FTT - Clearly by Evernote

Ripped off image from Evernote.com

Declutter Your Internet Reading with Clearly from Evernote

@joe_edtech

Maybe the best blog posts are the short ones, in which case, this is going to be nominated for my Hall of Fame! But I want to introduce you to a tool I've used on several different device platforms, and I've seen our two DHS Librarians use it very well.

"Clearly" is part of the Evernote suite of apps and is a quick add on for Chrome. To install it, got the the Chrome Webstore, search for "Clearly," and it will be the first extension on your search results page:

"Clearly" is available in the Chrome Web Store

But why would you take the time to install Clearly in your browser? Well, open up any news page and try to read. As an accomplished adult reader, you can probably be successful. But how about students who struggle with basic literacy skills or focus? How distracting is your average web page? Clearly fixes all of that. Take for example the Time Magazine story about how "Everyman" was the person of the year. It was cluttered, covered with ads, and loud. When you click the Clearly button, however, it becomes much easier to read:

After Clearly declutters, you can add the text to your Evernote account and read it anywhere, or you can simply read the page from your browser..

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Have another tool that helps make the web readable? Leave a comment below.

FTT - Armored Penguin

Armored Penguin Emblem - All Rights Reserved

Free Online Collaborative Crossword Puzzles, And More

@joe_edtech

Armored Penguin

We've been in school for several weeks, and it is time to start thinking about study guides and review activities - or it is simply time to have a little fun. In the past, I used to find my teachers in the copy room with shreds of paper, cardboard, and glue literally cutting and pasting Crossword Puzzles together to review vocabulary or historical events. Armored Penguin is a site that makes all of that bizarre 20th Century behavior unnecessary.

Online Crossword Puzzle Shared Publicly on Armored Penguin

Actually, I've used Armored Penguin for several years in my European History classes. You can create an account and save or publicly share your puzzles, or you can simply load the page and create something. It takes just a few minutes to generate a crossword puzzle that your students can complete online, or, for those of you who are a little more traditional, you can also easily print a PDF copy of your puzzle.

Instead of creating the puzzles yourself, you might leave it up to your students. Have them create their own study guide crossword puzzles and share them with their classmates.

In addition to the crossword puzzle generator, Armored Penguin now has:

• Word Search Generator
• Word Match Puzzle Generator
• Word Scramble Puzzle Generator
• A program called "Bagels" that is an interactive logic game that encourages students to think through a logical process
• Math worksheet creator - for simple arithmetic problems
• An "Illusions" page with a small collection of optical illusions
• "Fresh Words" web page that allows students to take a collection of letters, or a phrase, and see what other words can be made from those letters.

As with all the tools discussed in this blog, Armored Penguin is Chromebook compatible.

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Have a similar productivity Web 2.0 tool that you'd like to share? Leave a comment in the box below.

Mobile Learning - Informal Learning

photo credit: Martin Bekkelund via photopin cc

"Incidentally..." - What's So Different This Time?

@joe_edtech

For decades, experts and prognosticators have predicted that some new piece of technology would completely revolutionize the classroom and would change education forever. However, those predictions have fallen a little short. For instance, Thomas Edison famously predicted in 1922 that the motion picture would eliminate the text book and change forever the way we think about education. Close!

Even the advent of the personal computer has failed to dramatically change the way we do things on a day to day basis in the classroom. Gary Stager accurately wrote in his "Stager-to-go" blog, "Schools have largely failed to inspire teachers to use computers in even pedestrian ways after three decades of attempts." (For even more on this frustrating topic, see Reiser and Dempsey, full citation below.)

So with all of the let down from the attempts to integrate technology and transform the classroom in the 20th Century, why is there so much optimism surrounding the most recent 1:1 trends focusing on mobile learning? I think my 12 year old daughter stumbled onto that answer the other day when we were watching an old episode "The Big Bang Theory" on TV. James Earl Jones was the guest star and he made several references to Star Wars and Darth Vader.

She loves the TV show, and she loves Star Wars (she inherited that), and she was filled with questions. "Did he wear the helmet in the movie? How did they use SCUBA equipment to make the breathing sounds? Wasn't he also in The Lion King? Wait, is he the voice of CNN?" Of course these weren't really questions to me. She was asking these questions as she was searching for the information on her iPad. It gave me a couple of questions of my own, "What was it like - just 3 years ago - before I had the Internet at my fingertips 24/7 through my iPhone? How many questions did I ask that just simply went unanswered?"

Of course this time she was just searching for Star Wars trivia. But I've seen the same kind of informal inquiry on her part when she decided to study Civil War Era Medicine. And I've seen that same behavior not only in the classrooms of Deerfield High School, but also in the hallways, in the library, and in the courtyard.

It may be a mini-revolution to this point, but if mobile learning leads to wide spread informal learning and student inquiry beyond the classroom walls, isn't this one of the most important revolutions in modern history?

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Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the ability of mobile learning to transform education? Do you think instant access to information on the Internet is a positive good?

For a Great History of Classroom Technology, see:

Reiser, R.A., & Dempsey, J.V. (Eds.) (2012). Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (3^rded.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

FTT - eduCanon

Embed Interactive Video Into Your Classroom With eduCanon

@joe_edtech

Looking for ways to make classroom videos truly interactive? A history teacher I once worked with recently told me about one of his favorite Web 2.0 tools, eduCanon. According to their website, eduCanon "is an online learning environment to create and share interactive video lessons." 

Here's how my friend Mike uses eduCanon in his classroom:

I use eduCanon for a couple of purposes. One of them is to disseminate information via the flipped classroom model. Students can access the lesson that I've created in eduCanon and watch the video presentation for class discussion the following day. The best part of eduCanon is that during the presentation, kids have to answer a few questions during the video. This serves the purpose of not only checking for accuracy in their viewing, but also as a focus point. It also allows me as a teacher to design questions that are timed to emphasize the points that I wish for them to know. Finally, the questions are required. The video will not go on until the question is answered. It is a creative and interesting way to get started with the flipped classroom model.

You can get started in a couple of steps. First of all, go to educanon.com and create a free teacher account. Then follow their simple steps for building, assigning, and sharing lessons.

Here is a video from Benjamin Levy that further explains what eduCanon is and how to get started:

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Have you used eduCanon in your classroom? Tell us how. OR tell us if you use a different tool for embedding interactive videos in your classroom.

SAMR Model

photo credit: laura pasquini via photopin cc

How SAMR Helps Teachers Take Their First Steps

@joe_edtech

I love working with teachers who work hard to integrate technology into the classroom, but I sometimes fear that our current systems of support discourage teachers as they are taking their very first steps. One of the things that has concerned me recently is that our best practice models, and rightly so, are teachers who have been working hard at integrating technology into their classroom not for days or weeks, but for years. The problem is that a fully functioning, integrated website, or a 1:1 mobile computing classroom can be intimidating for someone who is taking their first steps into 21st Century Learning Skills.

Enter Dr. Puentedura's SAMR model (blog linked here). Schools and districts have moved in legion to adopt the SAMR model of technology integration as their theoretical framework, and it has done wonders for teachers who are taking their first steps with technology integration. Why? Because no matter how novice someone is, they can still be on the chart somewhere. Furthermore, depending on the technology tool we use, it is fairly simple to move from the "substitution" step to the "augmentation" step.

Consider the teacher who takes a simple reading hand out and converts it from a Xerox copy to a PDF using a scanner. If the students now access that exact same reading on a Chromebook, the teacher has augmented the classroom experience. The students can easily manipulate the screen and zoom in on the text, making it easier to read.  Or they can highlight a word and look up the definition or pronunciation online. With the installation of a Chome Store App, the students can highlight the text and hear it being read while they read along.

I am very proud of the teachers at DHS and think they have gone over and above the call of duty to prepare for and begin using Google Apps, eBooks, and Web Store Apps in their classes. Their willingness to climb the SAMR Ladder will only lead to even more innovative teaching and learning environments.

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Have you used SAMR? Is there a different theoretical framework we should be looking at for teachers just beginning to integrate technology.

FTT - MoveNote

Add Narration to Your Emails!

@joe_edtech

Today's blog post is essentially an embedded video demonstration. Sometimes that kind of thing makes me feel like I'm cheating on my blog, but there are some instructional tech tools that are best introduced through video.

The Movenote Chrome App is just one of those tools. Let's face it, if you give your kids a presentation using Google Slides or PowerPoint, the most important part of the presentation is what you have to say about the text and pictures you are providing the class.Using Movenote, you can quickly add narration to any presentation you need to share with a colleague you teach with, or a student who missed class. I suppose you could use Movenote to "flip" your classroom, but it is probably better for really quick explanations that go with documents, pictures, or presentations you want to share.

What better way to introduce Movenote than by sharing a completed Movenote?!?!

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Have you tried Movenote? Tell us what you've used it for. Or, if you know of a Chrome App we should be using in the classroom more, tell us about it below.

Image Search in Google

photo credit: Skiwalker79 via photopin cc

Searching For God's Eye With Google Chrome

@joe_edtech

The other night, my daughter and I were watching our favorite TV show, "The Big Bang Theory," and she asked about a picture that hangs on the wall of the set. I said I was pretty sure it was the image of a nebula. I couldn't remember the name of it, but maybe we could search for the image.

Google Search App - Search
by taking a picture

She grabbed her iPad and started typing "nebula" into Google, and I said, "No, I mean, let's actually search the image." I paused the DVR, pulled up the Google App on my iPhone, and snapped a picture of the image on TV. In a few seconds, we had thousands of results and I remembered that it is the "God's Eye Nebula."

You don't have to have an iPhone to search a digital image. Any device with Google Chrome installed will do. Simply click and drag any digital image into a Google Search window and wait for the results.

My daughter isn't the only one surprised by the ability to search with digital photos. When I do Digital Citizenship presentations to parent groups, I always mention this capability and watch the eyes of the Moms and Dads in the room get really wide. It is a wonderful search tool with powerful implications for the classroom. But it is also affords us another opportunity to remind our students - and our own kids - to be smart and safe with the digital cameras they keep in their pockets.

Dragging a digital image into a Google Search window.

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Got any other Advanced Search Tips? Share them in the comments section.

FTT - VideoNot.es

VideoNot.es

Making Sense Out of Flipped Lessons

@joe_edtech

Recently I had the opportunity to run a workshop on "Flipped Classroom" techniques with an excellent veteran math teacher. As we sat down to talk about the things that have to be considered before teachers simply make a video and share it with their kids, we came up with a key list of pre-production ideas to focus on. The list included items like:

• metascripts for lesson planning
• production values for videos
• software available
• long term storage

While we had a great discussion about preparing instructors to teach in the flipped classroom, I think the piece we missed was preparing students to succeed in a flipped classroom. If I had to do it all over again, I would suggest that we model and then scaffold note taking skills using tools like VideoNot.es.

An add on to Google Chrome, VideoNot.es allows you to split your screen and watch an instructional video on the left and take time stamped notes on the right.

And because it is all integrated with Google Drive, it is simple to share notes in collaborative groups or just between student and teacher.

VideoNot.es can be found on the Chrome Web Store by clicking here.

Here are some easy to follow instructions on getting started with VideoNot.es from Chris Morris:

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How do you teach your students to take notes?