Useful Links

• Edublogs Releases A New Android App This new app means that Edublogs can be used by almost all of your students. This service offers a good option for classroom blogging and can be on BYOD devices as well as our class tablets.

• 4 New Ways to Use Google Docs Forms with Students – Getting Smart by Susan Oxnevad – free technology, GAFE, google docs, multimedia, video | Getting Smart These are some simple ways to get more out of Google Docs. Forms are offer an efficient tool that can be used in a variety of ways to support learning.

• Teach Kids To Be Their Own Internet Filters | MindShift A good piece about the importance of teaching good digital literacy/information literacy skills to young people. Helping them to be proactive and responsible for their digital lives/learning is better than being reactive to breaches of protocol or banning technologies.

• A Useful Social Media Cheat Sheet – Edudemic “The infographic by Flowtown may be designed for small business owners but it’s worthwhile for any teacher, student, parent, or other Edudemic reader looking for the quick bites of the social networks.”

• 5 Strategies For Creating A Genius Mindset In Students Some simple steps to help cultivate intelligence in students are listed. The post emphasises that mindset is a huge factor. Going on the research from top cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience labs, it has been demonstrated that fundamental aspects of intelligence, and even intelligence itself, can be altered through training. Five classroom strategies for improving student achievement across the broad group are set out.

• Librarians on the Fly: Library Check In Forms – Creating Pages within Google Forms The way one school librarian keeps track of when teachers and students come into the library – class visits and student visits. She used Google to create one form that both teachers and students could use to avoid two different spreadsheets.

• Librarians on the Fly: Broadcast your Google Hangout on YouTube “How is this different from Skype and Face Time?  For one, the sheer number of participants allows it to be more conducive to conferencing than the other two.  Of course the best part is the broadcasting you can do.  Imagine having an author visit with schools across your district and being able to broadcast it for parents or others.  As I brainstormed ways Google Hangouts can be used, these things popped into my head: Authors, graduations, professional development and even tutorials with students that would give them the capability to come back and review the whole session on your YouTube channel.  I saw these examples on twitter today….”

• Librarians on the Fly: Instagram in Education Infographic The author has created an infographic with ideas about how you could use Instagram in an educational environment. This is a way of using the tools that students are using.   it could be as simple as “posting on prompts that teachers assign.”

• Designing a School Makerspace | Edutopia “A makerspace is not solely a science lab, woodwork room, computer lab or art room, but it may contain elements found in all of these familiar spaces. Therefore, it must be designed to accommodate a wide range of activities, tools and materials. Diversity and cross-pollination of activities are critical to the design, making and exploration process, and they are what set makerspaces apart from single-use spaces.” A good introduction about how to set up makerspaces in schools. The framework for initial discussions and the sorts of questions that need to be answered before a school goes down this path are very pertinent and will help avoid many problems.

• New Padagogy Wheel Helps You Integrate Technology Using SAMR Model – Edudemic – Edudemic Padagogy Wheel had been updated. Now at version 2.0, it features another band around the edge focusing on the SAMR Model and on helping teachers (and admins) effectively integrate education technology

• 7 tips for making your principal your ally – Home – Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog “You need an administrator who actively supports you and your program. Your principal needs you as well – as a cheer-leader and co-conspirator for change efforts. As a staff development resource for new programs. As an educator who can positively affect the learning environment of the whole school. As a researcher for best practices information. How exactly does your principal rely on you? Are you important enough to be listened to? Principals and librarians need to be firm allies in helping their schools change in positive ways.” Some simple, concrete ways to help strengthen the alliance.

• iTeach | Information Fluency and the Learning Assessment Cycle “The terms for this model have been chosen carefully – it is information fluency, not digital. Many parts of the information fluency model are analog, or consisted of characteristics for which the digital/analog terminology isn’t germane. It is fluency, not literacy. Information Fluency is a model that builds on the skills of traditional digital literacy, integrating technology with domain (discipline) specific knowledge, critical thinking, presentation, participation and communication skills.”

• The Ontology of the Web (Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Learning Standards) | DMLcentral “Mozilla and the community are creating a map of the territory. We hope it’s “useful in the way of belief” (as William James would put it) but realise that there are other ways to understand and represent the skills and competencies required to read, write and participate on the Web. So, happily, there’s no need to subscribe to Plato’s Theory of Forms to accept the Web Literacy Standard as A Good Idea. For all its top-downness, there is one thing that the Common Core has got going for it. That is a website with a unique URL for each part of every standard.”

• Word Sense This is a clever site. This tool offers a useful service that is part dictionary and part thesaurus. It displays related words, hierarchies & definitions and simple to use. Enter a word into Word Sense and it will show you the definition(s) for the word as well as the connections to associated and similar words. You can see any of the definitions of the connected words by simply clicking on them to pop-up a definition.

• Top Ten Book Recommendation Platforms | Digital Book World A number of e-book recommendation websites are discussed and rated.

• Easily Remove Image Backgrounds Online – Clipping Magic

• Best Android Apps From makeuseof people. On this page, you will find the best Android apps for all your needs. We’ve taken the effort to categorize the apps and picked only those we believe to be the best ones and which will most likely be useful to you.

• John Hattie in conversation with Maxine McKew A good interview from a very articulate man on “What really matters in education?”. A lot of good sense and seemingly simple advice.

• 11 Sites and Apps Kids Are Heading to After Facebook | Common Sense Media The sites listed here are currently being used by many of our students. Each one is briefly described and its popularity explained. Potential positive and negative aspects also indicated for each. There are also links to each tool as well as a few related discussions.

• Rising Seas – Interactive: If All The Ice Melted The 2013 October issue of National Geographic includes a feature about glacial meltdown. They created this interactive map of rising sea levels to complement this feature. The shows viewers what the coastlines of every continent would like if sea levels were to rise 216 feet. The map has an option to display major cities as reference points for viewers.

• Classroom Games – Microsoft Office Games PowerPoint Games EdGames contains downloadable games, game templates and utilities that can be used to enhance any lessons. Powerpoint, Excel and Word templates provided.

• Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations Atlas Obscura is a fantastic site for anyone with even a fleeting interest in travel. It guides you to the world’s hidden wonders, looking at Earth’s most disorienting locations, and surfacing photographs of abandoned water slides. Amazing photography.

• Themeefy | Create. Learn. Teach Themeefy is a curation and self-publishing platform that allows you to gather information from the web or to create your own content and share/read published magazines.

• Big Ideas in Education – Initiating and Facilitating a Library Publishing Program

• How to Cite Social Media in Scholarly Writing | SAGE Connection – Insight

• A Visual Guide on Using Google Drive Offline ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Simple guide to make sure you don’t lose valuable work by enabling Google drive offline

• How to Create Social Media Guidelines for Your School | Edutopia Some simple guidelines/steps.

• How Technology Has Transformed the Classroom [#Infographic] | EdTech Magazine “How Technology Has Transformed the Classroom [#Infographic] Infographic compares educational technologies of yesteryear to the classroom resources of today.”
• ICloud.com, Pinterest, MsEdTechie Blog, Video Lessons, 20… – ThingLink A good number of educational tools arranged around useful headings – from ThingLink
• Top 100 Apps for Teachers, Students and Researchers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning From the Educational Technology and Mobile Learning blog – post “the apps cover a wide variety of skills including writing, presentation making, mind mapping, referencing, and many more. In fact, I could not offer you any better than this great list for back to school. “
• 5 Presentation Brainstorming Warm-ups | Ethos3 – A Presentation Design Agency Some simple but effective ideas/exercises to get a session started.
• 13 Great Twitter Chats Every Educator Should Check Out — THE Journal Twitter chats can make a big difference in how educators are improve their professional practice by providing ideas, resources and inspiration in ways that were not possible only a few years ago. Advice for getting started ans a few good ones to follow. Interested in giving Twitter chats a try? Here are a few tips to get you started:”
• Wake Up Brain! The warm-up activities suggested in this slideshow are from Ethos 3. There are explanations of each activity are available in a corresponding Ethos 3 blog post here – http://www.ethos3.com/2010/01/5-presentation-brainstorming-warm-ups/.
• Top 21 Tips For Mobile Learning | The Upside Learning Blog The ideas can be adapted for school situations quite easily.

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