PD in your PJ's!

Join CCSD59 staff on Twitter the first Thursday of every month at 8:00pm.  Tonight we are chatting about Social Emotional Learning.  New topics every month.  A great way to collect ideas and resources from fellow educators.  #D59Chat

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a chance to catch up on whatever it is you love to do over break!

If one of your New Year's Resolutions is to try something new in your classroom, I would love to help and plan with you!  Please send me an email with your thoughts and times you can meet.

In the meantime, here are a few helpful links I pulled from the latest blog edition of practicaledtech.com 

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Here are the week’s most popular posts on FreeTech4Teachers.com:
1. 10 Good Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms Add-ons for Teachers
2. 5 Great Things You Can Do With Google Sheets
3. A Short Overview of 12 Tools for Creating Flipped Classroom Lessons
4. Click to Spin – A Fun and Free Random Name Picker
5. 15 Good Tools for Quickly Gathering Feedback from Students
6. 11 Apps and Sites for Learning to Code
7. EDPuzzle Now Has a Google Classroom Integration

Looking for online PD/Graduate Credits?On January 5th Richard Bryne is starting a new section of Getting Going With GAFE (Google Apps for Education). Three graduate credits are available in that course. More information about that course is available here.

January 11th begins a new section of Classroom Blog Jumpstart. More information about that online class is available here.

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Explaining ideas orally vs. written

Need a way to have students record their voice and explain their thinking? From any device, go to https://online-voice-recorder.com/.   Simply click record, and students can record up to 7 minutes of themselves talking.  They can also do this with tablets, using an app like Easy Voice Recorder.  The recordings are saved as an audio file that can easily be added to other applications.   For example, the recording can be uploaded to WeVideo, Google Slideshow, Padlet or Thinglink.

Some instructional ideas for use are to have kids explain how they solved a math problem, talk about the steps to conduct an experiment, reflect on a mentor text, or create a dialogue with a partner in another language.  They could also type up a story/essay/poem in Google Docs, and then insert a link of them reading the text for fluency practice, or a link to them reflecting on the piece.

And there's more! Imagine if they could take a picture of something, draw on it, and talk about it.  I love this app Clarisketch!  

Click HERE for samples of Clarisketch.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

Looking for a way to connect your math students to others around the world? Want to challenge them to use their math knowledge both in school and at home? Check out this innovative idea to motivate students!  This would be a great warm-up or closing activity!

There is a Global Math Twitter Challenge and it’s very easy to participate. Each day (or whenever you want), your class can post one math question from their lesson and can answer other math questions posted from students around the globe.  Simply type the hashtag #gmttcMS (for middle school) with the question or response.  You can also search Twitter with that hashtag to see what other classrooms at your grade level are posting. This is an ongoing challenge throughout the school year. The more classes that sign up, the better it will be, so spread the word!

Want to learn more about how Twitter is being used to improve instruction?  

Check out these links!

NEA: Can Tweeting Help your Teaching?

Edudemic: 30 Innovative Ways to use Twitter in the Classroom

A new way to share learning - Google Tour Builder

Communicating and creativity come to life in an interactive template, using Google Tour Builder.

Google Maps Interactive Tour Builder - Students and teachers will LOVE this new tool!  It's a great way to set the stage for inquiry-driven learning. Students can tell a story and create a "tour" to present learning, using pins on maps.  With each pin, they add a description which can include other forms of media, such as text, videos, photos, and links.  The project creates an interactive timeline of events.  This tool has so many possibilities for all content areas!   

A few lesson ideas:

• Multimedia letter about events in a novel, or events in a war.  Students assume the role of a character or historical figure to create their tour.
• Students create one class tour, and add information for a place their family is from.  Students can look for things they have in common with their classmates for a writing project.
• Students can add information about various cities in one area of study.  For example, the class can create a tour of South America, with each student creating a pin in various key cities.
• Create a tour from one biome to another with photos and descriptions.
• Create a tour measuring miles from one city to another.  
• Create a tour of famous musicians or artists, with places of their birth, and pictures of samples of their work.

Sounds interesting?  Here's a list of sample tours to check out!

Civil War Battlefields

Being a post 9/11 National Guard Member (Example of Digital Storytelling)

Underwater Reef Tour

Another similar web tool is tripline.net.