Keynote Thoughts- Leslie Fisher, The Technology Time Machine

These are my thoughts from this mornings keynote by Leslie Fisher.

Look I’m Learning….ipads in Pre-K classroom

Taking a look at technology through the ages, starting with a punch card machine.

New tech tools and toys

Cubify- 3d printer, 7 different colors of ink
Polaroid Z340- digital camera with printing, saves to an SD card.

Sage on the stage, guide on the side tools

Jetjaw allows people to take a survey and create charts and graphs www.ac3vd.jetjaw.com

Wufoo- click and drag form creation and create custom reports

TodaysMeet www.todaysmeet.com free colaboration tool for participants.

Gosoapbox.com, allows interaction between speaker and participants

www.smalldemons.com learn more about books such as people, places. Can also serach within a storyverse for books that mention similar topics.

Proust.com creating the story of you adding text and pictures, can then print a paper copy

Lesliefisher.com

Scoopit pages used for sharing with other teachers.

Time to Call The Differentiator

Writing objectives for higher order thinking skills can be hard.  Yet teachers know that higher order thinking skills are a key  to our students improving.  The Differentiator is a web app that allows you to easily create objectives using Bloom’s Taxonomy.  This will allow you to more easily write objectives that require higher order thinking skills. You can also include content, resources, products and groups in your objectives.  All of this is done by clicking on the desired choice.  Check it out at:

I found this on the following blog:

Tell Me a Smorie…

Smories are original short stories written and read by children.  They were thought of by a pair of sisters who enjoyed reading and recording stories for each other.   The website is super simple.  Its just a collection of pictures of the children who have written recorded the stories.  Clicking on the picture takes you to a video of the story being read. Above the child is the text of the story that scrolls by as the story is being read.

This sounds like a great resource to use as a listening center or a computer activity.  The site is safe for students to use.
Check it out here:
EXTRA:  Kindergarten teachers may want to pay close attention to the companion site: Walphabet for humourous (non Youtube) videos about the alphabet.  Check it out here:

Send Your Kids to the Lab…the PBS KIDS Lab that is…

Looking for a cool place for educational games for kids?  PBS has a site called PBS KIDS Lab which has many games for students to play and learn. But that’s not all.  There’s a collection of activities for classrooms and home use.  The lab includes online games, games for mobile devices, Interactive White Boards and Augmented Reality.  Check it out here!

Thoughts on Failure…

” Failure is not an Option”

“FAIL, First Attempt In Learning”

You’ve probably seen this video circulating recently…Best Motivational Video Ever

Go ahead take a few minutes and watch that one, its quite good and help makes my point.

 

 

I think we have been looking at the quote “Failure is not an option” as a negative, when really failure is a necessary step to being  successful.   All of the people mentioned in the video failed before they did something great.  Even one hit wonders fail many times before achieving success.

What’s this have to do with schools and teaching?   I think schools and teachers need to allow their students to fail more often and recognize that failure is an important step towards to success.   Now I don’t mean let students fail by giving up on them, but allow them to try new things, make mistakes when practicing  (grading homework and not allowing students to retake tests when they’ve worked to learn the material, come to mind here).  Schools need to allow teachers to fail as well.  Without failure there will be no innovation and in this world of doing more with less, innovation is going to be absolutely critical.

What do you think?

Have you ever found success before failure  (looking success up in the dictionary doesn’t count!)?

Awesome Apps for iPads


Appitic is a gigantic directory of iPad apps for education.  There are over 1300 different apps listed on this directory.  These apps were selected by Apple Distinguished Educators and have been tested at different grade levels and using different educational strategies. There are seven primary categories that further broken down as well.  The primary categories are:  SPED/Autism, PreSchool, Themes, Multiple Intelligences, Blooms, NETS (National Educational Technology Standards) and Teachers.  Check it out here!

Living Math Book List



Living Math Book List is a website that collects books and stories that can be used to introduce, teach or review math concepts. Everything from Addition to ratios to weights have books or stories that can be used for teaching. Using the site is simple, on the right hand side of the page their is button marked Search Categories. Click on this button and the box below lists all of the math concepts they have books.   When you select a topic it lists the books and includes a link where you can get the book from Amazon.  A neat idea would be to build a school or classroom library that includes books that teach the hard to learn math skills for your particular grade.  

Check out the site at: 

A New Site- Technically Speaking

Technically speaking I am just  a fifth grade teacher at my school….

As we all know there are more responsibilities that go with any teaching position in a school.  Most of mine happen to be technology related.  So I created a website to help handle those responsibilities.

Technically Speaking: https://sites.google.com/a/emanschools.net/techspeak/

I created a couple of Google Forms to assist with problem solving for a few of the applications we run at our school.  I also added a humor section and some sites I thought would be interesting for our staff.

Updated: January 5, 2012

Some of my posts here will be cross-posted there as well.  I recently added a page with SIOP resources and a page on iPad Resources.

 

 

 

 

 

Breakfast @Apple

My students start their morning as follows:

1. Put their things away in their lockers.
2. Pick up their breakfast.
3. Eat while talking with their friends or working on school work.
4. When done, clean up and put all trash away.
5. As they finish they come up and sit on the floor near my desk.

As students finish, I allow them to use whatever iDevice I’m not using. I always have my iPad and iPhone with me, and try to remember to bring my iPod Touch when possible. This leads to having a possibility of three devices to share with my students.

I generally pick out the app or interactive book I want them to use. Sometimes I will allow them to choose from a particular folder of apps. They must remain seated on the floor (keeps the devices safe) and must share. Its neat to see how engaged they are when using these devices. My students don’t have access to these types of devices very often otherwise.

Two of their favorite apps are Stack the States and Stack the Countries. They also like to play some of the Everyday Math apps.

The students respect the devices and appreciate the opportunity to use them. Behavior, damage or theft are not a concern. When we’re ready to start the rest of our day, the iPhone goes back on my belt clip, the iPod touch stays in my pocket and the iPad is stored in the stand I use. Occasionally students will use one of the devices to look up a word, or look something up.