Useful links 06/09/2017 (p.m.)

“Technology is just a tool” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by rhondda.p

• Beautiful and easy to use newsletters | Smore Smore allows users to create digital flyers that can be easily shared and accessed by anyone interested. The most useful thing about Smore is that it allows admin/teachers to embed photos and videos right in the flyer to easily share what is going on in the school.

• EDpuzzle Edpuzzle is a site that lets users select videos from YouTube to edit and customize for your students. Once you have the video you want for your class, add text and images to the video to for enrichment opportunities and add questions to assess your students’ knowledge.

• Duolingo: Learn Spanish, French and other languages for free This is a good enrichment tool, one that could be used when students finish an activity early or as a way to start off class each day. Most of the lessons are short and they are all interactive and engaging. Users complete written exercises to match words and phrases, plus Duolingo has a speaking component that has users speak the new language they’re learning.

• Recap Recap is an online tool that teachers can use to post questions that students have to answer through a video response.
  English language learners could practice their skills if they had to post daily/weekly question on Recap that they have to answer in English.
  A feature about this tool is that it keeps your prior videos, so students can visually see their growth.

• Newsela | Warriors look unstoppable going into Game 4 of the NBA Finals Newsela posts current, high-interest articles on their website daily. It is a US site but still has articles that could be used with Aust. students.This site is good for English language learners because it can alter a text’s Lexile with a simple click of a button. Through this site, students with lower English skills can participate in class by reading the same text as other students but at a lower Lexile.

• Learning, made joyful – Memrise Memrise can assist learners to learn a language through games, quizzes, and repetition.
  You can use competition with the students as Memrise includes a leader board and points system to get them to continue learning outside of the classroom.

• Quizalize Quizzes are a long-standing tools for assessment. Quizalize is a tool that aims to make quizzes into friendly online competitions. Teachers can create quizzes that test subject knowledge or can pick from a selection of a large number of ready-made quizzes. Students can be grouped into teams, play as individuals at home, or sit down to a formal test offered through this ed tech tool. Quizalize works on most mobile devices.

• 5 Myths About Teaching Kids to Code – The Edvocate Learning to code in the early years can help children to develop problem-solving skills, improve creativity and boost their attention. There are still myths that survive when it comes to teaching students to code in the early ages. This article discusses the validity of the most common five of them.

• Do students lose depth in digital reading? – The Tech Edvocate  An interesting article comparing the ways in which we read in print and onscreen. The author discusses the results he gathered between 2013 and 201. He obtained data from 429 university students drawn from five countries (the U.S., Japan, Germany, Slovenia and India).The students in the study reported that print was aesthetically more enjoyable, saying things such as “I like the smell of paper” or that reading in print is “real reading.” What’s more, print gave them a sense of where they were in the book – they could “see” and “feel” where they were in the text.

• Formative Homepage  Formative wants to encourage students to learn from feedback and corrections. teachers can watch in real time as students answer questions and can go in to give assistance.This allows students to feel that they are receiving one-to-one attention. It also offers way for teachers to provide personalized comments outside the classroom. The tool with Maths and Science focused subjects.. Free for students and teachers.

• Tristan Bancks | Australian Children’s & Teen Author | Kids’ & YA Books: Story Scrapbook Story Scrapbook is a transmedia story brainstorming tool. It lets you bring together images, video, music, text and web grabs, making creative writing interactive and fun. “It is based on my own multimedia-fuelled writing process, bringing the writing process alive for people who think visually, interactively and aurally, as well as textually.”

• Goodreads | Tristan Bancks’s Blog – Vision Boarding for Writers – June 08, 2017 05:57

• Python – teachwithict  A collection of free Python lessons Lessons include: Shakespearean Insult Generator, Magic 8 ball, Sorting hat, Mad Libs, Chat bot and Coding Golf

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

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Useful links

“Quotation: ”…I refuse to engage in ba” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Ken Whytock

 

Getting Critical About Critical Thinking | Edutopia “Critical thinking is when the brain is active, making connections to the material and applying original thought to the concept. It’s the difference between struggling to remember (“ugh!”) and struggling to solve (“yeah!”).” Whilst all kids think, not all activities trigger critical thinking. There are some ideas here that use targeted approaches and strategies to cause those young brains to work.

Writing 25 Word Stories [Handout] | THE TEMPERED RADICAL “A 25 word story is exactly what it sounds like:  A 25 word story.  It’s a writing style that I first discovered by following Kevin Hogdson — a really remarkable sixth grade language arts teacher — in Twitter. ”

5 Fantastic, Fast Formative Assessment Tools | Edutopia Updated post from @coolcatteacher (Vicky Davis.) ” Formative Assessment done as students are learning makes better teachers.” Some great ideas/tools discussed here.

Become an OneNote Expert in 50 minutes – Microsoft IT Showcase – YouTube Video how-to for the optimum usage of Microsoft OneNote, published on YouTube on 17 Feb 2017.
“Brian Moring, productivity trainer with Microsoft IT Showcase, demonstrates how to use OneNote for collaboration and increased productivity. Find out how to create a OneNote notebook, manage your task list and action items, and share notes in meetings. Shows how OneNote integrates with other Office apps, and learn how to access OneNote from Windows, iOS, or Android device. Brian answers questions about best practices for using OneNote.”

10 Reasons to Create Makerspaces in Your School – The Edvocate 10 things to consider when thinking about creating a makerspace in your classroom.. These should assist you to understand why you would consider it and encouragement to do it.

How to Self-Edit Infographic | Now Novel Learning how to self-edit your writing empowers you to polish your prose. Ernest Hemingway famously quipped that you should ‘write drunk and edit sober’. This might not be good advice for teetotallers (or in general). But there is a grain of truth in Hemingway’s words: you need a state of mental clarity that allows you to be methodical when editing. A professional editor who has polished many novels can turn your promising manuscript into a sleek novel. Yet if you can’t afford professional editing services at present, or want to tidy up your work before showing it to an editor, you can learn how to self-edit well. Useful infographic that lists the for top tips on editing your story

Write. Create. Publish: 4 Student-Centered Writing Projects to do Before Summer Break | Shaelynn Farnsworth Ideas to encourage students to start writing and sharing their voice with the classroom and globe. This will foster engagement, relevance, and practice with essential skills all students need.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves Test your comma IQ  – online quiz

School Librarians of Rhode Island Raising the Profile of Their Profession | School Library Journal  The School Librarians of Rhode Island (SLRI) found that the image students, and parents in particular, held of Rhode Island public school libraries was behind the times. It was clear that perception needed to evolve along with reality.What they decided to do is explained.

How to Use Google Forms’ New Quizzes Feature – Using Technology Better

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

Useful links

   by  mrkrndvs 

• Reading Australia – Home Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors’ (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia’s rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia’s history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW.”

• This Is What A 1915 Military Hospital Looks Like Now This Is What A 1915 Military Hospital Looks Like Now. “Then and now” photos show the WWI military hospital on the Greek island of Lemnos, where nurses treated Anzac soldiers injured at Gallipoli. This set of 16 images (the current day colour photos overlaid with the 1915 black and white shots) are part of an exhibition on display at the State Library of NSW

• Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs | LitReactor

• Bloom’s and Gardner’s Writing Matrix for Years 3/4/5 – Australian Curriculum Lessons “Bloom’s and Gardner’s Writing Matrix for Years 3/4/5” This writing matrix is directly linked to blooms taxonomy and Gardner’s multiple intelligences. It includes a wide range of writing activities.

• Persuasive Writing – Emotional vs Intellectual Words – Writers Write A useful list for writers. “Persuasive writers use words to convince the reader to listen or to act.  This is a list of words found originally in an article called “Common words that suck emotional power out of your content’ by John Gregory Olson. He explains how words have emotions attached to them, and that you should choose the correct ones for the response you want to elicit from your reader.”

• How To Get Published: Jane Friedman Outlines The Options (INFOGRAPHIC) Infographic. “Jane Friedman, a former publisher of Writer’s Digest, has created a useful infographic to help writers understand some of the different ways for getting published. She has divided the various models into five potential publishing paths, outlining the pros and cons of each.”

• Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre London; All The World’s A Stage – YouTube YouTube: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre London; Walking tour guide to the Globe Theatre.

• Ultimate Character Questionnaire ~ Writer Owl Long list of questions that should help flesh out any character.

• Simply Mindless A list of fiction prompts for writers.

• A quick tutorial to fantasy maps and cartography by justMANGO on DeviantArt A quick tutorial to fantasy maps and cartography by justMANGO. A useful and well-explained tutorial that any visual artist and writer could use.

• 7 “Tricks” to Improve Your Writing Overnight

• Writing the war: personal stories from WWI | State Library Victoria

• A Comprehensive Guide to Content Curation

• Writer’s Block: Overcome It By Following The Map | Write to Done Infographic: Got Writer’s Block? – This is a a useful outline to follow to keep the story flowing.

• So You Want to Write a Novel | Eric M. Ralph

• Poetry example- The Sea by carriezona on DeviantArt An example showing how to create a poem from a published book page.

• Community Creator Dan Harmon Unlocks His Storytelling Technique: Meet the Embryos – mentorless Writer Dan Harmon sets out the elements he considers are needed for a satisfying story. He uses them to map out nearly most of his stories. They are simple and the list is a useful tip for other aspiring writers.

• TED – How to tell a great story, visualized By Andrew… Infographic. A nice visual that explains the writing process.

• 5 Elements of Story Structure – Helping Writers Become Authors

• The Sound of Hamlet, part 1 — Good Tickle Brain: A Mostly Shakespeare Webcomic comic strip that plays with with Shakespeare. One of the best known musicals (Sound of Music) has been mashed with “that most-beloved of Shakespeare plays… Hamlet.”

• General Shakespeare — Good Tickle Brain: A Mostly Shakespeare Webcomic “An eclectic collection of mostly Shakespeare-related comics and other miscellany” – from Good Tickle Brain site”

• Shakespeare — Good Tickle Brain: A Mostly Shakespeare Webcomic 3 panel comics of many of Shakespeare’s plays. Amusing comics that offer an interesting way to get students discussing the plays.

• JULIUS CAESAR AND THE END OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC POWERPOINT LESSON – TeachersPayTeachers.com From the Teachers pay teachers site. “A visually appealing PowerPoint covering Roman History from the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey through the death of Mark Antony and rise of Octavian. Each slide includes images and graphics that hold students’ attention and keep them focused on the lesson. Topics covered include the rise of Julius Caesar, Pompey and the Senate’s plan to bring him home, his crossing of the Rubicon, the civil war, his relationship with Cleopatra, his assassination, and much more. It concludes with an open-ended exit ticket that has students thinking critically about the things they learned. “

• Julius Caesar family tree – – Yahoo Image Search Results Many image options for the family tree of Julius Caesar

• Shakespeare’s The Tempest Narrative Map | Mike Wirth Art Tempest Island Narrative Map. Mapping places and actions in The Tempest

• William Shakespeare’s Birthday Flowchart | GalleyCat “William Shakespeare flowchart from Goodreads.

• Shakespeare’s Britain Map of Shakespeare’s Britain.

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

Useful links

   by  William M Ferriter 

• Excellent Google Plus Cheat Sheet for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Infographic: Google plus cheat sheet. This useful cheat sheet was created by Eric Welke. It outlines the different shortcuts and tips you and your students need to know if you are going to make use of the full potential of this platform’s features.

• 10 Great Platforms for Primary Source Documents ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning From Educational Technology and Mobile Learning site – 10 different sources for archives – documents, photo etc These platforms offer searching opportunities for access to some great primary resources.

• Morphing into a 21st Century Teacher (updated) | An Ethical Island This infographic asks you to check if you have the right characteristics or skills (and model them to students) to see if you have what it takes to be the 21st century teacher.

• Fight the ‘Zombie Librarians’ | ISTE 2014 – The Digital Shift ISTE Keynote by teacher librarian Jennifer LaGarde. She gave a great speech that asks all TL’s to question what sort of librarian they are. Are we preparing for the future or stuck in the past. – or to put it another way Are we Zombie librarians or zombie fighters?

• Self Censorship Better Than Book Banning Imagination Soup Fun Learning and Play Activities for Kids An argument against the censorship of reading matter. Some nice images and links to other information.

• My Incredible Body – An App That Teaches Kids How the Human Body Works | Android 4 Schools From Richard Byrne’s “android4schools” site. A free Android app that is designed to help younger students learn how the human body works. The app features eight sections: circulation, muscles, the senses, kidneys & urine, skeleton, respiration, digestion, and brain & nerves. Each section contains short animated videos that explain the functions of each system and how it works.

• Free Technology for Teachers: How to Use PicCollage – And Five Ideas for Using It In Your Classroom Another useful post from Richard Byrne with some good ideas about using PicCollage with students. With the app you can arrange pictures, video, text, and stickers into collages very easily. “From the app you can share your collage to Google Drive, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, and many other file sharing services” He has also included a video where he demonstrates how to use the tool without creating a PicCollage account. It is a free tool and available as an Android or iPad app.

• Character trait lists Character traits – 2 lists – of positive and negative traits.

• Writing Aid – words that describe someone’s voice — Lana CorryDownloadable A4 writing aid for quick reference – words to describe someone’s voice.

• 7 Things We’d Change About Google Hangouts “Google Hangouts has allowed its users to participate in text, voice and video chats since May 2013, when Google first launched the unified communications platform. That doesn’t mean there cannot be improvements. For instance even though the free chat service is useful and convenient, it could use some tweaks to make it even better”

• Inquiry skills across the Australian Curriculum | inquiry learning & information literacy Inquiry skills and information literacy are embedded in the Australian Curriculum in the subject areas Science, History, Geography, Economics and Business (draft), Civics and Citizenship (draft, and in the general capabilities Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) . The post has an embedded video that presents the frameworks and concepts underpinning the author’s analysis.

• Don’t Just Copy. Do the Right Thing. – Venspired A nice downloadable poster about making the right decision.

• The World’s Largest Scrabble Game – Hammacher Schlemmer This Scrabble Wall is one of nine done by an artist. It is beautiful, large and expensive. The idea offers us a very cool “word wall” application. I wonder if a project for our VCAL boys would be to create something that offers similar play/word opportunities for our library. A game board that could be used for play or for messages.

• The Vertical Chess Set – Hammacher Schlemmer Another idea offers us a different way for our students to play chess in the library. Could it be a project for our students to build something along similar lines.

• Vibrant ‘BookBenches’ Painted With Images From Iconic British Stories – DesignTAXI.com  Some fantastic seats based on books here. How good would they be around Melbourne (A city of literature) streets. Also good for around our schools

• 3 Minute Teaching With Tech Tutorial – Using TedEd for Flipped or Blended Learning Lessons I enjoy watching many TedVideos. This post offers a howto to use them with students.

• 18 Ways to Use LEGO Bricks to Teach Literacy A great list of links that suggest how you can use Lego to teach literacy.

• Getting to Know the Makerspace Movement in Education A brief article that looks at the how and why of the makerspace activities are moving into schools and education. it also includes 4 links to some useful digital resources for anyone interested in following up.

• Read Aloud Roundup: The 10 Books I Suggest Most for Middle School Read Alouds | The Caffeinated Librarian An interesting, annotated list of books for reading aloud to students.

• The Best List of Reading Response Questions Ever. | The Caffeinated Librarian An very extensive list of questions that could be used to get students to respond to their reading.

• 4 Belief Statements Underlying Student Performance | Getting Smart

• Google Tricks and Tips: How to Make a Copy of Google Files – Shake Up Learning Useful reminder of the options we have to save our files using one of the Google tools.

• Which Creative Commons License is Right for me? A useful comic poster from CC Poland offers a good resource to begin discussions about Creative Commons. 6 types of licenses are discussed with with their separate conditions attached to each of them. “

• 5 Awesome Resources for Badges in the Classroom – Shake Up Learning The post briefly discusses how to recognise learning achievement by awarding students digital badges. The useful part is the annotated list of five useful technologies, that teachers could use to create their own badges, and they are not limited to a single device type.

• All Published Literature Quizzes and Games – Sporcle Games & Trivia Many games and quizzes, all based around literature including those about: authors, genres, opening lines, last lines, particular novels, poets and poetry, nursery rhymes and even words used in novels.

• Trading Cards – ReadWriteThink From ReadWriteThink, the Trading Cards app could give students and alternative way to share what they understand about the characters and places from the books they have been reading. The fields/categories that can be documented include: fictional person, real person, fictional place, real place, object, event and vocabulary word. Each category has specific guiding questions to assist students. Space is limited so students have to be able to demonstrate their ideas succinctly and only include the most important information. The app is easy to use, has good “how-to” information, auto-saves and can be printed or emailed.

• The Book Chook: Activities for Children’s Book Week 2014 A comprehensive post about how you could approach the 2014 theme “Connect to reading”.

• All Quiet on the Western Front – Book Summary & Analysis by Thug Notes – YouTube “All Quiet on the Western Front – Book Summary & Analysis by Thug Notes”.

• Horizon Report 2014 K-12 edition – an outline A brief explanation of the Horizon report with links on the Bright Ideas blog

• Animation – The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers – YouTube Classroom Management Strategies To Take Control Of Noisy Students “This video explains a little-used, often-forgotten but very effective classroom management strategy for taking control of really tough groups of students right at the start of lessons. This Classroom Management method is for really challenging, noisy groups that take ages to settle, cost you a lot of time and cause you a lot of stress and frustration. You’ll learn WHY some noisy groups of students take longer than others to settle down and HOW to get them in a state where they are more likely to stop talking and listen to you so that they enter your classroom on YOUR terms.”

• Leading Learning – Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada 2014 Downloadable PDF

• Leading Learning  Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada, 2014 presents a model for the development and implementation of the school library as a library learning commons. It provides educators with a common set of standards of practice for moving forward. CLA President Marie DeYoung stated that the organization considers this publication as a “definitive learning support that is critical for all Canadian schools.” Leading Learning addresses the impact on education of new technologies. The explosion of digital information calls for new working spaces, new networks, and new approaches to supporting learning. Leading Learning is focused on the concept of the new school library learning commons which responds to the needs of 21st century learners.”

• Part 1: Forty Educational Websites To Put In Your Toolkit | 21 st Century Educational Technology and Learning The first in a series of posts created by a practicing teacher where he lists those websites he thinks should be in every teacher’s toolbox. The useful aspects of each is listed in points under the links.

• PREPS: 5 steps for electronic notetaking success SmartBlogs “A guide written by Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) where she explains the unique nature of electronic note taking. “I’ve developed a system that I share in my new book “Reinventing Writing” that I call PREPS. In my opinion, there are two contenders for best notebook service: Evernote and One Note. I’ll mention them throughout this guide.”

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

Tips for writing a blog post

It is the start of our school year and i have been talking with teachers about some of their class activities. We have had some year 9 students in English classes respond to literature – novels and poetry, in class blog. We are always tinkering with how we present the idea of a blog to the students.

Whilst looking for new ides to add to my collection of information about blogging I came across the following infographic below, “10 Elements Of Style Of Post Writing“. It was on Marko Saric’s  HowToMakeMyBlog  It offers some good advice for bloggers based  on a book about writing recommended by author Stephen King, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. The post and infographic has some rules of grammar and most of it is a good guide for anyone who has an interest in writing in general, not just writing for a blog.  These writing tips could improve writing by making content more coherent and interesting for any readers.

I have added it to me digital folio of useful tips for class blogging and will be using these tips with our students.

Like this infographic? Get more writing advice at http://www.HowToMakeMyBlog.com.