories | History Tech

  Resist. Accept. Embrace. We can resist the changes that are happening in our schools. We can accept them. Or we can embrace them.

• Steve Hargadon: The 2020 Learning Revolution daily online conference starts today!

  Teaching Visual Literacy Through Fake News with Dr. Lesley S. J.

• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: 4 Communication Tips For #RemoteLearning Educators

  Feedback is one of the best ways to support student learning. According to John Hattie , Feedback has an effect size of .64 and is often …

• Novel HyperDocs: 25 ready to use units for your class – Ditch That Textbook

  This post is written by Karly Moura, a teacher on special assignment (TOSA) and Computer Science teacher in Mount Diablo USD in Concord, California. Karly is also part of team Ditchbook, enjoying her role as content and social media manager.

• Google Meet Nickname | 50 Things Book

  In the new Google Meet it is important that when video chatting with students that you use a nickname in the meeting. There is no pre-setup required. Choose your nickname and put the nickname after the g.

• Renaming an Attachment | 50 Things Book

  When you upload anything to Google Classroom it does NOT upload to Google Classroom. Instead, it uploads to Google Drive. When I take a screenshot it typically saves as the date, not helpful for kids knowing what it is. While I should rename it befo…

• Random Dice Roll with Google Sheets – Classroom Powerups

  Jon David Groff (@JonDavidGroff), part of the #GameMyClass crew, asked about random dice roll sites the other day on Twitter. It got me thinking of the random number generator on Excel and Google Sheets. A dice roll is really nothing more than a ran…

• Online learning – this is what works

• 10 Ways to Teach Collaboration | Mike Kaechele

  So you’ve gotten to know your students and created “perfect” groups based on my grouping post.

• A Principal’s Reflections: 10 Remote Learning Practices to Avoid

  Educators, schools, and districts have earnestly rolled out remote learning plans to support students and fill in gaps as a result of extended closures.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some amazing blog posts from last week:

• Video: Travel Deep Inside a Leaf | Science for All

  Back in the day (or a couple of years ago) I used to post lots of cool science videos on this site. I got away from that in order to focus on more “important” science education resources. Well- I think it’s time to start sprinkling in some fun scien…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use Flipgrid to Create Whiteboard Videos

  A couple of days ago Flipgrid released some new features that all teachers can use in the new school year. Those new features include tools for creating whiteboard-style instructional videos. You can use this feature to create whiteboard videos for …

• What Every Educator Needs to Know About Artificial Intelligence – Education Week

  • Right now, all sorts of technology, including educational software, is “adaptive.” That means it’s pre-programmed to take certain steps, based on what a user—say, a student—does. In simple terms, if a kid taking an adaptive test gets an answer right, the system knows to give that kid a tougher question next. (Think of this as a much more sophisticated, computerized version of those choose-your-own adventure books you might have read as kid.)
  • Plenty of experts would call those systems “AI” and plenty of vendors market their educational software that way. But these so-called “rule-based” systems aren’t the “fancy, sexy AI” that’s grabbing headlines
  • Cutting-edge AI relies on systems that can actually learn, usually by analyzing vast quantities of data and searching out new patterns and relationships. Instead of following one already predetermined pathway, these systems can actually improve over time, becoming more and more complex and accurate as they take in more and more information.
  • the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that 40 percent of the tasks that elementary school teachers now perform—mostly noninstructional job responsibilities, like tracking student progress and communicating with parents—could be automated by 2030 with the help of AI.
  • AI will ultimately help educators perform rote tasks, not replace them.
  • “My hope for AI is we actually will expand teaching,” Oranje said. “No teacher ever lost her job because every kid had an iPad. We need more teachers, not fewer. The nature of teaching will change. But it doesn’t mean that 40 percent of teachers will lose their jobs.”
  • One big problem: Human biases can be written right into the algorithms that power AI and then amplified by the technology.
  • facial recognition software, which is currently used for airport security and may even be deployed for school safety, is notoriously bad at identifying women and people of color. More troubling: Studies have shown that risk-assessment algorithms used to figure out criminal sentences tend to make harsher predictions about black defendants than white defendants. And Tay, a chatbot developed by Microsoft, was supposed to figure out how to emulate natural conversation by interacting with Twitter users. Instead, it began communicating in vulgar and racist hate speech.

• United Nations wants to promote peace, sustainability through mobile games – CNET

• Creating Digital Notebooks with Google Slides |

  In my role as a blended learning coach, I work with a lot of teachers who are intrigued by the idea of digital notebooks. They recognize the value of having student integrate text and media in an online notebook.

• Free Technology for Teachers: What is Two-Factor Authentication? – And Why You Should Use It

  Last night I had a chat with someone who had her Netflix account hacked. The hacker changed her password and the email address associated with the account. This prompted a bigger conversation about how accounts get hacked and some simple steps to pr…

• Free Technology for Teachers: ClassHook Gets a New Look

  ClassHook is a service that I recommend trying when you’re looking for video clips to illustrate a concept and don’t want just another “how to” video. ClassHook provides a search tool for finding clips from well-known television shows and movies to …

• ditchthattextbook.com –

  transitioning-back-to-the-classroom

• On Trigger Warnings and Potential Censorship – Pernille Ripp

  Warning: This post contains me changing my mind as well as unfinished thoughts. Read on to see what happens when you open your discussion to the expertise of others. You may have come across them if you read adult books.

• How Girls Make Games Is Inspiring The Next Generation Of Game Developers

  “How Girls Make Games Is Inspiring The Next Generation Of Game Developers”

• How Getting More Girls to Make Video Games Will Change the Gaming Industry | Teen Vogue

• Free Technology for Teachers: Great New Features Added to Flipgrid

  Just in time for the start of the new school year Flipgrid has rolled-out new features for teachers and students. I tried them out this afternoon and plan to make a video overview of them soon. In the meantime, here’s a run-down of what’s new and wh…

• Humanizing The Mathematics Classroom – The Reflective Educator

  I can remember exactly where I had my first major mathematical discovery. We were driving up the highway toward the nearby town for a night out for dinner. I was sitting in the back of the car playing with sums of numbers in my head. “Wow! It works!…

• 100% Online Data Science Degrees | Data Science Programs

• Uncontroversial: Online porn in sex ed – NetFamilyNews.org

  The other day, prominent UK professor Sonia Livingstone tweeted that the latest post in the Parenting for a Digital Future blog (which she helped create) has proven controversial. That’s not a huge surprise.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Seven Microsoft Product Updates for Teachers to Note

  Over the last six or seven weeks Microsoft has rolled-out some notable updates to their products that teachers and students use most. I’ve covered some of those updates in blog posts here and some I have only shared on social media.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Five Google Product Updates for Teachers to Note

  Every month Google pushes updates to all of their products. The ISTE conference is held in June so there were a lot of updates made then that directly impact teachers and students.

• Andrea Gabor: What to Do When the Testing Madness Ends | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Andrea Gabor, The Bloomberg Professor of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, is one of the nation’s worthy and thoughtful education writers. Her book about W.

• Google Expeditions VR + AR | ARVRinEDU | Jaime Donally | Professional Development

• Fake news: 3 things we can learn from Finland (And 3 cool tools from right here in the US of A) | History Tech

  We all get smarter when we all get smarter. Pretty simple concept. It’s the whole idea behind PLCs, #sschat, and, well . . . school in general. Learning together makes a lot of sense.

• Book Study: STEM Lesson Essentials | Science for All

  Well, it’s that time of year where the ongoing countdown of number of days to the end of the summer is reaching just a few weeks for most of us. As such, I’ll be posting some recommendations for last minute professional summer reading related to sci…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Dozens of Apps for Physical Education

  Glide is in my top five favorite new tools in 2019. Glide makes it incredibly easy for anyone who can make a spreadsheet to make a mobile app. We had fun using at the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp and many other people have shared their apps with me…

• Kids Should Read – Josh Stumpenhorst

  I work in a predominantly white school with what most people would consider high achieving students. Our free and reduced lunch number is small and most people would consider our community a stereotypical suburb.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Google Announces Transformation Reports for G Suite for Education

  Earlier today Google announced the launch of a new product called Google for Education Transformation Reports.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 8 Ways to Prepare & Connect at Conferences: #NYCSchoolsTech Summit

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

• Visual Histories Of World Wars I & II | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The American Battle Monuments Commission has tons of interactives related to both World War I and World War II. The best ones are: The Great War: A Visual History World War II: A Visual Hist…

• STEM Design Challenge: Building Earthquake Proof Buildings AND a Shake Table – Mrs. Harris Teaches…

  I created an Instructable for building a simple shake table and instructions for an engineering design challenge. I have a modifications for this activity below that make it more of a real world challenge utilizing budgets and analyzing costs per sq…

• A New Tech Wave? – 2¢ Worth

  When I had taught social studies for a few years I started to hear talk about personal computers. They were fully programmable systems that could be instructed to perform a multitude of functions and could be had for prices ranging from a few hundre…

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some great posts from last week:

• Project Based Learning Done Right … 10 Misconceptions: Plus… 10 Resources to Raise the PBL Bar | 21 st Century Educational Technology and Learning

  I wanted to take a moment to share some of the thoughts I often hear from educators as I travel the country providing PBL Professional Development. I really believe it might be a helpful read for those wanting to make that PBL possibility in their s…

• Control Alt Achieve: How to Force a Docs Copy WITH Pre-Loaded Comments to Help your Students

  We are always looking for new and improved ways to provide additional assistance to our students when they are doing digital work. Recently Google rolled out a new feature in Google Docs that, with a little tweaking, can give teachers new ways to pr…

• NEW! Google Classroom Filter by Topic – Teacher Tech

  The Classwork page in Google Classroom allows you to organize your assignments by topic, but it can get quite long as the school year goes on. One of the downsides to the Classwork page is the inability to see the full assignment title and assignmen…

• 55-creative-chromebook-projects-to-try-at-the-end-of-the-year

• if-you-dont-know-what-historic-brown-v-board-ruling-is-know-you-should-watch-this-minute-video/

  Maybe you don’t know exactly what the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling is, but you’ve heard about it often enough to know that you should. Watch the video below. It will take only six minutes.

• The Fearification of Fun – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  I recently read about a large online outlet who had introduced “Gamification” into the workforce. The idea was that by doing activities that the company felt were correct and efficient, the employee would earn points. Those points in some way affect…

• Tour Creator

  Share your tour with a link. No extra apps, no downloads. Embed on your website, blog or social.

• A Mindful Method for When You’re Tired : zen habits

  My family & I flew back to California after nine months of being in Guam, and boy are our arms tired! OK, our entire bodies are tired, and our brains — we’re suffering from jet lag and feeling tired during the day.

• “Currently…” – 2¢ Worth

  What was at the core of much of my advocacy for retooling education came from a condition that can best be illustrated by the Knowledge Doubling Curve. Recently adjusted by Faras Batarseh of the London School of Economics, it states that Until 1900,…

• Should I Use Seesaw Or A WordPress Blog In The Classroom? Pros And Cons Of Digital Portfolio Tools

  If you’re involved in primary education, you will have realised Seesaw has been taking the educational world by storm over the last few years.

• Find Free Images For Students On Photos For Class

  Do your students create digital work? Maybe slideshows, blog posts, documents? I’m guessing they do. Do your students add images to their digital work? I’m sure they do. Images can really jazz things up!

• 12 Tips For Teachers Communicating With Parents Via Email (With Poster)

  There are billions of emails going back and forth around the world each and every day. Email is a favourite form of communication for many people regardless of their location, age, or confidence with technology. Email is accessible, quick, easy, and…

• See What Animals See With This New Tool | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  How animals view the world is a new tool from LensBest that lets you see how various animals see the world, and explains why that’s the case. You can choose the experience of a dog, cat, snail or bee.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Four Ways to Create Your Own VR & AR Experiences

  Observing and interacting with augmented reality and virtual reality content is nice, but after a while students will get bored with the pre-made commercial content.

• Nikhil Goyal: Bernie’s Plan for Public Schools | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Nikhil Goyal, a graduate student and veteran activist for public schools, is deeply impressed by Senator Bernie Sanders’ ambitious and sweeping plan to pour billions into the schools and to protect public schools from privatization pirates.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Add Formative to Your G Suite Domain

  Formative is one of my favorite online assessment tools. I’e been using and and featuring it in my workshops about formative assessment for many years.

• Schoology: Make Collaborative Google Slides – Teacher Tech

  Unfortunately, the default when adding Google documents to Schoology is to “Make a copy for each student.” I personally try to avoid this like the plague. Using digital tools allows us to rethink what processes we are doing and take advantage of wha…

• Teach Better Academy

• SWBT Episode 18 with Monica Burns – Go Where You Grow

  Episode 18 of the “So We’ve Been Thinking…” podcast is now available! This episode discusses putting “Task’s Before Apps” with Dr. Monica Burns! Listen to the episode here: SWBT Podcast Episode 18: Tasks Before Apps with Dr. Monica Burns

• Empowering Learning Through Student Strengths – The Principal of Change

  The concept of “focusing on strengths” is something that I have shared in “The Innovator’s Mindset,” and dive into deeper in my next book, “Innovate Inside the Box” (Coming out in August 2019).

• My SBG Journey: my CORE DESIGN ELEMENTS – Classroom Powerups

  Next year I am going to implement Standards Based Grading and over the last few weeks I have written a few posts about my steps along the way.

• Diver Travels to Bottom of the Mariana Trench, Finds Trash Already There — The Adventure Blog

  This story made the rounds last week while I was away in Mexico, and even though I’m a little late to the party I thought it was worth mentioning here nonetheless.

• ditch-that-grade-9-ways-to-move-beyond-the-grade-and-on-to-meaningful-learning

• Finding a place to charge your EV is easy with Google Maps

  If you’ve ever driven to an electric vehicle (EV) charging station only to find that all ports are occupied, you know that you could end up waiting in line for anywhere between minutes to hours—which can really put a damper on your day when you have…

• Sssnakes on a map

  Once you’ve selected a city, start picking up as many passengers as you can as your train travels around the world—stopping everywhere from Big Ben, the Great Sphinx of Giza to the Eiffel Tower. But make sure you don’t run off the map (or into yours…

• Get lost in the new Earth Timelapse, now on mobile

  Gaze in awe at the scale of change, sometimes rapid, like bushfires in Australia’s Northern Territory.

• Introducing auto-delete controls for your Location History and activity data

  Whether you’re looking for the latest news or the quickest driving route, we aim to make our products helpful for everyone.

• Remove a Student from Google Classroom | 50 Things Book

  To remove a student from Google Classroom go to the People tab. Check next to the student’s name you wish to remove. Use the Actions drop down menu to choose “Remove.” Removing a student removes them from Google Classroom. Any scores or comments are…

• Simple Hacks To Stay Healthy At Work – e-Learning Infographics

  The working environment is so important to the health and wellbeing of workers, both psychically and mentally. This infographic gives tips and tricks to stay healthy at work for body and mind.

• Learning Experience Platform – Ten Essential Features – e-Learning Infographics

  Going beyond the traditional, academic constraint of the Learning Management System, the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) typically provides consumer-grade experiences to users in a variety of different ways.

• Curation as an Educational Challenge | Silvia Tolisano- Langwitches Blog

  When I saw the following headline from a German article by Nele Hirsch, I was immediately hooked to click my way through.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Presentation Checklist: 5 Ways to Prepare for Presentations

  Innovative educators understand the importance of being prepared to give a great presentation to inspire and influence others. Keeping these five ideas in mind, will help ensure you don’t fall short. Presentation Checklist Have speaker notes on your…

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Great blog posts from this past week:

• Interview: Matthieu Brevet, Steel Division II | Gaming the Past

  Recently, I had the opportunity to pose a list of questions about history and games to Matthieu Brevet, historian and game designer at Eugen Systems, makers of both historical and counterfactual strategy games such as R.U.S.E., the Wargame series, a…

• The Best Books for Middle School According to My Students 2019 – Pernille Ripp

  This is the fourth year that my students have gathered what they deem the very best books that they read this year and shared their recommendations with the world. As always we have favorites that …

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Find Games & Quizzes in Google Earth

  This week Google added a new round of Where in Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? The new game follows up on the popularity of the first Where in Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego? that was launched in March. The new game has players help Carmen Sandieg…

• When Society Fails Students | Mike Kaechele

  I recently visited an alternative education high school where I had taught for a year. The school uses PBL and students are genuinely loved and cared for. It was great seeing the staff and hearing success stories of former students. But unfortunatel…

• How To Fix A Talkative Class – Smart Classroom Management

  Unwanted talking is near the top of the list of teacher frustrations. Although not considered severe misbehavior, it can nonetheless severely disrupt learning.

• Google Classroom: More Options Menu | 50 Things Book

  On the class tiles page at http://bit.ly/1j8X3YR you find a grid of all your classes you are teaching or enrolled in. In the upper right hand corner of each tile is the 3 dots more options menu.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Will 5G Undermine Weather Prediction?

  There have been a number of media stories this week about a major threat to weather prediction: the sale of electromagnetic spectrum for new 5G cellphone service.

• Free Technology for Teachers: An Overview of the New Creative Commons Search Tool

  Whenever I talk about using media in videos, slideshows, podcasts, or any other media, I always emphasize the importance of using media that is either in the public domain or carries a Creative Commons license.

• Free Technology for Teachers: ReadWorks Offers Free Summer Reading Packets

  Summer will be here soon (in the northern hemisphere) and ReadWorks has free summer reading packets that you can send home with your students. The free summer reading packets are available with fiction and nonfiction articles for students entering f…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Wikispaces Alternatives

  Almost a year after it ceased operations, Wikispaces and “Wikispaces alternatives” are still two of the most frequently searched terms on this blog. If you find yourself looking for an alternative to Wikispaces, here are some good options to try.

• Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers, Trent Hergenrader, eBook – AmazonSmile

• World Anvil World Building, Tools, RPG Campaign Manager and Community | World Anvil

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 5 Tech Resources for the Blind or Visually Impaired

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

• Coding in the Classroom with Avokiddo Apps for Kids – Class Tech Tips

  I love the Hour of Code and how students across the world celebrate coding at the end of each calendar year.

• Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Ways for Students of All Ages to Make Animated Videos

  Making animated videos is a great way for students to bring their written stories to life on screen. Those could be fiction or nonfiction stories.

• Teach Computer Science & Coding to Kids – CS First

• The Art of teaching with HyperDocs: Student Centered Lessons that Inspire Curiosity and Creativity | HyperDocs.co

• I Thought Movie Theatres Were Dying Out |

  For much of my life I have heard of the pending demise of movie theatres.  First, it was the video tape, then DVDs and more recently it has been the explosion of online viewing options.

• 12 Awesome Ideas for Ending the School Year – Teacher Reboot Camp

  The end of the school year is approaching fast! Before the year ends I aim to get students to review, reflect, and connect. Some of your students are probably super excited to begin their summers or might be restless from testing.

• Google Shares A Second Online Carmen Sandiego Game | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  In March, Google unveiled a fun and education Carmen Sandiego game that you could play on Google Earth (see “Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” Is A Neat New Geography Game). Today, they shared a second one, The Tutankhamun’s Mask Caper.

• The Secret To Teaching Coding To Everyone • Teched Up Teacher

  Four years ago, when I started a makerspace at my current school district, I knew I wanted to introduce my middle schoolers to coding. I had taught coding to a small group of high schoolers in an informal, club-like format before, but I’d never taug…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ten Great Tech Tools for Social Studies Lessons

  Over the last decade I’ve written about a lot of excellent resources for social studies lessons. Over time some of those tools have faded away and others have moved to the forefront of my top recommendations. Here’s my current list of ten top tools …

• Is the purpose of school really low-level content and procedures? | @mcleod | Dangerously Irrelevant

  If each person has natural gifts and innate talents, then the true nature of education must involve the awakening, inviting, and blessing of the inner genius and unique life spirit of each young person. [Kindle location 371] We all create our own li…

• Mo Physics Mo Problems: Suite Science Practices: Models

  Leveraging G Suite & EdTech Tools when developing and applying models in the classroom.

• Dear STAR Test, We Need to Talk Again… – Pernille Ripp

  Three years ago, almost to this date, I wrote my first blog post about the STAR test, a test sold by Renaissance Learning and employed in thousands of districts across the United States.

• e-learning , conocimiento en red: “Ethics and Games: The Talos Principle” by Sherry Jones @autnes

  Hoy traemos a este espacio esta presentación de slideshare titulada “Ethics and Games: The Talos Principle” by Sherry Jones Feb.

• Twitch

• G Suite: Make Available OFFLINE – Teacher Tech

  I use G Suite over other tools because collaboration is king. I do not want multiple versions floating around. Using G Suite I have full confidence that I am always looking at the current version. This is one reason for the paradigm shift that we do…

• How Learning Targets Empower Students (and Help Me, Too) | All Things Assessment

  This guest post is written by Shannon Finnegan, a social studies teacher at Hopkins High School in Minnesota. Throughout my teaching career, I have taught in three vastly different schools: a suburban high school, an inner city 6–12 school, and an a…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Book Creator Updates

  Recently, Book Creator released some updates that now has their innovative app available for Safari instead of just Chrome. This makes it easy for all those Apple users to use Book Creator over the web on their default browser.

• Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Good Options for Making Digital Portfolios

  In yesterday’s Practical Ed Tech post I mentioned that if you have been using a service like SeeSaw all year to have students create digital portfolios, it is relatively easy to have students create an end-of-year showcase of their best work.

• Amusing Monday: A comedy connection to climate change info | Watching Our Water Ways

  Climate scientist Josh Willis, who graduated from the Second City Comedy School, does a pretty good impersonation of Elvis Presley, as he tries to help people understand climate change.

• 22 Top Tips for Better Classroom Management | Cool Cat Teacher Blog

  Classroom management can be a challenge. In this post, I’ll share twenty-two of my top tips and ideas that have helped me have an awesome classroom. While I won’t claim to ever be perfect, I have learned so much over the last seventeen years.

• Updated: List Of Class Blogs From Around The World – The Edublogger

  We’ve just completed the latest update of our class blog list! We’ve maintained our class blog list on The Edublogger since 2008. This list is updated twice a year and always proves to be a popular resource.

• Fostering Resilient Learners: Strategies for Creating a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom – Mari Venturino

  One thing I appreciate about my district is our Teacher Leadership Book Study. This phenomenal professional development opportunity is spearheaded by Amy Illingworth, our Director of Professional Growth.

• How much water should you be drinking? – Yummy Math

  As outdoor activities get into full swing and the temperatures rise, it might be a good time to look at hydration. In this activity student develop formulas for calculating their water needs, learn about the effects of too little water, and calculat…

• Is That Higher-Order Task Really Higher Order? | Cult of Pedagogy

  This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. The mobiles hang from the ceiling like jewelry, filling Ms. Jackson’s language art…

• Lake Erie’s toxic algae blooms: Why is the water turning green? | NSF – National Science Foundation

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some amazing blog posts from this past week:

• Control Alt Achieve: End-Of-Year Google Classroom Clean-up Tips

  As the school year winds down, most teachers go through some sort of check-out procedure for their physical classrooms, making sure everything is properly organized or put away for the summer. In much the same way, you may want to do some clean-up a…

• Assessment Portfolios: A Retrospective | Science Education on the Edge

  It’s been almost three years now. Are you still using this (portfolio) format? Can you comment on what you have learned since this original post? Sure! And thanks for helping me dust off the keyboard to do some writing after a long break.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Quick and Easy Way to Create Comic Strip Templates

  YouTube, like many social networks, has a little for creators that notifies them of old video postings and significant moments for their older videos. This week YouTube notified me that one of the videos I published three years ago hit 50,000 views.

• The Forgetting Curve | Patty Papers

  The Forgetting Curve is a model that describes how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. It originated in the late 19th century with German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.

• 10-google-sheets-tricks-you-probably-dont-know-about

• Free Technology for Teachers: Woodrow Wilson’s Mother’s Day Proclamation and the History of Mother’s Day

  According to President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation in 1914, the second Sunday in May is Mother’s Day in the United States. As the second Sunday in May is approaching, the U.S. National Archives recently featured President Wilson’s proclamation in …

• My 10 fave historical movies that every social studies teacher needs to see | History Tech

  I started off by thinking that it would be easy to knock out a quick piece on my top ten favorite history movies. But that idea lasted about a minute. There are so many movies that I’ve enjoyed.

• Personalizing Your Final Exam |

  As a student, I remember the stress of preparing for final exams. I spent hours reviewing notes that spanned an entire semester because it was all “fair game.” I never had a clear sense of what content would appear on the final.

• Free Technology for Teachers: 8 Options for Making Digital Maps

  In yesterday’s post about English Heritage’s Map of Myth, Legend, and Folklore I included a mention of using StoryMap JS to create interactive maps.

• Parenting in the Digital Age – 2019 edition | Tip of the Iceberg

  My colleague Daniel Johnston and I spoke to parents last week on the subject of Parenting in the Digital Age – a topic close to both of our hearts. We reminded those in attendance that we are personally invested in this topic and learning alongside …

• How to Use Spark for End-of-Year Celebration Videos – Class Tech Tips

  The end of the school year is a special time full of reflections, memorable events, and plenty of to-do items to take care of before the year comes to a close. As a classroom teacher, this time of year was always full of things to check off my list …

• NCC: Native grassland is important habitat for grassland birds

  Saying that native grassland is important habitat for grassland birds seems quite obvious. And you might think to yourself, “Of course grassland birds like grassland habitat; it’s right in the name!” The important point to note is the part about nat…

• Mo Physics Mo Problems: Sphero Challenge Accepted!

  Fighting the Inertia of a Traditional Classroom

• The world is complex. Our kids need to understand that. World Savvy can help | History Tech

  Need a brain break? Ready for some current event / world culture / global literacy questions to test your knowledge? Of course, you do.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Ways to Create Digital Collages to Summarize the School Year

  The sun is shining, the weather is warming, and kids are getting antsy. That combination means that the end of the school year is drawing near. Last week I shared five ways to quickly create audio slideshow videos for end-of-year events.

• K-12 Cybersecurity News You Can Use: May 6, 2019 – The K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center

  Keeping K-12 Cybersecure–the newsletter of the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center–curates the best cybersecurity and privacy news for K-12 policymakers, administrators, IT professionals, vendors, and privacy advocates.

• 10 Elements Of A Quality Blog Post: Tips For Teaching Students (Poster and Examples)

  The 22nd Student Blogging Challenge is finishing up this week. Over 10 weeks, students from 20+ countries have been learning about publishing online while connecting with a global audience.

• 5 Ways to Use Sutori for Social Studies Lessons – Class Tech Tips

  Where does technology come into play in the social studies classroom? The team behind Sutori reached out to me this month to let me know about some significant changes to their EdTech tool.

• Practical Issues Of Framing Learning Objectives For Online Learning – e-Learning Infographics

  What are learning objectives? A learning objective is a statement, in specific and measurable terms, that describes what learners will be able to do on completion of the training. What do Learning Objectives Help Finalize in an E-learning Course?

• 7-ways-you-can-remix-your-classroom-and-teach-like-a-dj

• Power Law & Baseball: My SBG Journey – Classroom Powerups

  As a child growing up in Western NY in the mid 1980s it was inevitable that In would fall in love with the New York Mets. My father was a bit of a front runner and I loved baseball so Doc and Darrell were my heroes.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some great posts from last week:

• • Chromosomes and Cancer

    This is a good follow-up activity to the Tasmanian Devil Karyotype, where students examine how the chromosomes of cancerous cells can be altered. It is a short read about a transmissible cancer found in Tasmanian devils which causes facial tumors.

  • How To Not Quit Teaching – Smart Classroom Management

    Four of every ten new teachers leave the profession within five years. That is a staggering number.

  • Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Ways to Quickly Create Audio Slideshows for End-of-Year Events

    Around this time every year I start to field a bunch of emails from readers who are looking for advice on how to quickly create audio slideshow videos for end-of-year events. Here are five options that I like for making audio slideshow videos.

  • Celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week by Watching and Sharing This Great Video by Stevie Van Zandt | Diane Ravitch’s blog

    Teacher Appreciation Week begins on May 6! His stage name is Little Steven; he played in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band and has received many honors.

  • Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Google Earth Pro Tips for Teachers and Students

    Google Earth is currently available in a few different versions. There is the web browser version that was built for use in Chrome and Chromebooks. There is an iOS version and an Android version for use on tablets and phones.

  • Was the Common Core Successful? | Diane Ravitch’s blog

    It is probably far too soon to know whether the Common Core succeeded or failed, but the studies are beginning to appear. The adoption of the Common Core standards was a central requirement of the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top program.

  • Free Technology for Teachers: How to File a Copyright Claim With Google

    In my previous post I detailed the copyright debacle that has consumed way too much of my mental energy and way too much of time over the last week.

  • Free Technology for Teachers: How to File a Copyright Infringement Complaint With Facebook

    I frequently deal with websites that are plagiarizing my work. Usually, I deal with sites that are plaigiarizing my work by simply sending them a notice that they’ve been caught and that they should stop. Seven times out of ten it ends there.

  • Teach Students to Track How Many Words They Read Per Minute Using Voice Typing and Google Forms |

    As elementary students learn how to read, teachers administer reading fluency tests and listen to students read passages. During these reading fluency tests, teachers listen for speed, accuracy, and expression.

  • Start Building Virtual Reality NOW: A dive right in guide to get students creating – Go Where You Grow

    There is a lot of buzz around using AR/VR technology in education, often as a technology that is soon to emerge as a powerful tool. The fact is, the tools are currently in place to get students started building with AR/ VR technology NOW, and many o…

  • 20-ways-to-analyze-text-images-with-edji

  • Kathy Schrock’s Kaffeeklatsch: Fake news: Fact or opinion?

    Becoming a good digital citizen commonly includes the mastering of a multitude of skills. I like this image, created by Wesley Fryer and Marcia Moore, which provides a visual overview of the components. https://www.flickr.

  • My SBG Journey: Mastery Level Calculation Methods – Classroom Powerups

    I have written previously about my interest in using the Power Law as a grading method in a Standards Based Grading class. I am still quite interested but I have come across a few other common SBG grading practices and this post will be my way of wo…

  • 3 Ideas for Dealing with “Pushback” on Your Ideas in Education – The Principal of Change

    Instead of answering this question with the idea that had pushback (because I have had a ton), I want to focus more on answering what I have shifted my thinking on for this context. First of all, assume positive intent of the other person you are wo…

  • Free Technology for Teachers: ICYMI – Google Team Drives Are Being Renamed to Shared Drives

    From the department of, “Google’s always changing something,” yesterday Google announced that Team Drives are going to be renamed as Shared Drives. Depending upon the device you’re using and your domain, this change will happen as early as May 21st.

  • how-mindfulness-can-help-teachers-and-students-manage-challenging-situations

    Excerpted from “Mindfulness in the Secondary Classroom: A Guide for Teaching Adolescents,” (c) 2019 by Patricia C. Broderick. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company.

  • Making Creativity Easier Than Ever with Buncee Ideas Lab – Class Tech Tips

    Have you heard the news? Buncee recently launched a brand new feature to help promote creativity in your classroom, Buncee Ideas Lab. This new feature gives classrooms the tools they need to easily innovate learning in your school, by featuring a va…

  • An Open and Extended Response (On Testing Season) | The Jose Vilson

    I laid my lesson plans on top of the roller tray. I pulled off my “problem of the moment” off my printer and put scissors on top of them. I turned on my Promethean board and connected the AppleTV to it.

  • The Evolution Of Flexible Workspace – e-Learning Infographics

    Workplace customs and trends have shifted over the years. The typical workspaces as we knew it 10 years ago appears different from what companies offer today. Businesses are acknowledging the changes and seeing the advantages of adopting a modern of…

  • A Breakdown Of Blended Learning – e-Learning Infographics

    A Breakdown Of Blended Learning – Infographic A breakdown of Blended Learning – What it is, models, stats and what the future holds. What is blended learning? Today’s classroom blends traditional methods of instruction with digital instruction for a…

  • Tips for Using Social Media to Tell Your School’s Story – Easy EdTech Podcast 012 – Class Tech Tips

    In this episode I share ten tips for using social media to help you spread the word about the great work happening by students, teachers and families in your school community.

  • Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Tips for New Google Expeditions Users

    Google Expeditions is often the first educational virtual reality tool that I introduce to teachers who come to one of my workshops. Here are five tips that I frequently pass along to teachers who are preparing to use Google Expeditions for the firs…

  • Taskade – Team Tasks, Notes, and Video Chat. Team Productivity.

    Taskade is on web, mobile and desktop! Log in AboutPricingAppsTemplates Log inSign up free Work together Team task, notes and chat. Get Started — Free ForeverGet Started Anywhere, Anytime Work on any device and keep everything in sync.

  • Control Alt Achieve: Google Slides Short and Long Vowel Sounds Audio Activity

    In my most recent post I shared a collection of web-based audio recording tools that you and your students can use to record and add your voice to Google Slides, or any project. There are many fun and engaging ways this new feature for Slides could …

  • Many Flavors of Neurodivergence – GeekMom

    I take two different kinds of neural reuptake inhibitors: one works on serotonin, the other on norepinephrine. Those two neurotransmitters like to mess up my brain in different, yet related, ways.

  • How to Add Music to Spark Video with Soundtrap – Class Tech Tips

    If you’ve ever watched a movie or television show and felt moved by the music, you know how powerful a soundtrack can be for a viewer.

  • Making Strengths (and Needs) Analysis Count in the Classroom | All Things Assessment

    I have long believed that if assessment doesn’t immediately impact learning in the classroom, it has fallen short of both its purpose and its potential.

  • Teaching All Students – The Reflective Educator

    Here are four videos that represent the perspectives of students with various learner characteristics. Imagine you have these four students in your class. How might you support them?

  • What We Assess Often Drives Teaching – The Principal of Change

    Is it a means to an end or is there a bigger purpose?

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some of the amazing blog posts that came out last week:h

• EdTech Nut – Kelly Fitzgerald: Automatically Play YouTube Video in Full Screen Mode

  You can change the URL of a YouTube video to force it to automatically open up in full-screen mode. You can use this link for lessons or share with other people. Check out the example here: https://www.youtube.

• Video: The World Below – Footage From the International Space Station — The Adventure Blog

  We often share amazing videos of some fantastic destinations from around the world here at The Adventure Blog, but seldom do we have one that shows us the entire planet in all its glory.

• KQED

  The project has awarded grants to 17 teams of education leaders at the school, district and state levels, all of whom are working to improve assessment systems. No one is arguing schools should stop measuring math and reading ability or content know…

• February Is Black History Month – Here Are A Ton Of Related Resources | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  February is Black History Month in the United States. You might be interested in The Best Sites To Teach About African-American History.

• Employ Millennials? Here’s Why You Should NOT Try To Retain Them

  It is no secret that the world of work has changed drastically in the last couple of decades. The linear career path is, quite frankly, long gone.

• A Big Reason Why You May Be Struggling With Classroom Management – Smart Classroom Management

  There is a common trait among teachers who struggle with classroom management. Not every struggling teacher has it.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Print Google Slides

  One of the frequently asked questions during my Getting Going With G Suite workshop is “can I print Google Slides like I can print my PowerPoint slides?” The answer to that question is yes. In fact there are quite a few options for printing your Goo…

• Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Good Tools for Creating Timelines

  The video I posted earlier this week that demonstrated how to use Canva to create timelines sparked a couple of reader emails about other options for making timelines.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Despite Earlier Reports, Verizon Hasn’t Reversed All Fees to Remind

  Yesterday EdSurge ran a story about Verizon promising to reverse course on the fees it is going to charge Remind to deliver text messages. The Twitterverse rejoiced in their victory over the corporate giant! It seems that the rejoicing might have be…

• Introduction to Gamification Part 3: Games, Play and Toys – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  In the last part of my introduction to gamification, I explained a little about my thoughts on Games Based Solutions, but I didn’t really explain what a game actually is. The reason for that is, it is a little complicated from an academic perspectiv…

• Free Technology for Teachers: New Features Added to Synth – Simple Podcasting for Students

  Synth is one of my favorite new ed tech tools of the 2018-19 school year. If you’re familiar with what Synth does, it provides a simple way to create short podcasts that people can reply to with their own audio comments. Think of it kind of like Fli…

• Control Alt Achieve: Google Tools and Activities for Art Education

  Although there is no replacement for getting your hands dirty with finger paints, technology can offer many ways for students to be creative when making art. In addition to creativity, technology can also allow students to explore and learn about ar…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Picture Yourself in Front of Any Landmark With Remove.BG and Google Slides

  Last weekend I published a video about Remove.bg and it has certainly been a hit with many readers. I’ve received a lot of comments and questions about it in my email, Facebook pages, and on Twitter.

• Stats Teachers: 2019 Is Your Year – dy/dan

  Folks, if you teach stats in middle school or high school, 2019 is your time to shine. Here are a couple of items where the world needs your help and one way where the world (a/k/a Desmos, the New York Times Learning Network, and the American Statis…

• NewsGuard Creates Credibility Ratings Of News Websites | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  NewsGuard is a new and free browser extension that provides rates the credibility of news sources (you can read more about it at today’s New York Times article, Veterans of the News Business Are Now Fighting Fakes). It looks pretty interesting, and …

• Wellbeing, digital or analog: A paper, a podcast – NetFamilyNews.org

  Confused about all that you’re hearing about the impacts of digital media and tech on young people? A just-published paper should clear that confusion up, reports Scientific American.

• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: The 6 Truths Of Effective Educators

  In all the work I have done with countless educators from across the world I believe we can break them down into two groups. Good Teachers and Great Teachers. What separates the two is effectiveness. Effective Educators are those that have a set of …

• Free Technology for Teachers: The WWII Museum Announces D-Day Electronic Field Trip

  This year is the 75th anniversary of D-Day. This spring the WWII Museum (a must-see for anyone visiting New Orleans) is hosting a virtual field trip all about D-Day. The field trip will take students to the coast of southern England and the invasion…

• Classroom Games and Tech – Ed-Tech to Engage and Inspire: When Older Students Write Stories for Younger Students

  Do you have a dream project? I’ve been able to do a few in my career. Here is one that I’ve done three times now, expanding on it each time. I’ll repeat it again soon with another group of students. It has been so successful this year that I believe…

• ditchthattextbook.com

• FH Knights Make Esports History • Teched Up Teacher

  On Thursday, January 10th, the Fair Haven Knights esports team made history when we took on the William Annin Vikings in the first round of the Jersey Shore Esports Cup. This was historic because it was the first ever esports match between two middl…

• iCivics: The bacon of social studies | History Tech

  Bacon cheeseburgers. Eggs and bacon. BLTs. Chocolate covered bacon. Maple and bacon doughnuts. Bacon and onion gravy. Bacon topped baked potatoes. Bacon wrapped Little Smokies. Bacon wrapped anything. I’m probably not the only one. And I get it . . .

• Climate Sense: Ice at both poles keeps melting at a faster and faster rate | Watching Our Water Ways

  Antarctica is losing six times more ice per year than it did 40 years ago, according to a new study by glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and the Netherlands’ Utrecht University.

• Logic Puzzles – Play Online or Print Your Own for Free!

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Innovative Educators Don’t Recommend Screen Time Limits

  In 2015 Dimitri Christakis, AAP Council on Communication and Media member, revealed new information about the recommendations. He confessed to the research that lead to the recommendations was conducted before anyone knew the iPad, or similar intera…

• Take Breaks and Be Active! An Important Digital Message for All Students – Teacher Reboot Camp

  One resolution my elementary students and I are setting is to be more healthy with our digital use. I teach technology to 450+ second to fifth graders. In class we reviewed and discussed the article, Computers and Your Health.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A New Look is Coming to Google Slides, Sheets, Docs, and Sites

  The next time that you open Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, or Sites you might notice some changes to the look of the editing and design tools. The new look is being rolled-out to users over the next few weeks.

• Free Technology for Teachers: The History of Science

  The History of Science is a Crash Course series that just came to my attention when I stumbled onto The Atomic Bomb: Crash Course History of Science #33.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use Canva to Create a Timeline

  Canva is one of those great tools that the more time you spend with it the more cool features you discover in it. One of those features is the ability to create timelines to save as images and PDFs.

• Control Alt Achieve: Google Tools and Activities for Music Education

  The “Seeing Music” tool allows you to visualize sounds and music. You can choose multiple sources for the music, as well as several different methods for displaying the sounds. Here’s how it works: Semi-Conductor lets you conduct an orchestra right …

• Apps for the Merge Cube | ARVRinEDU | Jaime Donally | Professional Development

• How to Engage with Gamification for Serious Results – eLearningworld

  Add game mechanics with engaging triggers like exploring, gaining recognition for efforts in real time, advancing on the Leaderboard, choosing and refining strategy, gaining new knowledge and skills are features that interact with the human mind. Th…

• The Paper Bag Mask – We Are More Than We Think We Are

  I’m a writer, but for most of my life I didn’t know that. Back in high school, writing was an academic exercise at best, a vehicle for whatever B.S. I needed to create to fill out the required page count and get the grade.

• The Best App for Your Teaching is Already on Your Smartphone – dy/dan

  tl;dr – It’s the camera. And using it thoughtfully can change your teaching in substantial ways. Some classes were high energy, some were low energy.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: An Important New Book Describes How the WA Shellfish Industry is Poisoning our Shoreline Environment

  In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote a book, Silent Spring, that documented the profound harm of the pesticide DDT on the natural world. This book led to the of banning of DDT and energized the U.S. environment movement.

• ClassroomQ: Streamline Questions & Provide Personalized Support |

  Blended learning models afford teachers the time and space in class to work side-by-side with students. As a teacher works with a single student or a small group, other students will inevitably hit bumps and have questions that require the teacher’s…

• It’s time to allow the F word in your classroom – Hack Learning

  When someone asks how your day was, do you say, “it was so satisfying?” Do you exit a roller coaster and exclaim, “That was a very satisfying ride?” When you last dined at a 5-star restaurant, did you tell the server that you just couldn’t wait for …

• The Nerdy Teacher: “I Just Don’t Know”

  In the Makerspace, I find myself telling students I’m unsure how to do something and then sitting with them to figure out how to do it. It allows the teacher to become an active learner alongside the students.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Huge Change Coming to Remind – No More Texts for Verizon Subscribers

  Many of us woke up to an announcement from Remind that they are going to discontinue text message delivery for teachers, students, and parents who use Verizon Wireless services. As is explained here, Verizon has increased the fee it charges Remind t…

• ditchthattextbook.com

• Teaching in minecraft

  Minecraft has a material called “redstone” which can be used to build power lines and even logic gates. Since the Minecraft engine is so powerful you can use redstone to build real computers and with mods even programming language parsers.

• Control Alt Achieve: Googley Activities and Tools for Primary Students

  A common question I receive from folks is how can younger students use Google tools? I am always happy to email them my collection of resources, but figured it might be easier if I pulled everything together in a single blog post.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are more great resources from this past week:

• Slime Science Fair Project Ideas: Questions for slime based learning
• Teaching Responsibility or Compliance? – The Principal of Change

• Alcohol and Drug Abuse in College – Substance Addiction Statistics

• Students’ smoking- the earlier you quit smoking, the better

• “Unpaywall” Is New Tool For Accessing Research Papers For Free | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…As anyone who has tried to pursue even a little bit of academic research can attest, publishers charge an arm-and-a-leg to access studies if you are not part of an institution that subscribes to their journals. And the authors of those studies don’t…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Federal Land vs. State LandAs I write this What is Federal Land? is the #49 trending video on YouTube. It’s nice to see an educational video trending that high on YouTube. The video was produced by CGP Grey who has produced some other fantastic educational videos over the yea…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Using Structured Academic Controversy to teach 21st century skills | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Encouraging Historical Thinking Through Picture Books | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• A Little-Known Secret To Effective Teaching – Smart Classroom ManagementThere is a secret to effective teaching very few teachers are aware of. It’s so secret, in fact, that I’ve never heard anyone speak of it.

• Classroom Games and Tech: A Simple, Powerful Reflection Activity with Google DrawingsFor some recent professional development I have been focusing on thinking routines from The Visible Thinking website. One particularly powerful reflection routine caught my attention, so I created a related template for it in Google Drawings.

• History Nerdfest 2018: Unpacking color consciousness | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• Screenplay – Edit video as naturally as textScreenplay gives you an auto-generated transcription of all the speech in your whole video file. All you have to do next is use the familiar text editor interface to trim, cut, and rearrange text to create your brand new video!

• 8 Food Myths You Need To Stop Believing | MyFitnessPalYou can find healthy eating advice on every corner. That doesn’t mean it’s good advice, though. Nutrition research can be confusing, and it’s always changing.

• Hydrophones open a world of underwater sound to people at home | Watching Our Water WaysListening to the sound of whales in Puget Sound from your computer at home is becoming easier than ever, thanks to a new hydrophone on Whidbey Island and its connection to a more sophisticated computer network.

• History Nerdfest 2018: Fostering Civil Dialogue | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Civic Engagement in actual practice – handouts, resources, and rubrics | History TechIt ranks right up there with the Holiday season, KC Chiefs football, and the first weekend of the college basketball tournament. It’s National Council for the Social Studies conference week. I’m lucky enough to get front row seats and am trying to l…

• Yong Zhao’s Must-Watch Lecture on “Side Effects in Education” | Diane Ravitch’s blogThis is a video of Yong Zhao’s brilliant lecture on education reform at Wellesley College on Bovember 1. He called it “What Works May Hurt. Side Effects in Education.” He recently published a book explains this paradox. I strongly recommend this boo…

• No, Robert Pondiscio, School Choice is Not a “Moral Agenda” | Diane Ravitch’s blogYesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the Washington Post about national issues in education with Robert Pondiscio of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Dean Bridget Terry Long of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

• Blended Learning: 8 Respectful Routines |I field a lot of questions about classroom management when I work with teachers transitioning to blended learning. Teachers worry about what will happen when they shift from whole group lessons to blended learning models that encourage student agenc…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Teaching the Constitution With Political Cartoons – Webinar RecordingDocsTeach is one of my favorite tools for building history lessons centered around primary source documents, pictures, maps, and drawings. DocsTeach contains an integrated search tool for finding artifacts from the U.S. National Archives. You can us…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Turn Text to Speech With the Voicepods Chrome ExtensionA couple of months ago I discovered a new text to speech tool called Voicepods. When I first tried it and wrote about it Voicepods would only create voice recordings based on text that you wrote.

• 8 Good Sketchnoting Apps for Teachers | Educational Technology and Mobile LearningWe are revisiting the topic of sketchnoting with an updated list of some of the best iPad apps you can use to create visually attractive sketchnotes.

• How to Multitask Like a Pro on Chromebooks: 8 Tips and TricksGoogle wants to replace your computer with an operating system that, on the surface, might seem like just a web browser. But when you want to get work done, you need those desktop-grade multitasking tools, and easily switch between multiple apps and…

• Control Alt Achieve: 8 Ways to Supercharge Google Docs with DrawingsOn the 8th day of Tech-Mas my true love gave to me… 8 Docs Drawings. Note: This post is part of my “12 Days of Tech-Mas” series for 2017. You can see all of the posts for each day as they get released in the main post here: “12 Days of Tech-Mas 2017…

• Development Progress #1Introduction Why, hello! My name is Felpix, and thanks for checking out my first post in my development progress for my own game, titled CrashBound. If you haven’t seen the first post, check it out at the hyperlink.

• Steve Isaacs (stevei2071) on Pinterestclasscraft story : Game in Progress – Reflection 1!Reflection #1 by Stephanie 11/30/2018 Quick Summary: The game I am creating in Minecraft is called Parcore. It is a game where you (the player), goes through a test (or a series of levels) to see if you’re a qualified parkourist.

• History Nerdfest 2018: Helping Teachers Embrace Controversial Issues | History TechI love the National Council for the Social Studies national conference. Who doesn’t? Seriously. Thousands of social studies nerds all in one place? Talking about best practice, resources, tech tools, sharing ideas, getting smarter? What’s not to lik…

• Trump Administration Warning On Climate Change | Diane Ravitch’s blogThe Trump administration released an ominous report on climate change in the middle of the Thanksgiving weekend, on a Friday at 2 pm. It hoped to bury the consensus of 17 federal agencies. But the facts won’t stay buried, no matter how much politici…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Social Studies Inquiry Made Real. Teachers as Designers | History TechI love this stuff! The Inquiry Design Model is a great way to integrate the NCSS Inquiry Arc into actual practice. This is something that we in Kansas have been struggling with since 2013. We created new state standards that focuses on finding a bal…

• Free Technology for Teachers: A New Gradebook for Google Classroom!One of the long-running complaints about Google Classroom that I and many others have had is about the nearly featureless gradebook. It appears that Google has heard those complaints and is taking some steps to improve the Google Classroom gradebook.

• A Professional Development Alternative | My Island ViewI recently attended the annual conference held by , the New York State ISTE affiliate organization. It is a favorite conference of mine, since I served as a board member of that organization for about six years. It is also both comprehensive and pro…

• History Nerdfest 2018: Spatial Analogies and Learning Geography | History TechDr. Phil Gersmehl is rocking the room with brain science and maps. His basic point: He’s using brain research to show how our brains unconsciously encode maps differently. What we remember depends on how we encode it. He highlighted some ways that t…

• Room Escape Maker – Create Escape The Room Games For FreeROOM ESCAPE MAKER is a free online application to create Escape The Room games. Build challenging casual point and click games with puzzles, hidden objects, safes with combination locks, and much more. YOU are game designer. And for free 🙂

• Great Books for Dystopian Book Clubs – Pernille RippOne choice can transform you. Beatrice Prior’s society is divided into five factions—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent).

• Control Alt Achieve: Google Tools for English Language LearnersGoogle Docs translate add-on Instead of translating an entire document, sometimes you may just need to translate a phrase or sentence. For those occasions you can use the Google Translate add-on for Docs.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Google is Removing Annotations from YouTube VideosEighteen months ago Google removed the annotations editor from YouTube. Today, I logged into the YouTube editor and saw an announcement that Google is going to remove all existing annotations from YouTube videos on January 15th.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Sites in VR – The VR App for Those Without VR HeadsetsSites in VR is a free Android and iOS app that provides a 1700 virtual reality views of significant landmarks around the world. The app is a good one for those who would like to experience a bit of virtual reality without having to use a virtual rea…

• My Own Game: The Minecraft Olympics Name (s): John, Zayan, Ben, Charlie Game Title: Minecraft Olympics Genre: Action/Adventure Tool / platform you think you will use to create the game: Minecraft Storyline: In the city of Gome the Olympics have been going on for a hundred years with c…

• Homework did not prepare my daughter for college.“I give homework to my students to prepare them for college” is a common statement made by teachers that I work with and throughout the country.  According to Bill Gates’ Blog, (cnbc.

• Real teaching means real learning: Area and perimeter of a triangleAsk, “What do you notice? What do you wonder?”. After some discussion pose, if not already asked, the following questions:

• 5 Resources to Find Tons of Free Fun Unplugged Coding Activities! – Teacher Reboot CampPart of the series, Hour of Code Ideas! In a previous post I described why all students should participate in the upcoming Hour of Code event, which takes place December 3rd to 9th.

• [Mailbag] What Do You Do with the Ideas You Used to Call “Mistakes” – dy/danGuillaume Paré, in the very interesting comments of my last post where I urged us to reconsider mistakes: I do agree with what is written, but I am still wondering what I’m supposed to do with that information and the student’s copy.

• Guest Blogger: Mary Gross – Anger and Hope | CUNY Games NetworkToday we wrap up the four-part series from guest blogger Mary Gross. In this final entry, Mary describes a game in which students participate in strategic gambles that result in reallocation of resources represented by chips.

• How to build an integrated STEM lesson using Minecraft – Monash EducationAnd it all starts with searching for action verbs, write Monash’s Gillian Kidman, Roland Gesthusizen and Hazel Tan. Within the Australian curriculum, there are a number of specific cognitive skills that need to be developed in science, technology an…

• Sketchnoting How-to Sylvia DuckworthThe perfect combination of pedagogy and practice, Sylvia’s new book begins with an overview of why doodling is not just okay, it’s beneficial to the learning process.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Technology Use Is A Right, Not A PrivilegeSome traditional educators may still view student access to technology as a privilege, but it is not. Today, technology is necessary for learning to be accessible, real, and relevant in the modern world.

• A Big Reward for Writing this Blog | Diane Ravitch’s blogSeveral weeks ago, I told the story of Arnold and Carol Hillman, who retired as educators in Pennsylvania and moved to South Carolina.

• Paymon Rouhanifard: I Was Wrong About Standardized Testing and Accountability | Diane Ravitch’s blogPayman Rouhanifard was in charge of Joel Klein’s “Office of Portfolio Management” in New York City. He was appointed as superintendent of schools in Camden, New Jersey, by Chris Christie.

• ditchthattextbook.comSketchnoting in the Classroom: A Beginner’s Guide – Class Tech TipsAre you ready to try something new? Sketchnoting isn’t a new concept, but it’s gaining traction throughout education communities. Educators and students are exploring ways to capture their learning. It’s been very exciting to see the excitement arou…

• Get Started with Augmented + Virtual Reality | ARVRinEDU | Jaime Donally | Professional DevelopmentFree Technology for Teachers: Nearly 900 Free Art History Books – And an Art LessonAround this time five years ago I discovered that the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts free online art history texts. A recent Tweet from Open Culture reminded me of that collection. Today, I revisited that collection and discovered that it has expa…

• Collection: Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection – Cornell University Library Digital Collections Search ResultsStart Over Collection Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection Cornell University Library Digital Collections Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection About the collection Skip filters Cornell University Library Web Accessibility Assistance Library Resources:…

• Badass Teachers Association: BATs Statement on US Attack on Asylum SeekersThe directors of the Badass Teachers Association condemn U.S. border agent’s unjustified use of tear gas on asylum seekers this weekend in Tijuana, Mexico.

• 50 New Blog Post Ideas For Students – The EdubloggerDo your students have blogs? Or perhaps they contribute to a class blog? Enthusiasm is typically high when blogs are first set up but students may need some assistance to keep the momentum going.

• Are Rubrics Counterproductive and Limiting? | All Things AssessmentA few months ago, a young teacher, Maggie, asked me what I thought of the use of rubrics. I thought it a curious question, so I asked her why she was asking.

• A Side Quest about Side Quests! – Classroom PowerupsPlease leave me a comment so that I know you found this side quest! If you aren’t actually at my FETC Session this is going to be a side quest participants will be able to go on as I am playing a dice game with the group.

• 8 Wonderful Websites for Easy Coding Activities for Any Age or Level! – Teacher Reboot CampFirst in the series, Hour of Code Ideas! Throughout my 20 plus years of teaching I’ve integrated technology in the various subjects I’ve taught because the world needs all our learners to gain the digital skills needed to thrive, connect, and contri…

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Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Check out these great blog posts:

• Teach Better by Doing Less – The Reflective Educator

  There are two common activities teachers do that have either little to no impact on student learning but which do take teachers a tremendous amount of time, time that could be better spent on other activities.

• NV Math Team | Math

  What is the New Visions Mathematics Curriculum?

• Augmented Reality | Hide messages in the real world | WallaMe

• Audiotool

• Timeblocks | A quick and easy Agenda Timer

• 10 Tips to Keep Pupils’ Attention – UKEdChat

• Why is Maths a Big Deal? – UKEdChat

• 10 Easy Ways to Motivate Your Students by @RichardJARogers – UKEdChat

• Insufficient sleep in children associated with poor diet, obesity and more screen time – UKEdChat

• Brickapic – Turn your pic into a brick mosaic

  tags:lego brick picture photo

• PBS LearningMedia

  tags:math maths real world resource

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Fog and Roadway Icing: The Warning of the Husky Bus Crash

  Yesterday, a bus with a number of students of the Husky Band overturned on Interstate 90 just west of the town of George, Washington (see map below) as they headed to the Apple Cup game in Pullman. A number of students sustained injuries, but thankf…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Access and Use the Blurring Tools in YouTube’s Video Editor

  This is the time of year for winter concerts and plays at schools. If the ones at your are anything like the one I attended last week, there will be plenty of parents recording the performances. And I’d guess that you or someone from your school wil…

• How Technology Helps In The Education Of Special-Needs Students – e-Learning Infographics

  Special-needs students who have, in the past, faced particular learning challenges in the classroom have benefited from the introduction of technology.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How Frost Appears on Plants – A Science Lesson

  Here in Maine we’re way past worrying about frost in the morning. That’s because we’ve already had a few snow storms. But some of you may have frost on plants in the morning. SciShow Kids has a new video all about what causes frost to appear on plan…

• Filling a Makerspace Room – Classroom Snapshots

  Wondering what to start collecting and purchasing for your STEM/STEAM makerspace room?  I started this growing list to help guide what’s added to our elementary STEAM makerspace. Do you have any additions I could make to this list?  Comment below or…

• Low streamflows have constrained the salmon migration this fall | Watching Our Water Ways

  If you are hosting out-of-town visitors this Thanksgiving weekend, it might be a good time to take them salmon-watching — or go by yourself if you get the urge to see one of nature’s marvelous phenomena.

• John Thompson: Goliath, King of the Zombies | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  John Thompson here writes about his reaction to the annual conference of the Network for Public Education, where the implicit theme was that David is beating Goliath, but Goliath just keeps stumbling forward, crushing public schools and advancing pr…

• Ditch Summit 2018 PD on Your Couch

• Free Technology for Teachers: Wakelet Now Lets You Copy and Build Upon Collections

  Wakelet is free bookmarking and note-taking service that I’ve been using since April when I started looking for alternatives to Padlet. On Wakelet you can create collection and sub-collections of notes, bookmarks, and pictures.

• Royalty Free Music by Bensound

  You can use this music for free in your multimedia project (online videos (Youtube, Facebook,…), websites, animations, etc.) as long as you credit Bensound.com (in the description for a video). For example: Music: https://ift.tt/1R9NTfT

• Free Technology for Teachers: Bensound – Free Music for Video Projects

  On Tuesday I wrote about the impending closure of the Free Music Archive. In that post I shared some other sites to find free music to use in your multimedia projects. Thanks to an email from Kari Kakeh I’ve learned about another good site to find f…

• 7 geography tools that mess with your head. Cause that’s a good thing | History Tech

  We all know that I spent a significant amount of my formative years digging through old National Geographic maps. You know the ones I’m talking about. They got slipped into the middle of the magazine and unfolded into poster size after you discovere…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Make a QR Code for Just About Anything

  This fall there seems to be a renewed interest in QR codes, at least amongst readers of this blog. In just the last two weeks I’ve answered a half dozen emails with questions related to QR codes.

• Using Technology to Humanize – The Principal of Change

  I have been an advocate of technology in education for a long time. But I have been an advocate of “people” for my entire career.

• That Isn’t a Mistake – dy/dan

  I’ve seen this particular incorrect answer from dozens of students over the last several weeks. The work for 10 and 15 marbles is incorrect, but it isn’t a mistake.

• Tweens are smart about smartphones: Study – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  Everything about this study is smart — the 10-14 year-old respondents (average age 11), what the authors are modeling for pediatricians and parents, and the tweens’ answers. For example, when asked what age kids should be given mobile phones, one an…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Answerables

  Answerables the innovative educational tool that combines the best features of game based learning w/ a learning management system has just released their free iPad app.

• Free Technology for Teachers: The Free Music Archive is Closing – But Not All is Lost

  For the better part of the last decade the Free Music Archive has been one of my go-to places to find free music to use video projects. Unfortunately, the end is near for the Free Music Archive.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Change Coming to Your Google Account’s Sign-in Screen

  Starting next Tuesday you might notice a small change to the sign-in screen for your Google account. The change is that you will see a box around the “email or phone number” field on the sign-in page instead of just a single line.

• what giving students choice looks like

  1. People to Work With. Give students the chance to choose whether to work independently or with another student(s). As a teacher, you can still maintain some control by giving students input.

• Three Ways You Can Improve Your Math Textbook Tomorrow – Achieve the Core Aligned Materials

  In my work as a Mathematics Specialist at Student Achievement Partners, I get the opportunity to talk to and work with educators from around the country. Often, especially in conversations with elementary school teachers, we talk about challenges wi…

• Teach Students How to Give Peer Feedback – Teacher Tech

  Peer feedback can be powerful for learning, but only if students do a good job at it. Analyze and critique can be higher critical thinking levels than doing the task in the first place. I guarantee if you ask students to give peer feedback the quali…

• Gamification, part 2

  In the previous article, I wrote about the basic motivation principles for setting up a great gamification model. In this one, I would like to tell you what I learned about failing and why it is a critical element in gamification.

• The Benefits of Gamification for Call Center Managers | Fonolo

  Attention all call center managers: It’s time to talk about you. Picture it: You are the fearless leader of a call center team in 2018.

• 20 ways to celebrate hour of code in any class

• The Nerdy Teacher: What I Learned About Literacy After I Left The English Classroom #EngChat #Literacy

  Making the decision to move from my high school English Literature and Composition job after 15 years to build a makerspace and support tech integration for teachers, was very tough. I loved working with students and helping them read and evaluate t…

• Nobody Knows Anything: Why Skipping Playtesting Is Inconceivable | David Mullich

  Last week plagued us with at least three deaths of figures in the entertainment industry.  The death of beloved Marvel Comics editor and Marvel film cameo star Stan Lee made front page news around the world.

• Atlas Obscura Shares Your D&D Maps – The Map Room

  Remember how Atlas Obscura put out a call for Dungeons & Dragons maps? They’ve received a pile of entries and are featuring two dozen of them: “[Y]our D&D maps are more incredible than we could have imagined. Every single one calls out for explorati…

• Where Apple Maps and Google Street View Will Be Driving (or Walking) Next – The Map Room

  Apple now has a fleet of cars collecting data for Apple Maps. Since they’ve been making a point about consumer privacy lately, this page lists where their cars are going to be in the coming weeks. (AppleInsider notes that some of that data collectio…

• Amusing Monday: New satellite enhances images of East Pacific region | Watching Our Water Ways

  An amazing new satellite, designed to peer down on the West Coast and Hawaii, started transmitting stunning images last week, when heavy snows blanketed parts of Alaska while California wildfires sent plumes of smoke into the air. The satellite is c…

• Showcasing Class Blogs! – The Edublogger

  Do you enjoy seeing what’s happening in other classrooms to get new perspectives and ideas? Or maybe you’re looking for other classes around the globe that your students can connect with? We’ve just updated our list of class blogs!

• Another Test? How to Plan Assessments So Students Can Learn | All Things Assessment

  Ever feel like you are giving assessments all the time? Between the pretest, post-test, quizzes, district benchmarks, state interim assessments, or other nationally normed progress monitoring assessments, when is a student supposed to learn? When is…

• Why choice matters to student learning?

  Student choice builds ownership in the learning. Student choice allows students to display their learning in the way that they feel best represents their knowledge.

• Control Alt Achieve: Adding and Using Comments on Screencastify Videos

  There are many excellent screen recording tools available, but one of my favorites is the Screencastify Chrome extension. It is simple to use, has lots of nice features, works on Chromebooks, and is free for videos up to 10 minutes long.

• Classroom Games and Tech: A Quick, Simple Google Chrome Extension for Student Video Responses

  Here’s the most popular tool I showed at the miGoogle conference recently. It’s a simple Chrome extension from Alice Keeler called Webcam Record.

• Welcome to Discovery Education Canada – Total Education Solution in Canada

  In case you missed it, check out our monthly Newsletter. We have included timely content, resources, and events to engage your students inside and outside of the classroom.

• Gamification can help education — here’s how | VentureBeat

  Teachers and parents hear it over and over again: “make learning fun” to keep kids engaged. Gamified education apps for use outside of the classroom have proliferated, leading students to expect gamification when they’re back inside of the classroom…

• A Student’s Guide to Using Google Sheets – Teacher Tech

  Using a spreadsheet is a life skill. In the real world, successful people use spreadsheets. I have created a Google Doc with 4 essential skills that if students can do just these 4 things they can use spreadsheets for assignments.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some amazing blog posts from this past week:

• 6 ways ordinary people can prevent climate change, according to researchers and advocates

  Worried about the environment? Scientists, researchers and advocates share the top changes we can make to be part of the climate change solution. In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a leading international body on climate chan…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Create a QR Code for a Voice Recording

  Just a few minutes ago I answered an email from a reader named Chris who wanted a recommendation on how to have students create voice recordings that play back when a QR code is scanned. My recommendation was to try Vocaroo.

• ditchthattextbook.com

• Badass Teachers Association: Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges by Steven Singer

  Linda Darling-Hammond is one of my education heroes. Perhaps that’s why her recent article in the Washington Post hurts so much.

• Different Definitions of Personalized Learning Conflict Cause Confusion

  It’s a concept grounded in the psychology of motivation, learning science and growing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). And the hype around it is blowing up. Personalized learning is the No.

• How PortfolioGen Helps Students Create Free Portfolios – Class Tech Tips

  Do your students have fantastic work to share this school year? If your students have a wide range of creations, they can help their work shine with an online portfolio. A digital space to showcase student work opens the possibilities for a wider au…

• Mo Physics Mo Problems: UDL Smackdown

  Fighting the Inertia of a Traditional Classroom

• A Grading Strategy that Puts the Focs on Learning From Mistakes

  The students get their grade a day later on PowerSchool, and they’re given opportunities to retake the test after they’ve digested their mistakes. Alcala also projects “favorite mistakes” on the board that they talk about as a class.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Tools for Creating Custom Maps Without a Google Account

  Google’s My Maps is a great tool for designing custom maps. The problem with it is that students can only save their work if they have Google accounts. If your school uses G Suite for Education that’s probably not a problem, but it is a problem for …

• Powercards: Unit 3 Items – Classroom Powerups

  For the 2018-19 School Year I have completely revamped my Power Card Items. This year I have tied the Items to my narrative. The story concept is that the students’ powers are based on the manipulation of “Primary Source Energy” and each items is ba…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: 10 Sites for Checking Plagiarism

  “Plagiarism is the “wrongful appropriation” and “stealing and publication” of another author’s “language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions” and the representation of them as one’s own original work. (wikipedia)”.

• A Supreme Court Justice’s Legacy in Edtech | EdSurge News

• Pear Deck for You! – Teacher Tech

  It’s pretty universal, seeing Pear Deck and falling in love. It allows for making interactive lessons. Not only do they have really cute pear drawings, but their interface is super easy to use.

• The Future Of Education With AR – e-Learning Infographics

  Technology in education has made it possible to add a layer of enhanced reality and interactivity, this gives Teachers/tutors opportunity to make learning more realistic and immersive improving retention and deep learning.

• 3 Ways to Make Literature Real and Relevant – Class Tech Tips

  How can you make curriculum content real, relevant, and approachable? Making student-centered instruction a priority is an important place to start.

• Free Technology for Teachers: CoRubrics – An Add-on to Facilitate Assessment Among Students

  This week I am hosting guest posts. This one was authored by Jaume Feliu at the Salas i Xandri High School in Sant Quirze del Vallès, near Barcelona. More and more rubrics are coming into the classroom for assessment.

• The Importance of Definitions (and Why They Don’t Matter) – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  Yep, paradoxical title alert! Recently I got into a very interesting debate on LinkedIn about the definition of Gamification. Now, I have long had my definition of gamification, one that doesn’t stray too far from the closest thing we have to a “pro…

• Mercedes Schneider: Letter Grades for Schools Are a Measure of the Families’ Income Level | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Jeb Bush had this big idea about how to hold schools accountable: Give them a letter grade based mostly on their test scores.

• What it’s Like to Teach When You Don’t Have Parent Support

  Not all of us are dealing with lawnmower parents. Maybe you read this viral article on lawnmower parents and nodded in agreement. Or maybe, like me, you read the piece and sighed ruefully, thinking, “Champagne problems.

• changing how educators see negative experiences in the classroom

  For example, a fourth-grade teacher I’ll call Jane had been teaching for nine years and was on the verge of dropping out of the profession from exhaustion. She told me, “I just don’t think I can keep this up another year.

• Google Slides Sticky Note Brainstorming Powerful Planning

• Video: “The science behind California’s surging wildfires” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Our discomfort is obviously infinitesimal compared to those who lost their homes – and their lives – due to the Camp Fire. But I have to say the constant hazardous smoke in Northern California is pretty bad, and most schools have prohibited all outd…

• Peers are Powerful

  Since the #MeToo movement, six states have introduced or passed bills to require the teaching of consent in their sex ed classes in K-12. But there’s not yet much research on what kind of education actually works to shift teens’ attitudes and action…

• Important New Video: “The Science of Racism” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The Science of Racism is a new video from YouTube’s “Creators for Change” program. I’m adding it to Revised & Updated: Useful Resources For Learning About Race & Racism.

• 25 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Google Docs could do

  tags:google docs tips shortcuts googledocs

• 7 Questions To Guide Your PBL Implementation Plan –

  tags:pbl questions guide implement implementation plan

• CPU VLOG: 11-13 Ranking Up – Classroom Powerups

  Mr. Powley is a 14 year teaching veteran and is currently the dual enrollment American History teacher at the #1 ranked high school in South Carolina. For the last several years he has transformed his classroom based on the principles of game inspir…

• Just a Little Push: Five Ideas for Intervention and Feedback | All Things Assessment

  When you are unsure, not feeling confident, and scared no one will like you, it can be hard to get started. My son, Chase, is a fifth grader, and we signed him up for a basketball camp. He went alone and didn’t know anyone. As can be predicted, he w…

• Celebrate Geography Awareness Week with Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunts – Class Tech Tips

  It’s here! This week is Geography Awareness Week, and I’m excited to share some tech-friendly ideas for exploring the world with your students. Augmented reality scavenger hunts can get your kids moving both inside and outside the classroom.

• The Nerdy Teacher: Adventures in Icelandic Schools #MakerEd #MakerMentality

  The nice part about all of this is that these skills are all transferable to all of the other classes the students attend. Maths, English, Science, etc. are all using Project Based Learning to explore ideas and the students have the skills to create…

• 25 Coding Apps For Kids Under 8 – e-Learning Infographics

  Did you know that coding can help kids develop their problem-solving and critical thinking skills? Did you know that you can introduce them to programming at a very early age? Maybe you are looking for a way to make the kids’ screen time a bit more …

• A Guide to Gamification

• Linda Darling-Hammond Vs. Ravitch and Burris on School Choice | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Carol Burris and I wrote a critique of that report, because it seems to endorse the reformers’ idea of a portfolio of charters, public schools, and other choices.

• 10 Ways To Instantly Make Your Blog Better! – The Edublogger

  Your blog might be full of inspiring ideas but are people reading your posts? Are they sticking around and returning when you publish new content? I have the pleasure of reading a lot of blogs as part of my role with Edublogs.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Why did the Catastrophic Camp Fire Start Where it Did?

  The tragic Camp Fire of northern California has killed at least 31 people, destroyed approximately 7000 structures, and basically leveled the retirement community of Paradise, California.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Edji – A Great Tool for Literacy and Critical Thinking

  This week I am welcoming some guest bloggers. This one is from Eric Hills. As a tech coach, I love spending time trying to find tools that are easy to use, can enhance student learning, and are engaging for students. Edji checks all three of those b…

• 4 Skills and Traits Great Schools Teach That Will Always be Essential – The Principal of Change

  Most educators are aware of the “Four C’s” (Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication) and their importance in schools for ensuring the development of today’s skills in our students ().

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Presentation Trick Innovative Educators Will Love

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

• A Principal’s Reflections: 3 Shifts to Make Learning Personal

  In education, a lesson makes or breaks a learner’s experience in a classroom. Planning takes time.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Another batch of great posts from this past week:

• Free Technology for Teachers: 4 Ways to Play Seterra’s Online Geography Games

  Geography Awareness Week is a coming up later this month. If you find yourself looking for some geography games for your students to play, take a look at what Seterra has to offer. Seterra offers hundreds of geography games in 34 languages.

• Grateful to Hit the Reset Button – Classroom Powerups

  In the B.C. years of my marriage (that is Before Children) my wife and I rocked Guitar Hero. Neither of us play guitar but ability to pretend to be rockers, enjoy the music, and just be goofy with each other got us through some tough times. We were …

• Let’s Talk About Reading Logs Again – Pernille Ripp

  Let’s talk about reading logs for a moment.  Yes, I know I have gone down this path before, but it bears repeating because not a week goes by without someone asking about them.  Asking how they can speak to their child’s teacher about the reading lo…

• Maker Marvelous: Book Page Pumpkins

  Book Page Pumpkins At the beginning of the school year I started my 9th year as a high school media specialist (14th year as a media specialist overall).

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use QR Codes to Share Animated Videos

  Earlier this week I answered an email from a reader who had heard someone talk about using QR codes so that people could watch animations made by students.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Two Online Primary Source Document Activities for High School Students

  Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing project called Crowd. The project seeks volunteers to transcribe primary source documents that are available online through the Library of Congress. Crowd is similar to the Smith…

• New Downloadable Version of the Gamification Inspiration Cards On Sale – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  Hey there you lovely people. I’ve decided to release a downloadable version of my Gamification Inspiration Cards as I know that the printed ones can get expensive and take ages.

• So where are we with ‘digital citizenship’ now? – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  This week I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion in Delhi at Facebook’s South Asia Safety Summit with YLAC India (Young Leaders for Active Citizenship).

• Arizona: Parents Use Voucher Money for Personal Purchases, Not Education | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Arizona’s State Auditor identified more than $700,000 in voucher money that was mis-spent for cosmetics, music, movies, clothing, sports apparel, and other personal items. Some even tried to withdraw cash with their state-issued debit cards. The sta…

• 18 ways to go gradeless

• All the World’s a Classroom: Adventures of a Crazy English Teacher: A Lesson From the Leaves

  I was driving one day and noticed something that I had never noticed before. There was a row of green trees with one tree that had already turned for the fall and was bright red. These trees were obviously on different time tables.

• Classroom Games and Tech: Team Building Video Challenge for High School

  Here’s a team building exercise I created for our high school video announcements team when we started the new semester. I loosely based it on a very fun, creative game we used to play, back before everyone carried around video cameras (and high pow…

• Level Up Your Talent With Gamification In Talent Management

  Remember when we played Scrabble, competing to put the best words forward? The competitive streak to excel and prove your vocabulary sought to improve the proper use of words during conversations and eventually taught us to be better in communicatio…

• Two Riddles for Problem Solving

  Riddles are a great way to get kids thinking logically, testing predictions, using math and even collaborating. They’re fun and often quite challenging.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: 15 Sites for Differentiated Instruction

  “Differentiated instruction and assessment (also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation) is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing students with different avenues to acquiring con…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Math Run: Panda Chase

  Math Run: Panda Chase is a super fun iOS app for grades K-5th learning basic Math skills (i.e. addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc.) This game follows the familiar “running” game-style and has students avoiding obstacles while solving Math pr…

• Modeling Collaboration | Mike Kaechele

  This is the sixth and final post in a series where I flesh out why the ideal traits of a PBL teacher are important. Check out the links to the rest of the series below the post. Traditionally teaching has been an isolated occupation.

• www.meridianstories.com

  Welcome to Meridian Stories, a national non-profit that offers schools curriculum-based ‘Challenges’ in Language Arts, History, Math and Science. Students work in teams to produce creative digital stories in response to the Challenges, and compete w…

• The Nerdy Teacher: Don’t Forget the A when talking STEM #MakerEd

  One of the things that has bothered me over the years has been the dismissal of the Arts as part of an important, well-rounded education. I don’t want to think that it has been intentional, but I do know that many schools around the country will cut…

• Free Technology for Teachers: It’s Time to Change the Clocks

  I’m one of those rare people who actually likes turning the clocks back in the fall. Sure, it means that it gets dark earlier, but I’m an early riser and like seeing the sun in the morning.

• Google Keep: Toggle List View – Teacher Tech

  Google Keep (keep.google.com) is a note app, like Post-it ®️ notes. Make sure you have the Google Keep app on your phone. Handy when you want to make a bulleted list, to do list, or take a picture of where you parked.

• Learning From Games: Onboarding and Mario – Gamified UK – #Gamification Expert

  I’ve probably mentioned this in the past, but Super Mario (for me) has one of the best on-boarding experiences of any game I’ve ever played. But let’s start at the beginning.

• “‘Add More Positives’ When Your Classroom Goes South” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  A three-part series on classroom management is wrapped up by Julia Thompson, Rebecca Alber, Madeline Whitaker Good, Stuart Ablon, Alisha Pollastri, Allen Mendler, and Kelly Wickham Hurst. I’ve also included many responses from readers. I’m adding it…

• Here Are Answers To The Question Many Teachers Will Be Asked: “Am I Still Going To Be A Citizen?” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  As if our students and their families don’t have enough to worry about, President Trump today added to their list of concerns when he said he would end birthright citizenship by Executive Order. The Citizenship Clause Means What It Says is from The …

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: The 5 Ways Tech is Shaping Humans in the Digital Age

  In a presentation titled Constantly Connected – The Role of Humans in the Digital Revolution, Digital Anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush shared with attendees at the 2018 #GovTechLive Forum five ways technology is shaping humans in the digital age.

• Failing and Reflecting: 10-30-18 CPU Vlog – Classroom Powerups

  Mr. Powley is a 14 year teaching veteran and is currently the dual enrollment American History teacher at the #1 ranked high school in South Carolina. For the last several years he has transformed his classroom based on the principles of game inspir…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Insert Equations and Special Characters Into Google Documents

  Here’s a question that I get a lot when I conduct on-site G Suite for Education training, “is there an easy way to add math symbols to documents?” In fact, there is an easy way to add mathematics symbols, equations, and other special characters to G…

• Google Classroom Comment Bank vs. Setting Your Preferences in Google Docs |

  I was excited in August when Google Classroom got an upgrade. The feature I was most excited about was the Google Classroom comment bank.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 3 Programs & 3 Strategies to Retain Millennials

  Millennial expert Gabrielle Bosché spoke to attendees at the 2018 #GovTechLive forum to share advice for those wanting to retain millennial staff. If you’re an innovative educator you care about this because these are your colleagues (or yourself) a…

• Parent Communication Isn’t What It Once Was. | My Island View

  In a recent #Edchat discussion we discussed whether or not schools should encourage teachers to use technology to reach out in communication with parents.

• Shapes 3D Augmented Reality Geometry Drawing App – Class Tech Tips

  I’m always excited to meet folks who are passionate about educational technology. At ISTE this past June, I met Milena Piasecka a Product Manager for the company Shapes at the end of one of my sessions.

• ghostmaster25 game design portfolio

• Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Halloween Lesson Resources

  Halloween is just two days away. If you’re looking for some Halloween-themed lessons, take a look at the following resources that I featured earlier this month.

• Guest Blogger: Mary Gross – Tension and Fear | CUNY Games Network

  This week, we feature the first entry in a four-part series by guest blogger Mary Gross, Associate Professor of History at Marian University of Wisconsin, who has been designing games for history, political science, sociology, and first year studies…

• Schools Matter: The case against intensive phonics

  Submitted to the New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018 In “Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?” (Oct 26) Emily Hanford says the research supports systematic intensive phonics, a method that teaches all the rules of phonics in a strict order to …

• Podcasting in the Classroom? Here’s a Byte-Sized Option – Class Tech Tips

  I’m not exactly sure how it started, but once I got hooked, there was no turning back. Podcasting is a powerful medium and a way to consume a wide range of content.

• What Does Improvement Science Look Like in Classrooms?

  Teachers in the BMTN choose to focus on deepening their students’ abilities in one of three areas: connect, justify and solve. They are grouped with other algebra teachers at schools across New England working on the same skill.

• Learning with ‘e’s: Head, hand and heart

• Embed A Google Photos Album Into A Website – The Edublogger

  Google Photos is my favorite photo and video sharing and storage service. My phone is set to automatically upload photos to Google Photos in high resolution when I’m connected to WiFi.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here is another week’s bounty of great blog posts!

• The Best Sites For Learning About Daylight Saving Time | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Check out my New York Times Learning Network interactive for English Language Learners on Daylight Savings Time. Students identify word meanings, explain the context clues they used to determine them, and then respond to an informational writing pro…

• 21 Things You Should Do To Students – Smart Classroom Management

  1. Create a classroom they look forward to. 3. Be consistently kind to them.

• Free Technology for Teachers: An Easy Way to Create Your Own Captioned Flipped Video Lessons

  Two weeks ago I published a video about how to use the automatic captioning feature in Google Slides. A lot of people have asked if there is a way to download the captions that are automatically generated when you speak while presenting your slides.

• 15 innovative ideas for outside the box teaching

• Top 6 Reasons Why Students Prefer Digital Content – e-Learning Infographics

  The latest study released by McGraw – Hill Education in partnership with Hanover Research has 3000 students voice their digital preferences in college education. The infographic shows research on why students prefer digital reading over print.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Format Tables in Google Docs

  Last week Google added new ruler and margin tools to Google Docs. The new ruler that appears on the left edge of your screen can be used to format the vertical spacing of tables that you insert into Google Documents.

• the secret menu for google slides doc drawings and more

• Free Technology for Teachers: Your Life in Comics – 100 Writing Prompts from Make Beliefs Comix

  Make Beliefs Comix is a nice service on which students can create their own comics. But there is more to Make Beliefs Comix than just comic creation tools. Make Beliefs Comix offers free ebooks containing many writing prompts for students.

• Meet Synch – A Classroom Audio Tool

• Free Technology for Teachers: GeoGreeting – Send Messages Using Google Earth Imagery

  Years ago I wrote about a service called GeoGreeting. This morning I got an email that reminded me of the service so I decided to see if it still works. Sure enough GeoGreeting still works as well as ever.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Scrible Helps Students Organize and Use Research

  Scrible is a service that helps students organize their online and offline research findings. That is done through the Scrible’s website and Chrome extension. Scrible’s Google Docs add-on helps students use their research in their papers.

• New Study Shows That Researchers Don’t Always Think Through How Their Studies Can Be Misused | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The study itself is behind a paywall (there are other ways to access it), and you can read a summary here under the title Why relationships – not money – are the key to improving schools.

• Somethign went wrong…

  Having the “same” text written for different levels of English comprehension can be a life-saver for a multi-level class of English Language Learners or for a teacher with a mainstream class that includes some students that are facing other challeng…

• Text Quest: The Scarlet Letter – Google Slides

• Home

  As part of a school trip to Romania, you and your class decide to create your own side trip: Visit the Castle Poenari, where Vlad the Impaler lived–the same man who inspired Bram Stoker to write the novel Dracula.

• classtechtips.com

  How do your students keep their work organized? And are you able to give feedback to students in real time? When I first started teaching in the classroom, I remember collecting student’s notebooks at the end of the day and flipping through them to …

• Google Classroom: Step One – Organize Your Topics – Teacher Tech

  The new Google Classroom interface allows you to organize your assignments into topics. However, new topics are added at the bottom. It can be incredibly tedious to move a topic up from the bottom to the top.

• Alice Keeler and @JoBoaler #ISTE17 Talk: Google Apps with youcubed.org Math Activities – Teacher Tech

  My favorite book of all time is Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler. Truly a life changing experience for me to read it. While the title says Math, it is really a book about teaching. Every educator should read it. To say the least, I am a huge fan o…

• Hiding Easter Egg Items: 10-25 Vlog – Classroom Powerups

  Hello! Join me as I hide some of my physical Easter Eggs through my school building. I began this last year and wasn’t planning on continuing this year but several current students had heard about the game and began asking when I would be hiding car…

• Map of Indigenous Canada Accompanies People’s Atlas – The Map Room

  The map accompanying the Indigenous People’s Atlas of Canada is a map of Indigenous Canada: as iPolitics’s Anna Desmarais reports, “Dotting the map are the names of Indigenous languages, including Cree and Dene, and the geographical location where e…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Find and Modify Halloween Games in Kahoot

  Halloween is only seven days away. If you’re an elementary school teacher, you might be planning to do some trick o’ treating safety reviews with your students. Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Create Digital Scavenger Hunts With Flippity’s New Google Sheets Template

  Flippity is a site that offers great Google Sheets templates that you can use to make flashcards, timelines, and games. The latest game template added to Flippity is a scavenger hunt template.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Kids Health in the Classroom – Guides & Resources for K-12

  Kids Health in the Classroom is a great place to find lesson plans, videos, and games for teaching personal health topics to students of all ages.

• The neuroscience of play, games, and learning (and why Fortnite might not be so bad) @coolcatteacher

  Dr Dave Neale is a researcher in the psychology of play and learning at the Centre for Play, Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at The University of Cambridge. Today he talks about the neuroscience of play, games, and learning in the classr…

• Fitoons Healthy Eating and Exercising App for Kids – Class Tech Tips

  My friends at Avokiddo made a big announcement today! They just released Fitoons, a new educational app with the goal of helping kids eat healthy and exercise each day. Fitoons can help students develop healthy eating habits and discover ways to add…

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Help Students Address a Garden of Emotions with QR Coded Book Featuring Innovative Wellness Technique

  Before educators can help students get to the learning, we must first ensure we help students feel good about themselves.

• 8 Tips for Carving an Amazing Pumpkin From the “Pumpkin Guru” – GeekDad

  You may remembering seeing Jon Neill on the Food Network’s “Halloween Wars” or sculpting squash in a Snickers ad or carving pumpkins on Nickelodeon or the Hallmark Channel, but you most certainly have seen his work as one of the most recognized pump…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Two New Ways for Kids to Create Stories on WriteReader

  WriteReader is one of my favorite tools for elementary school students to use to create multimedia stories. The outstanding feature of the service is the option for teachers to write corrections directly beneath a students’ original writing in their…

• Guest Blogger: Kathleen Offenholley – Quick Games for Any Subject | CUNY Games Network

  This week’s guest blogger is the CGN Steering Committee’s own Kathleen Offenholley, Associate Professor of Mathematics at BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College). Her post offers ideas of quick games for any subject using the elements of rando…

• Media minds need new ways to inform people about climate change | Watching Our Water Ways

  The headline on Margaret Sullivan’s column captures the urgency of the moment: “The planet is on a fast path to destruction. The media must cover this like it’s the only story that matters.” Margaret writes about media issues for the Washington Post.

• The Full Measure of a Teacher: Using value-added to assess effects on student behavior – Education Next : Education Next

  When students look back on their most important teachers, the social aspects of their education are often what they recall.

• Gaming The Classroom – The Art And Science Of GBL: Game Based Learning – e-Learning Infographics

  Over 60% of learners say leader boards and competition would motivate them. 80% of learners would be more productive if learning was more game-like. 97% of teachers use digital games created for educational use.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Taking Off and Landing in Dense Fog: A Miracle of Technolgy

  On Sunday, I flew out of Sea-Tac on a flight that took off around 8 AM. The region was covered in dense fog and the horizontal visibility at Sea-Tac Airport was reported at .12 miles (630 ft) at 1453 UTC (7:53 AM)–see below for hourly reports.

• November 11th Is Veterans Day – Here Are Related Resources | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  November 11th is Veterans Day (recognized as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day in Great Britain and in other countries to specifically remember those who fought in World War I). I’ve just updated The Best Websites To Learn About Veterans Day.

• Free Technology for Teachers: ClassTools SMS Generator – Text Messages Between Historical Figures

  Last week I wrote about three ways that students can create social media profiles for historical and literary characters. Writing that post reminded me of the Classtools Fake SMS Generator.

• Free Technology for Teachers: PicLits – Using Pictures to Inspire Creative Writing

  PicLits is an excellent site for finding creative writing prompts. PicLits aims to provide inspiration for writing short stories. PicLits tries to reach this goal by providing users with images upon which they can build their writing.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Zap Zap Math

  Zap Zap Math is an excellent new mobile (iOS/Android) app for Math grades K-6th. ZZM focuses on a lot different topics such as: addition/subtraction, multiplication, geometry, and more. All of this is done in a fun game based learning environment.

• Control Alt Achieve: Make Mondrian Art with Google Sheets

  Although you might not recognize the name, you most likely will recognize the look. Mondrian Art is an abstract form of art that uses a creative layout of squares and rectangles, often filled in with primary colors.

• Sacrificing Character Ally Cards: Strategic Classroom Thinking – Classroom Powerups

  As part of my Battle Mechanics: Skirmishes system students can earn “Enthralled Allies”. These are historic character cards and up to this point I had a vague notion that these would have an impact in my class game but wasn’t exactly sure how. I hop…

• The Adventure Blog: Video: Hiking Boots vs. Trail Runners –– Which is Best for You?

  I get asked all the time whether I prefer trail running shoes or hiking boots when heading out for the trail. It turns out, the answer to that question isn’t easy, as it depends on the trail, the length of the trip, the terrain and weather condition…

• The Future Proof Educator

• Making a Plan for Student Engagement with Tech-Friendly Strategies – Class Tech Tips

  What does student engagement truly look like? And are we making it a priority when entering classrooms and leading lessons? As an educator who now spends time in other teachers’ classrooms, I think about this topic often.

• Twitch, Yubo & online safety innovation with an ancient ‘tool’ – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  As geeky as “content moderation” sounds, we’re hearing about it more and more these days – in podcasts, at conferences, in books and in hearings. People all over the U.S.

• The Nerdy Teacher: The Dog Days of Fall for Teachers #EdChat

  The Fall part of the school year can be tough on teachers for many reasons.

• A Lever and a Place to Stand: Escape to Flippity.net

  I’ve written several times about the amazing free tools at Flippity.net. In fact, when I am looking for a way to get people interested in spreadsheets, I almost always use Flippity because once people see the variety of the tools, and how easy it is…

• Video: “The History of Trick or Treating” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay I’m adding this new video from Reading Through History to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween:

• Environmental volunteers needed in Kitsap County | Watching Our Water Ways

  I thought I would offer a quick note on some volunteer opportunities in Kitsap County, based on an email from WSU Kitsap County Extension.

• A Principal’s Reflections: Meaningful Learning Begins and Ends with the Opportunities We Create

  Learning hasn’t really changed, but the conditions that impact and influence it has.

• What Are the Best Ways to Use Leveled Texts? | Cult of Pedagogy

  This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. A few weeks ago, a teacher named Isabelle O’Kane sent me a direct message on Twitt…

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here some of this week’s amazing blog posts:

• 21 Things You Should Never Do To Students – Smart Classroom Management

  Effective classroom management is as much about what you don’t do. As it is about what you do.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: The Winter Transition is Imminent

  It is like falling off a meteorological cliff. And it happens every year. The transition to winter weather in the Pacific. It is a real meteorological curiosity.

• Machine Teaching, Machine Learning, and the History of the Future of Public Education

  These are my prepared remarks, delivered on a panel titled “Outsourcing the Classroom to Ed Tech & Machine-learning: Why Parents & Teachers Should Resist” at the Network for Public Education conference in Indianapolis. The other panelists were Peter…

• Innovation in Education – Reading By Example

  I walked into a classroom that was modeling the story structure process. The teacher had provided one-word sentence starters as a guide. The students were using this structure to organize a personal narrative in their writing journals.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Create Storyboard Templates in Google Slides or PowerPoint

  Creating a storyboard is an excellent way for students to plan video projects. Storyboards provide a frame-by-frame outline of the plot of a video.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Ways to Make Social Media Profiles for Historical and Literary Characters

  Earlier this week I received an email from a reader who was looking for a way that her students could create fake Facebook and other social media profiles based on historical and literary characters.

• Gaming Association of Manitoba Educators – Keynote » edurealms.com

  Wow.  200+ educators in one place to explore all things related to games and learning!!  Thank you @gametolearnmb for organizing an incredible event!  I wish I could be physically present to hang out with you all (y’all as we say, ’round here) and l…

• 12 must have teamplates for teachers and students

• Legal settlement could help protect salmon eggs incubating in gravel | Watching Our Water Ways

  Washington Department of Ecology has agreed to take steps to protect wild salmon eggs incubating in gravel by developing entirely new water-quality standards to control fine sediment going into streams.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Set Start and End Times for Videos in Google Slides

  This morning I answered an email from a reader who had a question about ytCropper. The link ytCropper link for her cropped video wasn’t working in Google Slides. My solution was to not use ytCropper and instead just use the built-in formatting tools…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Why Have Students Make Simple Animations?

  Last week I wrote about having middle school students create presentations from a combination of illustrations and videos that they made. In that post I shared Brush Ninja animation tool. That’s just one of many tools that students could have used t…

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Beautiful weather produces noisy mornings!

  Yesterday morning I received an email from blog reader Emily Vilbrant wondering about an increase of train noise during the morning hours. Distant trains sounded unusually loud and clear. Emily asked if I might have an explanation. And I have been n…

• Virtual Reality Employee Training Is Here. Should You Adopt?

  Imagine a world in which new hires can practice running through chaotic Black Friday scenarios without interacting with actual customers and potentially harming your brand.

• Metacognition Hyperdoc – Mari Venturino

  This year I’m doing something entirely crazy with my AVID class–I’m going (mostly) gradeless! It’s a bit scary, seeing as I have to report grades each six weeks. So, my solution is to have students keep a portfolio, then reflect on their progress an…

• Class Rules Focus Poster in Rainbow Colors – Mrs. Harris Teaches…

  The classroom rules focus poster I created was originally designed in blue and green. Although my classroom color scheme has always been blue and green, other teachers have different color palettes. With that in mind, I created several different col…

• The Moral Imperative of Sharing | Silvia Tolisano- Langwitches Blog

  We are all on our own learning journey. All of us have different experiences and backgrounds. Some of us have been reflecting on the paradigm shift in education longer than others.

• Equal Earth Gets a Wall Map – The Map Room

  It was announced today at NACIS that the Equal Earth projection is now available as a wall map—which is a necessary thing if it’s going to go toe-to-toe with the Peters map.

• how dungeons dragons primes students for interdisciplinary learning including stem

  “Dungeons & Dragons, and other narrative role playing games of its kind, provide many opportunities for learning,” said Simkins. “Participation in narrative role play can open up interests in topics such as mathematics, science, history, culture, et…

• A-Frame – Make WebVR

  A web framework for building virtual reality experiences Make WebVR with HTML and Entity-Component Works on Vive, Rift, Daydream, GearVR, desktop Get Started Supported by

• Getting started with VR

  As I attend conferences and education events, the topic that seems to be on everyone’s lips is augmented and virtual reality. After doing some research, I wanted to see what it would take to introduce AR / VR into the classroom. I found a tool calle…

• How Many Ways Can You Write 27 + 8? – Teacher Tech

  Rule, after you find the solution whatever way you want, you have to do it another way. Too often we focus on algorithm procedures rather than number sense or place value.

• EDU in 90 – YouTube

  EDU in 90 is a new video series from Google for Education. Each episode, we’ll focus on an important topic for educators, administrators, and school leaders – things like product updates, new programs, and helpful resources for the classroom.

• 8 Halloween Reads to Make Your October Spooktacular

  In this collection of Halloween reads there’s something for kids, teens, and adults, whether you prefer your October filled with silliness, spooks, or full-on scares.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A New LOC Online Collection – Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers

  I have always found Theodore Roosevelt to be one of the most fascinating characters in U.S. History. That is why I was excited this morning when I saw an email from the Library of Congress announcing the online publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s pa…

• Single-point rubrics and Checkmark make your life easier & your kids smarter | History Tech

  We’ve all been there. You just finished putting together a great instructional lesson or unit. Kids are gonna love it. They’re working together. Doing research. Creating stuff, not just consuming it. The historical thinking will be off the charts. T…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: GameBuilder

  GameBuilder is an excellent site for game based learning that I just found out about from Larry Ferlazzo’s blog. Not only can an educator find any number of games on a wide range of subjects they can also select a template and create their own game.

• Dancing Robots & More | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Robots at Work and Play is a photo gallery from The Atlantic.

• Free Technology for Teachers: JotForm – A Better Way to Create Online Forms

  If you have ever looked at a form on a web page and thought, “I’d like my forms to look like that,” then JotForm is the service you need to try. JotForm is a service for making fillable online forms.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Money-Saving Facebook Setting Phone Providers Don’t Want You to Know

  If you have Facebook on your phone, you may have noticed that videos automatically play. If you are not connected to WiFi this eats up your data. Here’s what my data looks like: When talking with some colleagues we were discussing this and found out…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Design a Custom Certificate in Google Slides

  On Monday I shared tutorials for two ways to send personalized certificates via Google Forms and Google Sheets. What I didn’t include in those tutorials was how to create a custom certificate without using the default certificate template found in G…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Wakelet Makes it Easier to Organize Bookmarks

  Wakelet is quickly becoming a popular choice amongst teachers who want to create collections of notes that can include text, videos, links, and pictures. Students can use it for the same purpose and share their collections with their teachers.

• Turn School Permission Forms into PDFs with JotForm – Class Tech Tips

  Collecting and keeping track of permission forms can be an organizational headache for schools. As you work to leverage the power of technology in your school, you can combine online data entry with traditional PDF files.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A New Vertical Ruler and New Margin Settings in Google Docs

  Google has added two new formatting features to Google Docs. First, there is now a vertical ruler that you can use to evenly space the rows in tables in your Google Documents. Second, you can now adjust the size of the margins in your headers and fo…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Case Maker – Civics Lessons Built on Primary Sources

  Case Maker is a free service designed for middle school social studies teachers and their students. Case Maker uses primary sources from the Library of Congress as the basis of activities in which students have to build a case in response to real ci…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Unhangout

  Unhangout is an interesting new site from MIT for creating events/backchannel chats, that I just found out about from Larry Ferlazzo’s blog.

• Reflections on Situated Learning vs. The Traditional School System |

  The more I learn about situated learning theory, developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, the more I find myself reflecting on the sharp contrast between authentic learning and the design of traditional schools and curriculum.

• Stop Collecting Papers – Classroom Powerups

  I am trying to get better at my click-bait titles. How did that one sound? The only thing better would be if I could get a Listicle title in there – 5 Ways to Stop Collecting Papers… Maybe next week.

• Atomic Habits: How to Easily Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones – Hack Learning

  Thanks so much for stopping by Hack Learning. Please join others like you who have decided to become a Master Teacher. Grab your copy of the 10 Habits of Master Teachers presentation now. Click on the form below, enter your email, and you’ll have 10…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Halloween Articles for ELA Lessons

  ReadWorks is a popular service that offers a huge library of standards-aligned ELA lesson plans for K-12. You can search the ReadWorks library according to grade level and topic. Throughout the year ReadWorks publishes curated collections to align w…

• TED-Ed Launches Cool New Animated Poetry Video Series | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  TED-Ed is launching a weekly video series of animated poetry. The first one is only available on Facebook right now, and it’s embedded below. I assume they’ll soon start showing them on their regular YouTube channel.

• Video: “Deepfake Videos Are Getting Real and That’s a Problem” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  GDJ / Pixabay I’m adding this new video to The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More:

• New Video: “The Origins of Halloween” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  QuinceMedia / Pixabay I’m adding this new Reading Through History video to The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween:

• Notable Books, Notable Lessons: Putting social studies back into K-8 | History Tech

  Full confession. Elementary kids freak me out. They’re sticky. They smell funny. And they throw up. All the time. Seriously. All the time. Every day.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Elementari

  Elementari is a wonderful new site for digital storytelling and project based learning that I just found out about from Larry Ferlarzzo’s excellent blog.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How I Found a Google Earth File of 550+ Ancient Greek Places

  Last night on Twitter Wes Fryer asked me if I knew of any Google Earth files that displayed ancient Greek locations. I didn’t have anything within my own bookmarks so I did a quick Google search that I filtered according to file type. I first filter…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Import Files Into Google Earth

  In my previous post I shared the steps that I took to find a Google Earth file that contains more than 550 ancient locations in ancient Greece. At the end of the video in that post I demonstrated how I was able to display those locations in Google E…

• Control Alt Achieve: 360 Degree Learning with Google Tour Creator

  Google has a rich history of creating map-related tools that can be used across all subject areas for engaging, immersive learning experiences. Some of these include Tour Builder, Earth, Expeditions, My Maps, and many more (see my slideshow on Googl…

• The Golden Age of Podcasting

• Free Technology for Teachers: New Ways to Personalize Certificates in the Certify’em Google Forms Add-on

  Certify’em is a Google Forms Add-on that I have been using all year to issue certificates when people complete one of my professional development webinars or courses. Certify’em makes it easy to have certificates automatically emailed to people when…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Send Personalized Certificates via Google Forms or Google Sheets

  From perfect attendance to volunteerism to honor roll there are lots of occasions during the school year for schools to issue certificates to students.

• The Ultimate Guide To Twitter 2018

  Most educators who learn to use Twitter effectively say they learn more from their personal learning network (PLN) on Twitter than any other forms of professional development or personal learning.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: If You Worry About Climate Change and Care About the Environment, Vote No on I-1631

  If you care about the environment, if you worry about global warming, and if this summer’s smoke is of concern, you should vote against Washington State Initiative 1631. If you are like me, you are worried about the impacts of increasing CO2 in the …

• OneNote Class Notebook: A Digital Binder That Will Change the Way You Teach | Cult of Pedagogy

  This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own. Now imagine doing all of those things inside a single digital platform, where you could share and deliver materials, access student work, and allow students to work together seamlessly at school or …

• EdTech Nut – Kelly Fitzgerald: Thinking/Sentence Frames for All Content Areas

  Thinking Frames are used to help students begin the thought process by providing a model for organizing their thinking. They should be used in any classroom K-12, regardless of level or content area.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Tool to Brand Yourself or School with a Logo

  Educational institutions are becoming more and more aware of the importance of branding staff and schools in our digital world. However schools and districts often don’t consistently have and/or use their logo and slogan in their materials.

• Free Logo Maker, Create Custom Logo Designs Online – DesignEvo

  Not a registered user yet? Sign Up Already have an account? Login

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: SOLE

  SOLE is a “self organized learning environment” that is a wonderful app for mobile learning and integrating technology into the classroom. The way this works is by a simple process: asking a question or selecting one, investigating/collaborating w/ …

• Google Maps Walking Tours with Street Views and Screencasting

• The 56 Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education In 2018 | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  With this post, I’m beginning to publish my end-of-year “The Best….” lists. There are over 1,700 regularly updated lists now.  You can see them all here.  You can also find many of them organized a bit differently here.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Another collection of great blog posts from this past week:

• The Adventure Blog: So Far This Year the Arctic Sea Ice isn’t Reforming as it Should

  When it comes to climate change and warming temperatures on a global scale, one of he canaries in the coal mine has always been the Arctic and Antarctic ice.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Edthena

  Edthena is a wonderful site/app for professional development that uses an innovative “video coaching” approach. This is done through a very user-friendly browser based interface where educators can record themselves right from the web (i.e. they can…

• Open World Class and Feedback Loops: 10-12-18 CPU Vlog – Classroom Powerups

  This has become a bit of a running theme in my thinking lately. A lot of my game inspired design comes from Open World or Sandbox Style Games.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Kindness Bookmarks and Kindness Bingo

  This week I had the opportunity to observe a great teacher-librarian in action at Sigsbee Charter School in Key West, Florida. One of the activities that she did with kids was making “kindness bookmarks.” The kids made bookmarks like the one in the …

• Free Technology for Teachers: Answers to FAQs About Automatic Captioning of Google Slides

  Last night I published a video demonstration of the new automatic captioning feature in Google Slides. Today, I’ve received eight emails from readers asking questions about automatic captioning.

• Helping Learners to be Kind Online and Offline – Teacher Reboot Camp

  October is National Bullying Prevention month. I like to focus on getting students to spread kindness and feel the benefits of being kind versus being mean to others. Many children play social games, such as Roblox and Fortnite, and experience cyber…

• iThrive Games ::

  The potential for video games to empower teens has been largely overlooked even though video games allow for players to stretch their skills, take risks, and explore who they are and who they want to be.

• 4 Big Shifts That Can Personalize the Learning Journey | EdSurge News

  What needs to happen to move your school or district toward an effective implementation of personalized learning? According to EdSurge Fusion conference speaker, Dr. Scott McLeod, there are Four Big Shifts that propel “deeper learning schools” along…

• The New Google Sites: The Good, The Bad, and Nothing Ugly! | Shake Up Learning

• Coding posters for printing PDF.pdf – Google Drive

• Three Things Teachers Need to Spot—and Stop—Plagiarism | EdSurge News

• “This Is 18” Is A Great NY Times Interactive | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Yesterday was The International Day of the Girl (see The Best Resources For “The International Day Of The Girl”), and The New York Times published a great feature headlined This is 18. It highlights images, music and commentaries from eighteen-year-…

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Create Personalized Certificates in Bulk Through Google Sheets

  Creating a certificate for one or a few students is a fairly straight forward process. You can use Google Slides, Canva, or any number of Word templates for that.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Halloween Writing Activity for Elementary and Middle School Students

  Earlier this week I shared a bunch of Halloween-themed math and science resources. If you’re looking for a writing activity that has a Halloween theme, consider having students create Halloween cards.

• Is it more about what you can teach or what they can learn? – The Principal of Change

  In a workshop, an educator shared their reluctance to try some of the things that I was suggesting with students in their classroom. Luckily, I had students joining me in the workshop and asked them for some feedback.

• 10 Ways that College Classes Differ From High School

  Sadhvi Mathur Senior Blogger at CollegeVine Sadhvi is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, double majoring in Business Administration and Media Studies.

• Two Videos About Hurricanes | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  Thoughts and prayers to those affected by Hurricane Michael.

• Why Graphic Novels Belong in All of Our Libraries – Pernille Ripp

  Look at that; an incredible graphic novel is shortlisted for the National Book Award.  Image from School Library Journal.

• Google Slides Templates for Snapchat Games in Class – Ditch That Textbook

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Projector Screen

  ProjectorScreen.com is an excellent site for people or educators to find projectors and other type of equipment for their classrooms. Not only can a person search through an immense amount of screens, but from other categories such as fixed or manua…

• Free Technology for Teachers: More Halloween Science and Math Lessons

  Last week I shared a handful of Halloween-themed math and science activities. PBS Learning Media also has a collection of Halloween-themed science and mathematics lessons.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Synth – Quickly Record Short, Interactive Podcasts

  Synth is a new service from Swivl. Synth is a free service that you can use to record short podcast episodes that are up to 256 seconds long. When you record your episode you post it publicly for others to listen to and record spoken responses.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Using Brush Ninja and Screencastify to Make Science Presentations

  This week I had the opportunity to work in an eighth grade science class. I was there to help their teacher help them learn new ways to make presentations. The topic of their presentations was “forms of energy.” That topic lends itself to having stu…

• Good Work Leads to More Work | Mike Kaechele

  This is the fifth post in a series where I flesh out why the ideal traits of a PBL teacher are important. Check out the links to the rest of the series below the post. I am a believer in hard work. I always tell my students that “good work leads to …

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: New Infographic: 8 Dates All Teachers of #EdTech #DigCit #MediaLiteracy Should Know

  Post this on your wall for 2018/2019 school year as a reminder of all the dates you can celebrate ways to prepare modern learners. Visit the infographic here.

• VLookup: Creating Battle Damage – Classroom Powerups

  I’m stepping on Alice Keeler’s corner and I think I need to watch my back! In my Dreadsheets, whether they are clashes or boss fights, I try to include “Battle Damage” or images that show when a student or team’s hit points decrease.

• Jennifer Binis’ #PairedTexts Is An Amazing Resource For Teachers & Their Students | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  For a long time, Jennifer Binis has been sharing #pairedtexts on Twitter. She scours the media to find contrasting articles, photos, quotes, etc. that are great teaching tools for a variety of classes.

• Teaching Resources On U.N. Report On Climate Change | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  You’ve probably heard about the terrifying United Nations report on climate change that was issued this week. Here are some useful teaching resources on the report.

• Starting With the Questions to Develop Curiosity and Better Solutions – The Principal of Change

  I first heard about the idea of “Problem-Finders” from Ewan McIntosh, and it always struck me as something we should be focusing on in education: “Currently, the world’s education systems are crazy about problem-based learning, but they’re obsessed …

• The Data Says…What? (Or: Why we struggle to make sense of literacy assessment results) – Reading By Example

  Our instructional leadership team recently analyzed the last two years of writing assessment data. We use a commercial-based rubric to score student writing in the fall and in the spring.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Eight Options for Creating Screencasts on Chromebooks

  Recording screencasts is one relatively easy way to get started making videos in your classroom. Today, I helped some middle school students make screencasts in which they explained the animations they made to represent forms of energy.

• The Many Lives of Doctor Who: A First Glimpse Into the 13th Doctor – GeekDad

  Titan Comics presents a myriad of artists reliving 12 moments, one for each of the previous doctors.

• Leveraging the Lore of Dungeons and Dragons to Motivate Students to Read and Write

  MindshiftSep 25 Overcoming Childhood Trauma: How Parents and Schools Work to Stop the Cycle Many people have experienced some kind of trauma in their childhood, such as loss of a caregiver, substance abuse in the home, homelessness or abuse.

• Google Slides Gets Automated Captions – HUGE Help To Online Teachers Of English; Could Maybe Help In Regular Classroom | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  I would imagine that every single educator who teaches English Language Learners online are jumping for joy today – Google announced that Google Slides will now provide automatic slide captioning for everything a speaker says.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Google Has Added a Captioning System to Google Slides

  Today, Google announced a new Google Slides feature that some teachers are going to love. Google Slides now has a real-time captioning system. This system works when you are presenting your slides (full screen) and have a microphone connected to you…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Google Is Shutting Down Google+

  This afternoon Google published an official blog post about their Project Strobe data and privacy audit project. The leading portion of that Google announced that the consumer edition of Google+ is going to be shut down.

• Free Technology for Teachers: The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival – Videos Based on Newbery Winning Books

  Thanks to one of the great teachers that I am working with at Sigsbee Charter School I learned about the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. The festival is really a contest that is organized by YA author James Kennedy.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Two Detailed Presentations About Copyright for Educators

  Earlier this evening I answered an email from a teacher who was looking for some resources about copyright that she could share with colleagues in her school. There were two resources that immediately came to mind when I read her question. The first…

• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: Making The Best Technology Purchasing Decisions

  In our next collaborative post, Shaelynn Farnsworth (@shfarnsworth) and I discuss how schools and districts can make the best technology purchasing decisions. Recently I was talking to a Tech Director colleague that was in the middle of a purchasing…

• The Nerdy Teacher: Writing IS Making #MakerEd #CSforAll

  The more I have spent time sharing Making and Makerspace with people, the more I get to reflect on those conversation and see how others perceive the act of making. I also spend time thinking about my own practices and how I used to teach in my Engl…

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: No. You Haven’t Been Hacked Or Cloned On Facebook

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

• Lessons From Sherlock Holmes: It’s Elementary! – The Edublogger

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories was lucky enough to rediscover his love of literature in his later years. Is this true for all students?

• DB Quest: The latest super sweet tool from iCivics and Library of Congress | History Tech

  A few days ago, I bragged on one of the latest Library of Congress interactive tools titled CaseMaker. Part of the Teaching with Primary Sources project, CaseMaker joined the three earlier tools that rolled out last year. But wait. There’s more.

• Tough Topics – Josh Stumpenhorst

  Sexual assault, rape, harassment, and abuse are currently hot topics in the world and often ones we don’t like talking about. In light of recent world events, I’ve thought a great deal about these topics and their impact on our society.

• Hood Canal avoids a major fish kill following unwelcome conditions | Watching Our Water Ways

  Southern Hood Canal avoided a major fish kill this year, but for a few days in September it looked like conditions were set for low-oxygen waters to rise to the surface, leaving fish in a critical state with no place to go, experts say.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Good Reminders About Password Security

  The mot recent Facebook hoax making its rounds has prompted me to remind everyone about the importance of using strong and varied passwords (don’t use the same password for Facebook as you do for your bank account).

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Do Wind Turbines Enhance Global Warming? No!

  There were a series of headlines in a variety of media outlets this week suggesting an unfounded and unphysical claim: that wind turbines might contribute to global warming. Some examples below: The key issue is that frequently the surface is cooler…

• Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Problems with Evidence-based Education: Side Effects in Education

  The following is the Introduction of my book What Works Can Hurt: Side Effects in Education published by Teachers College Press in June 2018. “Ibuprofen may cause a severe allergic reaction,” you are warned when you buy a bottle of Advil, and “this …

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are some great posts from this past week:

• How Not To Feel Resentment Over Difficult Students – Smart Classroom Management

  It’s normal to feel angry. How could you not? You have a student who is ruining your school year.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 7 Dates #EdTech Teachers Need to Know

  If you teach tech, then you need to know when important tech topics are celebrated across the year.

• 10-5-18 CPU Vlog: Battles and Open Worlds – Classroom Powerups

  It is Reflection Friday on the Classroom Powerups Vlog! This Friday I discuss how I use my Battle Mechanics as a classroom review system and its impact on my Feedback Loops.

• Science teacher: Getting certified, FRS-NJ version

  I do get, however, why credentialing of some sort can be useful at times, and have participated when necessary. I have been board certified as a pediatrician, and am currently certified as a public school teacher in the state of New Jersey.

• DeVos Doles Out $399 Million to Charter Schools and Charter Organizations | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Politico reports the latest federal handouts for charter schools and charter advocacy organizations, as well as to state agencies. There is no sector of American education less in need of federal funding than charter schools.

• Control Alt Achieve: Turn Google Slides into an Animated GIF with this Free Tool

  With Tall Tweets you can import a Google Slideshow, set the duration for each slide (as well as some other options), and then create and download an animated GIF version of your slideshow. First you need to finish creating the Google Slideshow that …

• 50 ideas for using video in the classroom

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Writer Igniter

  Writer Igniter is a nice little tool for writing prompts that I just found out about from Ozge Karaoglu’s wonderful blog. All a teacher has to do is click on the “shuffle” button and a random character, situation, prop, and setting, will appear and …

• Zombies, Run! — Hey Siri, Raise the Gates!

  1.5M ratings 277k ratings See, that’s what the app is perfect for. Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna Hey Siri, Raise the Gates! That’s right – in our latest 7.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Land Breeze Clouds

  This morning I was at an early meeting at the UW, looking out towards the West and I saw a line of low-level clouds and I recognized their origin…. clouds over the Sound produced by converging land breezes from both shores. Here is a satellite ima…

• Ongoing lack of rainfall raises concerns for chum, coho salmon | Watching Our Water Ways

  We’ve just gone through one of the driest five-month periods on record in Kitsap County, yet the total precipitation for entire water year was fairly close to average.

• The Philippines is building a green, disaster-resilient city

  (CNN) – In one of the most disaster-prone regions on the planet, a new city has been designed specifically to withstand natural calamities — and it’s being built using remnants of a major disaster.

• Future cities: the rise and rise of smart grids | News | Eco-Business | Asia Pacific

  Faced with a burgeoning urban population and the need to achieve resource efficiency, city planners are increasingly seeking solutions to green their infrastructural systems and smart grids are poised to play a key role in this transformation.

• In British Virgin Islands, hurricane whips up green energy transition | Reuters

  ROAD TOWN (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Nearly a year after Hurricane Irma knocked out power across the British Virgin Islands, electricity boss Leroy Abraham will be among the last residents to have their homes reconnected.

• Japanese cities move towards distributed energy systems to power-proof from natural disasters – Climate Action

  According to a research conducted by Reuters in the city of Higashi Matsushima, a ‘silent’ revolution has been happening in Japan in the wake of the 2011 fatal earthquake and tsunami, with more and more municipalities setting up distributed energy s…

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: Answerables

  Answerables the innovative educational tool that combines the best features of game based learning w/ a learning management system has just released their free iPad app.

• 3DBear AR – Explore learning with AR and 3D printing

  Human life is inherently creative. It is the common currency of being a human being. *Tarjoamme 7 päivän ilmaisen kokeilun. Huomioithan, että sinun tulee olla yli 18 vuotta vanha tai sinulla tulee olla huoltajan suostumus.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Wakelet Has a New Sections Option

  Wakelet is a free bookmarking and note-sharing service that I first tried back in April when I started to look for new alternatives to Padlet. On Wakelet you can create collections of notes that can include text, videos, links, and pictures.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Add Custom Covers to Podcasts You Make on Anchor

  Anchor has become my favorite tool for creating podcasts. In a matter of minutes you can have your first podcast episode recorded, edited, and published (watch this video to see how). You can do that on your laptop, on your phone (Android or iOS), o…

• Arizona: Governor Ducey, Facing Election, Decides It Is Time to Curb Charter Corruption | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona has been a stalwart champion of unregulated charters and vouchers. He has looked the other way when members of the legislature pass laws to enrich themselves while running charter chains and voucher programs.

• Passionate PBL | Mike Kaechele

  This is the fourth post in a series where I flesh out why the ideal traits of a PBL teacher are important. Check out the links to the rest of the series below the post. It’s cliche, but of course most teachers are passionate about their students and…

• When They Abandon Every Single Book – Pernille Ripp

  “….well, I didn’t finish any books last year…”She turns to me and smiles. “What do you mean?”  I ask, not sure I have heard her correctly, after all, I know what amazing work they do in 6th grade. “….I just stopped reading them, I didn’t finish them.

• Free Technology for Teachers: My Tips for Managing Student Blogs – One for All or All Have One?

  In the course of a year I get to run a lot of workshops about blogging.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Fun and Free State & Country Capital Identification Game

  Capital Toss is a free geography game from ABCya. The game has a state capitals mode and a country capitals mode. In both modes of the game works the same way. The name of a state or country appears at the bottom of the screen and three rows of capi…

• Five Apps for Reducing Isolation and Increasing Connectedness – Reading By Example

  The principalship, as well as other leadership positions in schools, can be isolating. We typically don’t have a team of our own within a building.

• Item Alchemy: Student Created Mash-ups – Classroom Powerups

  First, just a refresher and some vocabulary. In my classroom Items are Powerup Cards that students can earn in a number of ways. To see my first two series of item cards click here: 2018-19 Items: Unit 1 Cards, 2018-19 Items: Unit 2 Cards.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Share Your Google VR Tours With Students

  Over the last few weeks I have received a lot of emails from readers who had made virtual reality tours in Google’s VR Tour Creator but then ran into difficulty sharing those tours with their students.

• Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: Taking Collaboration And Teacher PD To Another Level With Verso Learning

  When I was teaching Middle School Science I always tried to encourage academic discussion among my students. As a group we would debate results from various experiments, attempt to understand current events in science and talk about how science was …

• Library of Congress adds awesome new tools. Today? Case Maker. | History Tech

  A year or so ago, the Library of Congress introduced three new apps that focused on civics and the use of primary sources. Eagle Eye Citizen, Engaging Congress and Kid Citizen were developed through the LOC’s Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) prog…

• Elementary Book Club for Advanced Readers |

  When I work with elementary teachers, one of the biggest challenges they face is the wide range of reading skills in their classrooms. A first-grade class may have students who are struggling to decode while other students are reading at a third-gra…

• 2018-19 Items: Unit 2 Cards – Classroom Powerups

  I am a huge proponent of using ITEMs in the classroom. These are powerups that allow students to change their experience in the classroom by changing the rules or expectations within the classroom universe.

• Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Science & Math Resources That Have a Halloween Theme

  SciShow Kids has a playlist of videos covering topics that are frequently connected to symbols of Halloween. Those topics are bats, spiders, skeletons, and the changing colors of leaves.

• Should You Use Student Photos Online? – The Edublogger

  This is an update of a post that was first written by Sue Waters in 2013. Whether you’re blogging, using social media, producing videos, or publishing any digital creations, the topic of student privacy must always be considered.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Voicepods Has New Editing Features – Turn Text Into Voice Recordings

  A few weeks ago I introduced a new tool called Voicepods. Voicepods is a service that will create voice recordings based on the text that you write.

• Strategies to Promote Inquiry in Your Classroom – Class Tech Tips

  When students take part in inquiry-based learning they pose questions and research issues. Promoting inquiry in your classroom can take many forms. So I was excited to connect with Trevor MacKenzie who has written books on the subject.

• 5 LMS Mistakes To Avoid Infographic – e-Learning Infographics

  A Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to solve the problems around training, but not cause new ones..obviously.

• Everyone Can Create

  Have you heard the news? I am so excited to share a new, totally free set of resources from Apple Education. Today Apple Education released four books of lesson ideas and one teacher guide to spotlight the ways Everyone Can Create.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Mind Over Media – New Resource for Teaching Propaganda and Media Literacy

  I first met Professor Renee Hobbs from the Media Education Lab last spring at the SXSWedu conference. She led a fascinating discussion about how to foster media literacy and digital literacy in an age of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.

• For this Bullying Prevention Month, a bit of clarity – NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org

  The Pew Research Center just published a surprisingly high figure under a headline referring to “cyberbullying.” The authors report that 59% of US 13-17 year-olds had experienced some form of it. But it’s important to zoom in on the “some form of” p…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Seven Good Places to Find Writing Prompts

  Anyone who has ever taught language arts has heard, “I don’t know what to write about” from a student or two. If you’ve ever heard that from a student, take a look at the following sites and apps to find writing prompts. Emoji Prompts uses emojis as…

• Watch and share YouTube videos safely | teachers and family friendly YouTube

  Kids Are 3 Clicks Away From Improper Content On YouTube …Safe YouTube Solved This! Surrounding Youtube Videos Decrease Attention To Your Video …Safe YouTube Solved This! Teachers Can Now Show YouTube In Classroom …

• boardgamegeek.com

  Patrick Rael (prael) United States Brunswick Maine We see our role as essentially defensive in nature. Heading to College of the Holy Cross for a workshop on using boardgames in college classrooms. Here’s an introductory handout I intend to use. Hap…

• Steven Singer: The Six Biggest Problems with Data-Driven Instruction | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Steven Singer writes here about the mechanistic, anti-child implicationsand consequences of data-driven Instruction. He identifies six issues. I offer only the first of these problems. To learn about the other five, open the link. He writes: No teac…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Digital Portfolio Styles – And Tools for Making Them

  This post originally appeared in my Practical Ed Tech Newsletter and on my Practical Ed Tech website. This week I am working with a group of teachers who want to have their middle school students create digital portfolios that they will maintain thr…

• Control Alt Achieve: Create Halloween Rebus Stories with Emojis and Google Docs

  In earlier posts I have shared Google Docs templates for creating Emoji Rebus Stories for both Wintertime and Valentine’s Day. With Fall coming soon, I have put together a Halloween-themed version.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Is Global Warming A Significant Contributor to Washington State Wildfires, Now or in the Future?

  During the past several summers there have been major wildfires in Washington State producing a lot of smoke. And many people have been asking an important question: To what degree is anthropogenic global warming contributing to Washington State wil…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ten Tools for Teaching With YouTube Videos

  If you can get past the distraction of cute animal videos, video game highlights, and other nonsense, you can find excellent educational videos on YouTube. But even then it’s not enough to just share the video with your students either in your class…

• Seven Things That Happen When Students Share Their Work – John Spencer

  When my middle son was in the third grade, he volunteered to share a joke with a big audience at a family camp. As I watched him standing in the line with older kids and quite a few adults, I felt nervous.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Seterra Offers Science Quiz Games

  A couple of weeks ago I featured Seterra’s hundreds of geography quiz games that are available in more than thirty languages. But geography isn’t the only subject that Seterra offers quiz games about. Seterra also offers games about human anatomy, p…

• 10 Core Values for Education – The Principal of Change

  As in any profession, educators should be able to look back and think, “Why did I do that?”  If you aren’t able to do that, there might not have been much growth.

• A Principal’s Reflections: 10 Strategies to Strengthen Instruction and Learning

  When I think back to my training to become a teacher, there were some reasonably consistent norms. These consisted of sound classroom management, listing the learning objectives, and developing a lesson plan.

• A Notecard Check – A Simple Way to Check for Understanding – Pernille Ripp

  Ask our students what makes them hate reading and many of them will say the work that comes after.  The reading logs, the essays, the taking notes when reading, the post-its, the to-do’s.  Not the act of reading itself.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Create a Screencast Within Padlet

  Back in June I published a video that demonstrated ten types of notes that you can add to Padlet walls. Thanks to Dan Methven I recently learned that there is another new way to add notes to Padlet walls. The new type of note is a screencast video.

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Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

Here are this past week’s list of some cool blog posts:

• How To Bring Instant Calm To Your Classroom – Smart Classroom Management

  One of the biggest causes of misbehavior is excitability. It’s also one of the hardest to fix.

• Free Technology for Teachers: A Rubric for Digital Portfolio Assessment

  Next week I am working with a group of teachers to help them start creating digital portfolios with their students. After we decide what we want students to include in their portfolios and the platform for the portfolio we’ll start looking at the as…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Planning a Student Video Project? – Don’t Forget the Storyboards

  Earlier this week I shared details of Next Vista for Learning’s Creative Storm student video contest. One of the rules of that contest is that videos have to be 90 seconds or less. That’s generally a good guideline of classroom video projects too.

• Do We Give A Zero Or 50% For Work Not Turned-In? Here Are Some Useful Commentaries | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  I think I do a pretty good job on grading and am generally successful in having students be less concerned about “points” and more concerned about learning. You can read more about my thoughts on the topic, and those of others whom I respect, at The…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Manufacture Your Future – A Discovery Virtual Field Trip

  Next Friday at 1pm EDT Discovery Education is a hosting a virtual field trip titled Manufacture Your Future. The virtual field trip will take students to the Arconic plant in Texas where they’ll learn about the 3D printing in the context of the aero…

• 150+ Digital Learning Apps Inside 1 Simple App for K-2 Teachers

  The Really Good StuffⓇ Digital Learning Collection has over 150 apps for kindergarten to second-grade classrooms. Recently, I took a tour of this amazing app. Perhaps you’re wondering how more than 150 apps can be inside one? It is possible.

• Comics and Graphic Novels: Honoring All Literacies – Reading By Example

  I was only partially surprised when a librarian mentioned to me that in her school, graphic novels were not seen as quality literature by some of the teachers. This discussion was prompted by a note a former student had written to her recently. Than…

• 5 ways to gamify your class

• What You Should Know About Banned Books Week – GeekMom

  We again find ourselves smack in the middle of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. Maybe you’ve seen articles about the Top Ten Most Challenged Books.

• Video: “It’s Getting Harder to Spot a Deep Fake Video” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  pixel2013 / Pixabay I’m adding this new video from Bloomberg to The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More:

• Games For Thinkers | Accelerated Learning Foundation

• History Simulation Games For Kids | History Simulator

• The Propaganda Game

  tags:game games think thinking gbl

• Providing Support Versus Enabling – The Principal of Change

  In a workshop this past week, I discussed how it is essential to create conditions for students where students and adults find ways to learn for themselves.

• Beginner’s Guide to Genius Hour: Developing Students’ Passions – Teacher Tech

  A Guest Blog Post by Marcia Carrillo @marciamentor I am passionate about sports! I love to play sports, watch sports, coach sports, analyze sports, and learn new sports or exercises! At what age did I realize this? Probably in 6th grade, when you co…

• Internet Safety For Kids: 7 Tips For Parents Infographic – e-Learning Infographics

  It’s the start of the school year again, so you’ve probably started giving your kid the same old tips – be careful when crossing the street, don’t talk to the strangers, don’t play with scissors, etc.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Frostbite Theater – 87 Science Experiment Video Lessons

  Jefferson Lab’s YouTube channel includes a playlist titled Frostbite Theater. The first time I looked at the playlist a few years ago it had about fifty videos. The playlist has now expanded to 87 videos. The playlist features videos of science demo…

• Google Science Fair Now Open For Submissions | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

  The famous Google Science Fair is now open for submissions (through December 12th). You can read all about it at Google here – and watch the video below.

• Flex like Stretch Armstrong | Mike Kaechele

  This is the third post in a series where I flesh out why the ideal traits of a PBL teacher are important. Check out the links to the rest of the series below the post. I remember as a kid that Stretch Armstrong was definitely the ultimate Christmas …

• Avatar Selection Day: Reflection Roundup pt 1 – Classroom Powerups

  Friday started the process through which my students would select their Avatar types for my classroom. For those interest an overview of the Avatars can be found here – Super Avatar Types Overview.

• Free Technology for Teachers: 5 Ways to Use Google Slides Besides Making Presentations

  Google Slides has come a long way since the first time that I had students use it a decade ago. Many features have been added in that time. Many of those features make it possible to use Google Slides for more than just making slideshows.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Einstein’s Archives Online

  More than 80,000 of Albert Einstein’s documents and drawings are now available to view for free at Einstein Archives Online. The archives include not only his scientific work but also his images and documents from his travels and thoughts on the wor…

• Control Alt Achieve: Create Your Own Story Cubes with Google Drawings

  Story cubes have long been a popular item to give inspiration for writing. Typically they are regular cubes with a different picture or word on each face. Students can pick a few cubes and then roll them to randomly get elements for a story.

• The Nerdy Teacher: Bring Project Pals into the New School Year

  The template guides students to create an introductory story about the person’s life, timeline, and map out the key events of the person’s life. Digitizing PBL provides an outlet for students to dig deep into their interests.

• What Is Your Teacher Personality Type? Infographic – e-Learning Infographics

  Every teacher approaches their job differently. Some teachers are strict, while others are lenient. Some are spontaneous, while others are more practical. One thing is for sure: there are pros and cons to every teaching style. What teacher personali…

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: New Infographic! 8-Step Plan to Finding A Student Internship

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

• 5 handy tools that combat fake news and create informed citizens | History Tech

  Civic engagement is one of the latest education buzzwords. But for many of you, prepping kids to be engaged, informed, and knowledgeable citizens has always been job one. So it’s good to see the rest of the Ed world climbing on board.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Creative Storm – A Next Vista Video Contest

  Next Vista for Learning is a great place for teachers and students to share short video lessons that they create. I have been recommending the service for almost ten years now.

• Small Disruptions in Text – Pernille Ripp

  I have been so incredibly inspired by the work of the women behind the #DisruptTexts movement.  This movement, started by a group of fearless educators: Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Dr. Kimberly N. Parker, and Julia E.

• Technology Tidbits: Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: eNotes

  eNotes is a wonderful site/iOS app for students looking for homework help and much much more.

• Resources from YouCubed | Patty Papers

  Youcubed.org is a free K-12 math resource from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Many of you are familiar with the Week of Inspirational Math, but here are a few of the other resources you’ll find on the site.

• Free Technology for Teachers: 8 Tools for Making Multimedia Timelines

  Creating timelines has been a go-to activity for history teachers since the beginning of history. When I made timelines as a student and in my first year or two of teaching, timelines were made on paper. Today, there are better ways to have students…

• Free Technology for Teachers: 5 VR Projects for Students

  Google’s VR Tour Creator is one of my favorite media creation tools. Since its launch in May of this year I have shown it to hundreds of teachers in-person and even more in videos and webinars.

• Roberta Memeo – Games for Health Europe

  Graduated with honours in Arts from the University of Florence (Italy) in 1993, e-learning specialist and Project Manager, she has been working for Grifo multimedia since its foundation in 1997.

• The 8 core drives behind great classroom gamification – Classcraft Blog

  With its focus on human motivation, gamification can have a positive impact on our lives, from school to the workplace. Many educators are already using game elements to boost student engagement, track progress, and enhance the learning experience.

• Hey, dumb American question here. Every UK person…

  Where do I fucking start? So, Thatcher was the bane of the working classes, and much of what she did still has repercussions to this day. So, in no particular order, just in the order I remember them, here are some things she did that pissed us off –

• Save the Date/Call for Blogs | CUNY Games Network

  The CUNY Games Network of the City University of New York is excited to announce The CUNY Games Conference 5.0, to be held on January 18, 2018, at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City.

• 10 Ways To Introduce Your Students To Blogging – The Edublogger

  It’s ‘back to school’ season for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Along with setting up classrooms, decorating bulletin boards, and preparing lessons, many educators are also considering their virtual spaces.

• My Vision of a Multi-Disciplinary Academic Center for Video Game-Based Learning. – Simone Bregni, Ph.D.

  tags:gbl ar vr games gaming learning learn

• How to Quickly Create, Send, & Translate a Parent Newsletter – Teacher Reboot Camp

  “At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child’s success is the positive involvement of parents.” – Jane D. Hull A few weeks ago I sent my first parent newsletter to 400+ parents.

• Voice of Witness: Bring the Power of Oral History to Your Classroom | Cult of Pedagogy

  Teaching history and English has gotten complicated. For many, many years, educational publishers produced texts that centered an overwhelmingly white, European experience.

• A Principal’s Reflections: The Pivotal Role Movement Plays in Learning

  “More blood means more energy and oxygen, which makes our brain perform better.” – Justin Rhodes Spending time in schools as a leadership and learning coach has been some of the most gratifying work I have done.

• The Connection Between Innovation and Time – The Principal of Change

  The demands of teachers are seemingly going up while the time frame of our days stays the same.  From my conversations with educators, the “other stuff” that they do not tell you about in college (paperwork, reports, etc.) is getting to be more and …

• FBI, This Week: Education Technologies Could Pose Risks to Students – K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center

  As a follow-up to the recently released public service announcement on the privacy and security issues the FBI has observed with the use of technology in education, on September 21 they also released a brief podcast targeted to parents.

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

Sharing Diigo Links and Resources (weekly)

More amazing blog posts from this past week:

• Cells Alive Worksheet |

  This worksheet follows diagrams and activities at CellsAlive.com which focuses on the size of cells compared to other objects, such as viruses and pollen.  Students view interactive plant, animal, and bacteria cells to learn about the different stru…

• 4 Strategies Designed to Drive Metacognitive Thinking |

  Metacognition is defined as thinking about one’s thinking or learning. More formally, “metacognition was originally referred to as the knowledge about and the regulation of one’s cognitive activities in learning processes” (Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters…

• I Don’t Read – Pernille Ripp

  “I don’t read” has been a refrain heard loudly in our classroom for the last three weeks.  Several students have informed me that reading is not something they do.  Not something we can get them to do.  And they have been right.

• 3 Simple Ways To Check For Understanding – Smart Classroom Management

  In observing teachers, one common area of weakness is checking for understanding. Not every teacher, of course. But many.

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: REX Will Dominate Northwest Weather This Week

  During the past two weeks, the Northwest has enjoyed absolutely normal weather. Typical temperatures (see plot below, purple and cyan are normal highs and lows) and nearly normal precipitation (see cumulative precipitation for the same period).

• Chrome-Friendly App Smash Tips for Book Creator – Class Tech Tips

  So many of you joined me this summer to explore how to use Book Creator in the classroom! But whether you’re checking out this blog post on a hot summer afternoon or chilly winter morning, you can jump into Book Creator right away.

• Global Problem Solvers: Authentic problems, engaging content, free resources. What’s not like? | History Tech

  We want our kids to help lead their own learning, have the soft skills to work well with others, be engaged with their communities, and solve authentic problems. So basically . . . kids who grow up to save the world. No biggie.

• Schools Matter: School Libraries and Books Critical for School Success

  Published in the New York Times, September 20, 2018 To the Editor: Re “Why libraries still matter.” [https://ift.tt/2oR1Oyb (Sunday Review, Sept.

• How to talk to young people about the Kavanaugh story.

  Spector is also a survivor of sexual assault, and it took her years to come forward. She says she’s willing to use her full name because she is a feminist activist who feels the importance of raising public awareness.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Slides from ESC-20 Library Resource Roundup

  Today I had the pleasure of giving four short presentations at the Texas ESC-20 Library Resource Roundup. It was a great day! Thank you to everyone who came to my presentations. And a special thank you to those who came for multiple presentations.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Math in Real Life – Why Airlines Overbook Flights

  I’m currently flying home the ESC-20 Library Resource Roundup in San Antonio, Texas. Before I boarded the flight the gate agent was looking for volunteers to take an alternate flight due to overbooking.

• 7 Hidden Tips for Google Sites – Teacher Tech

  I have been loving using Google Sites to create tutorials. The autosizing of pictures, the easy insertion of items from Google Drive, mixing text with video and images, and other features that just make the process easier.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Make a Timeline Through Google Sheets

  Earlier this week I wrote about Flippity’s new timeline creation template for use in Google Sheets. The template lets you create a multimedia timeline by simply entering information into a spreadsheet and then publishing it to the web.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Apps to Incorporate Into Outdoor Learning Activities

  One of my passions is encouraging teachers to take their students outside for class. The technology that our students use the most in their daily lives is meant to be mobile so don’t keep it locked up in your classroom.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Apps to Explore the Potential of Augmented Reality

  On Friday I am giving a presentation about augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality in education. If you’re unsure of the differences between the three, take a look at my explanatory video and slideshow on the topic.

• Gamification Stage Three: The Constraint • Teched Up Teacher

  My father got a job with AT&T after the military. My dad started out driving trucks and laying phone line. After a couple years, AT&T asked him if he’d like to go back to school to become a computer tech. I was probably four or five at the time.

• 2018-19 Super Hero Game: Villains Guild Option – Classroom Powerups

  Last year I introduced Boss Battles about half way through the year. It began as a simple dice roll game against Gen Robert E Zombie and Gen William T. Shermonster (1st Boss Fight Post). It was low tech and the students had fun with seeing the Hit P…

• Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog: Time to Drop the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale

  One of the most familiar aspects of hurricane season is the constant talk about the strength of developing storms using the Saffir-Simpson scale, which ranges from Category 1 (a marginal hurricane) to Category 5 (a powerful monster).

• Big Online Courses Have a Problem. Here’s How We Tried to Fix It. – dy/dan

  Here is some personal prejudice: I don’t love online courses.

• google-slides-icon-boards-for-low-prep-visual-thinking

• A Game-Changing Approach to a Back to School Syllabus by @MeehanEDU – Teacher Tech

  Hi. I’m John Meehan, an instructional coach and eleventh grade English teacher at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, Virginia.

• Free Technology for Teachers: If You Manage a School Facebook Page, Watch Out for This Scam

  I manage a handful of Facebook Pages. This morning when I logged into Facebook I had notifications that “Verified Facebook Page” had requested administrative access to those pages.

• Classroom Fortress: The Nine Kinds of Students

  It doesn’t take long to learn that there are different kinds of students. In fact, there are exactly nine kinds.

• A group of scientists is using Fortnite to talk about climate change with gamers | BT

• Ten Jobs That Should Be Safe From Automation

  In contrast, robot-proof jobs tend to involve tasks like decision-making and problem-solving, and require a flexible mindset and a willingness to multitask.

• The Nerdy Teacher: Assessing Making #MakerEd #MakerMentality

  The other day, I was doing a webinar for littleBits and I was asked a question I often receive when talking about Makerspaces.

• One Important Question That Leads to Student Empowerment in Schools – The Principal of Change

  I walked into Jasper Place High School in Edmonton, Alberta, as a basketball referee for the game, but as a principal at another school at the time.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Use Flippity to Make a Multimedia Timeline

  Flippity is a site that I have recommended for years as a place to find templates that you can use in Google Sheets to make things like flashcards, quiz games, and random name pickers. Recently, I noticed that Flippity has added a template for makin…

• 8 Reasons We Need Kids Playing RPGs – GeekDad

  RPGs came about in a time when so many things didn’t exist: pre-World of Warcraft, pre-HBO-Game of Thrones, and pre-internet. In those early days, players sat down and let their imaginations provide the imagery, the sounds, and the story.

• How rumors spread on social media during weather disasters | NSF – National Science Foundation

  After hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research to investigate the broad impacts of these disasters.

• Control Alt Achieve: Collabordependent Writing with Google Slides

  Technology can have it’s pain points. Take peer feedback for example. We want to students to be able to write, express themselves, create, etc. Then we want them to be able to share what they made with their peers. Then we want their peers to be abl…

• Ready Player One: Parzival’s Motivations – Classroom Powerups

  Warning: SPOILERS! Seriously… I am talking about the book Ready Player One. If you haven’t read the book then please stop here and read the book.

• Reverse engineering your mobile banking app

  Our Austrian banks (seemingly) hate developers as they don’t give you an API to check banking statements or balances. Soon there should be the new PSD2 Standard which will force all european banks to have an API but I didn’t want to wait so long.

• So you have been scammed

  It’s okay, it happened to the best and even large companies aren’t bullet proof when it comes to scammers.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Three Sites That Help Students Understand the Size of the Universe

  Living in a relatively rural area that doesn’t have a lot of artificial light helps make it easy to spot constellations. Some nights when I take my dogs out before bedtime I look up at the constellations and I try to wrap my head around the size of …

• The Obsolete and Costly American Faith in Testing | Diane Ravitch’s blog

  Alyson Klein wrote a useful overview of emerging critiques of our national obsession with standardized testing. As Marc Tucker points out, we are likely the only country that tests every child every year.

• Four Strategies for Google-Friendly Classrooms – Class Tech Tips

  Google tools have transformed the way we think about technology in the classroom. Students can collaborate with their peers, and create products that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Create a Progress Tracker With Google Forms and Sheets

  Last week I wrote about using Google Forms and a pivot table in Google Sheets to create reading logs and other progress trackers. Over the weekend I received a lot of emails from folks asking various clarifying questions on how to use the pivot tabl…

• Free Technology for Teachers: Shakespeare Uncovered – Ten Free Lesson Plans

  Shakespeare Uncovered is a series of videos about Shakespeare’s life and work. The series, hosted on PBS Learning Media, is organized thematically. Some of the themes are “Shakespeare and History,” “The Use of Soliloquy,” and “Gender Roles in Shakes…

• Student-Created Videos in the Classroom | Edutopia

  1. Learning product videos: Learning product videos are often summative assignments that students create to demonstrate their learning. One year, my students worked in small groups to create green screen videos explaining the life cycles of differen…

• Storybird – Guides

• Encouraging Creative Writing With Bookcreator – Kleinspiration

  Today education technology is on its peak and will continue to evolve as we leverage technology solutions in every aspect of our lives. Education is no exception. There are a ton of useful edtech solutions available for both teachers and students to…

• A Tacoma Teacher Strike Reflection — A Teacher’s Evolving Mind

  The strike is over and school starts Monday. When I got the email letting me know we’d reached a tentative agreement, I was so giddy I screamed to my wife “TA, TA, WE GOT A TAAAAAAAAA.” Words can’t describe how glad I am this is over.

• Asking Questions to Find Better Answers – The Principal of Change

  As we consider what’s best for each learner, we must also think about how what we’re teaching will impact his or her future.

• A Principal’s Reflections: 5 Strategies to Create a Culture of Accountability for Growth

  In a world where ideas are a dime a dozen and shared openly on social media, it is incumbent upon all of us to critically reflect and determine if it is, in fact, a sound strategy.

• Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Freebie & Ideas For Parent-Teacher Conference Success

  · 4 #EdTech Blogs to Bookmark · 9 Must Read Blogs for Innovative Teachers · 10 Digital Citizenship Bloggers to Follow · 10 Education blogs worth following – eSchool News · 11 Ed Tech Bloggers to Follow · 20 Best Blogs in Instructional Technology · 2…

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