Well, I don't know about you but I had a great summer and I am ready to start posting again. I have a few things in the pipeline for October. I am going to be looking at a couple of apps first, Comic Life and Quizdojo. While not free they both appear to be promising so I bit the bullet and purchased them so I could review them for you. I also hope to get some website and equipment reviews in too. I am working on a team of teachers that will be implementing the 22i trig grant in my district. I just received an iPad and I am going to start using it extensively with all my classes. I will also let you know how that goes. If you have any questions that you want answered you can leave a comment or email me and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Until next time, have a great week!
VideoNot.es VideoNot.es is a website that lets you take notes on videos you are watching. This would be great if it just stopped there, but it doesn't. It gets better. You enter the URL that your video resides at and VideoNot.es cues up the video. You play in the window on the left, and in the window on the right you have a space where you can take notes. All notes are time coded so you can click on one of your notes and it will go right to the part in the video that you started typing. This is nice, but it gets better. It allows you to sign in through your Google Drive account, thus allowing you to do all the things that come with Drive, like sharing.
Their are many cool things to this tool, but it still needs some improvement. Everything is not as smooth and easy as I would like it to be. When you try to click on the link you get when it is shared you need to install a small plugin to allow it to run. This can get a little confusing. I was able to do it without a problem on my computer, but when I shared something with a student they had an issue making it work the first time. When you do get it working it opens up the website, but without the video and note content. You have to go to File, Open, and then choose the file. I think that this process needs to be streamlined more. In conclusion, I think that this is a great tool to use. I think that it is not as intuitive as I would like it to be yet, but it shows great promise. VideoNot.es gets my seal of approval. I just finished a page on my site here that has a link and short synopsis to a few of the good coding/programming sites that I have come across in my travels on the internet. I hope that you find it useful. If you have any others that you like, or would like to share please let me know. Thanks!
Coding with your kids ClassDojo is a great site for keeping track of all the little things that your students do, good and bad. I am currently reviewing the site and app and I will update this post once I have finished. (March 17, 2013 update) I have been using this app/site for a few weeks now and I am impressed. The kids have liked it and it has been easy to work with as I move around the computer lab. I had the opportunity to share it with some of my fellow teachers and a few have expressed some interest. I hope that they have nothing but success and I hope they have stories for me about how they use it to help me use it better in my classroom. I am a collector. I collect websites and resources and "when I have time" I like to go back and take a look at them. Sometimes this takes longer than others. One site that I just got back to was Socrative. Socrative is a great website, and app, that you can use with your classes. You can create a quiz, test, question, poll, or whatever and you can have your class take it using the student app or the website. There are a couple little tricks to know, but I found it to be a great free resource that I have just started using with my classes. For all of you teachers who need to collect data on your classes, this is the website for you. I loved that I could pull out the data and look at it in Excel. I am going to create a page on this site that contains all of the resources that I found for using this website. I will let you know when I'm done. :)
I think that I need to get my professional development blog up and running for this year. I plan on using this forum to discuss articles that I have read and ideas that I have stumbled upon throughout the school year. I
I am posting to this site once again to give some thoughts to new ideas. I have been working hard to come up with relevant material to teach to my kids. I have a bunch of materials, but they need to be sorted and organized. I have been working within the 21Things4Students framework and using a bunch of materials that I have developed for it. I hope that within the next few weeks I can post
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Doug's Dream
Welcome to my new ed-tech site. I hope to create a site where all educators can "beg, borrow, and steal" thoughts and ideas relating to educational technology and teaching. |