Discovery Education (formerly United Streaming) has tons of really wonderful resources for teachers and students! One of the participants in last week’s training said that it was the best training she’d ever had (Thanks, Angela J.!)!

With that in mind, for those of you having trouble accessing this great resource, here are the steps:

1. Go to http://tech.hylton.groupfusion.net and log in.
2. Under Links, click Discovery Education/United Streaming. If this is your first time using Discovery Education Streaming, be sure to write down the access code located just below the link.
3. To sign up, use the access code and complete the registration form. If you already have a username and password for Discovery Education, log in.
4. Once you are logged in, click “Streaming” in the upper left corner and have fun searching!

At the start of the school year, during the Technology Kickoff presentation, I challenged teachers to take their Professional Learning Communities to the next level – beyond the walls of the building and the boundaries of the school district. I thought that now, right before our PLC Professional Development Day, it would be a good time to re-issue that challenge and provide an idea on where to start.

I wrote about Twitter.com last year. This is a GREAT place to start. I know some folks will say, “What? Why on earth would I want to know what other people are doing during all hours of the day, every day of the week, and in 140 characters or less?!?!” Well, the key is in WHO those other people are. In Twitter you “follow” people with similar interests and backgrounds. They, in turn, “follow” you. It may sound like one big stalkfest (I know stalkfest isn’t a real word. But this is a blog and not even remotely close to anything resembling literature), but Twitter has proven to be the most valuable online tool I have used during the past year. After logging in to Twitter, within minutes tips, tricks, and resources come flying in.

If the key is in who to follow, how do you find the people? Twitter4teachers provides lists of educators on Twitter by subject area. Once you find folks that post information that you find useful, check out who they are following and follow them, too. If you know of others in your field, you can search for them on Twitter. It’s amazing how many people are tweeting–authors, professors, politicians (and, yes, Ashton Kutcher is tweeting, too, if you are into that sort of thing). Or, you could check out who your friendly-ITRT is following and start there. You will find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tekkieteacher.

Once you have started setting up your online PLC, the next step is to actually post something. For those of you who are a bit shy, try “re-tweeting”, or just re-posting someone else’s post that you found useful. Be sure to include the “RT” indicator and attribute the post to the original person with the “@” symbol like the example below:

When working within an online PLC, you will get more out of it if you are a contributor to the conversation rather than just a bystander. Before you know it, people will start following you, too! I recommend always screening your followers and blocking anyone that you aren’t sure about. However, I have to admit that it was also very cool once some of the big names in the the Ed Tech world who I was following started following me, too!

Our PLCs are about helping and learning from each other to improve ourselves and the instructional process. There are 195 people in my Ed Tech PLC and I am much better at what I do because of them. Come join me!

 For those of you who are interested in one of the 10 SMART Boards we are purchasing, here is a great site with resources for SMART educators. This might be a nice place to start for your lesson ideas!

Smart Educator Resources

Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips is a site is sent in by our very own Jennifer H. According to Jen, “This website is a fantastic way for students and/or teachers to brush up on grammar.  It is styled after Gossip Girl – a tv and book series.  The quick and dirty tips are amazing.”

Please don’t forget that our faculty calendar is officially online this year! You should all be receiving daily email notices about all the upcoming events. These events “pull” from every webpage that you are associated with, including your class webpages, the faculty calendar, and the IT webpage. If you are not receiving these messages, please contact your friendly ITRT.

To see everything that is on the Faculty Calendar, login to SchoolFusion and click My Calendar on the left. You can search for specific group events by checking/unchecking the boxes below the calendar.

If there is anything missing from the calendar that you believe should be included, again, please contact your friendly ITRT.

Since last week’s Technology Kickoff presentation, a number of you have asked about the tool I used to create the opening slide, http://wordle.net. Wordle is a completely free tool that allows you to create a word cloud out of any text, including poetry, literature, speeches, etc. All you have to do is copy/paste the text into the create field and viola – a personalized word cloud. Wordles can be used to introduce a lesson and spark discussion, or in our Language Arts classes to convey the main ideas in a piece of literature. This site created Wordles for every presidential inaugural address since Washington!

To get started, I recommend copying/pasting your favorite poem or a couple of paragraphs from your favorite book to see what kind of Wordle is created!

(Originally posted 12/8/2008)

For the past year, the Tech Team and I have maintained Hylton’s webportal at http://guest.portaportal.com/pwcs. However, I recently moved all of our links (and added lots of new ones!) to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs. Both PortaPortal and Delicious are online bookmarking tools. However, Delicious has proven to be much more user-friendly. It is easier to create bookmarks, and it is also easier to search your bookmarks. Once you have over 100 bookmarked sites (we currently have 297!), the search capabilities become very important!

Hylton’s Delicious site hosts a collection of bookmarked sites for teachers, students, and parents. Just go to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs, and use the tags listed along the right side to find tons of links to online tools for virtually every subject. We will continue to add bookmarks, so check back often to find out what’s new! And, if you know of a site that you would like included, forward it along to your friendly ITRT.

Hylton’s PortaPortal site will remain “live”, but no new bookmarks will be added. Instead, everything new will be posted at http://delicious.com/hyltonhs.

Monday is our first official day back at school. We have a week to get everything in order before our students arrive. I love this time of year. Although I am sad to see another summer break come to a close, I love the “fresh start” feeling that comes with a new school year.

As you arrive back in your classrooms, one of the first things most of you want to do is boot up your classroom computers. However, the computers, which have been sitting idle for eight weeks, may not be overly cooperative. If you have trouble, please be sure to create a Help Request asking for assistance. Of course, you will have to find a working computer to log the Help Request. The computers in the IT Lab are up and running for just that purpose! Our amazing TSSPEC, Teresa H., will be running around all week fixing things up, but it’s important to document the problem(s) so they are fixed as quickly as possible.

When you fill in a Help Request, be sure to include the following information:

• Detailed description of the problem
• County inventory tag # (it’s on the yellow sticker)
• Serial # (if you can find it)
• Your name
• Classroom number

Welcome back!

In this session, ISTE gave some folks an opportunity to showcase their products that had earned the ISTE Seal of Alignment. Here’s what was presented:

Adobe Curriculum and NETS
-targets enabling instructors to be successful in the classroom

IC3 – Certiport Products
-Internet and Computing Core Certification
-Global standard for measuring digital and computer literacy

eMINTS National Center – about NETST
-new approach to teaching and learning
-from Missouri, originally
-professional development to help teachers with technology

School of Education from Johns Hopkins – Online Graduate certificate Program in School Administration and Supervision
-If you go through the entire program, you will have fully met the NETSA standards
-prepare school administrators to be technology leaders
-One year program – 18 credits
-focus on team-based learning community approach to distance education

EZTech from Learning.com (http://www.learning.com/easytech/)
-Ann McMullan – Director of Tech from Texas Klein school division
-how to integrate technology into core curriculum
-Continually adding new content (k-8)

PBS TeacherLine (http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/)
-Capstone Certificate Program
-30 week program – online professional development for Technology Educators

Verizon Thinkfinity.org (http://www.thinkfinity.org/home.aspx)
-free resources for teachers, students, parents, etc
-free professional development, too – with emphasis on integration

Presented by Tammy Worcester, ESSDACK

www.tammyworcester.com

http://handouts.tammyworcester.com

On instructional uses of cell phones – yes they can be bad, and most schools ban them – but they can be used for good, too!

Most kids say when they come to school they are “taking a step back in time” when it comes to technology

1-800-Goog-411 – Free 411 service from Google

Text questions, any questions, to Google at 466453

Google maps – choose the “send” option to send maps and addresses to your phone

http://www.google.com/mobile/ - has lots of tools that can be used with cell phones

Posting to blogs by cell phone – via email – set up through blog settings – can create project-specific blogs and students “send” (aka email) assignments – show up as blog posts – caution: students have to sign posts somehow, either with id # or name, so teacher knows where they came from – nice way to post pictures on blogs

Cell phone to Flickr – can email pictures to flickr, too, just like to the blogs – be sure to include tags – http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser/index.html can then be used in combination with tags to create slideshows and embed in blogs (But Flickr is often blocked, not sure how this will work in that case)

Podcasting by cell phone – really easy using http://drop.io/ – “drop” audio files from your phone – click phone link and gives you a number to call to record your message – can embed the audio

http://www.geograffiti.com/ – leave voice marks – marks it on a map – call in and talk about where you are at that time – nice for geography or family vacations – Caution: there is no filtering so kids can say anything

http://www.polleverywhere.com/ – Student response tool using cell phones – nice example of instructional use of cell phones

Additional links at end of presentation – check the presentation link – one really cool one on ring tones that can’t be heard based on your age – http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/

There’s just one more week to go and I’ve been struggling to figure out what websites would be the most useful to teachers at this time of year. Like our students, it’s hard not to “check out” mentally a little early. It’s so hard, in fact, that I’ve given up trying. This week’s featured website is just for fun. BeFunky.com is a cool online program that enables you ”turn your photos into incredible artwork with one click.”  

Here’s an example of what you can do:

There are some very good educational uses of this application–in our art classes and with any of your students presentations–but mostly it’s just fun!

Recently we’ve had a number of reports about thumb drives not being recognized by school computers. You plug the drive in, go to “My Computer” and……nothing. The thumb drive is not listed. The problem is that the drive that would be normally assigned to the thumb drive is already being “mapped” to something else. The result is a very confused computer. To alleviate this confusion, our wonderful TSSPEC, Teresa H., has added an icon to your Novell desktop called USB Drive.

If the thumb drive is not being recognized, just click this handy icon and choose a different drive letter (I like “U” for USB).

This site looks very promising.

http://www.shmoop.com/teachers/

The mission of the site is “To make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age”. While the focus is on literature and poetry, there are also nice resources for social studies, too. Check it out and let me know what you think!

This is the favorites list to end all favorites lists! Vicki Davis, one of the masterminds behind the Flat Classroom Project, has listed her 122 favorite online tools at 122 For You. There are links here to anything and everything (even including weight management!) - you will want to set aside a bit of time to explore all of them! She’s included descriptions for each along with ideas on how to use them for instruction.

I really try to keep my inbox organized – deleting some emails, filing others – but all too often life interferes and the result is an overflowing inbox. Of course, because of Murphy’s Law, this is exactly the time when I will need to find an important email within the hundreds of emails that are waiting there. For times like this, the “filter” feature can really come in handy. I wish they called it a “search” field, because that’s what it does. Just type in something related to what you are searching for, and GroupWise will filter the information and return only those items with that search term. Once you are finished, though, be sure to delete the search term or GroupWise will continue to filter everything and you’ll end up wondering where all your mail went!

This week’s featured website comes from our very own special Librarian, Connie M. If you haven’t checked out Thinkfinity, there are a ton of really nice resources there, including lesson plans, assessments, enrichment activities, and more. Teaching is by far the hardest job on the planet, and anything that might make that job a little easier gets 5 stars from me. This is one of those tools!

Believe it or not, the end of the year is in sight (Yippee!)! The last marking period is upon us and it is time, again, for a reminder that now is a GREAT time to backup all your files and make sure they are secure. Your files can be saved to a thumb drive, a cd rom, or even an external drive if you have it. To backup your files to a thumb drive:

1. Go to Start/My Document (Note: if you have your files stored somewhere else on your C Drive other your My Documents folder, then use these steps to copy those, too)
2. In the My Documents window, highlight all your documents and folders.
3. On the left pane, click Copy the selected items. The Copy Items window displays.
4. On the Copy Items window, select your Thumb Drive (this is usually your E: drive). Click Copy

Let’s face it. We live in a Microsoft-dominated world. Our computers use a Microsoft operating system(Windows) and most of us use Microsoft productivity tools (Office). But believe it or not, there was actually a world before Microsoft. More importantly, there will be a world AFTER Microsoft, too.

How do I know? Because everywhere we turn innovative new companies and individuals are coming up with truly wonderful (and much less expensive) alternatives to Microsoft products. An example is this week’s website of the week, Google Docs. With this free service, you can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. AND it allows you to easily share files and collaborate with others. Everything is then stored online – no thumb drives or floppies needed!

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really have anything against Microsoft. However, I do think competition is a good thing!

For more information and ideas on how you might use Google Docs with your students, contact your friendly ITRT!

SOLs are approaching very quickly! I remember when I returned to education in 2004 I was a bit taken aback by the World Geography pacing guide which had me finishing instruction by April 21. It did not make much sense to me since the last day of school was not until June. And then I remembered – SOL End of Course exams are actually given in May, many weeks before the end of the school year. (I still have issues with this, but that’s a topic for another day)

With that in mind, I know many of you are getting ready to delve into SOL preparation and review for your students. There are several resources available to help with SOL test preparation. First of all, the Department of Information Technology Services has placed an icon in our Novell desktop for the SOL practice tests, or ePats. If you have not already checked them out, they are a great place to start your SOL review. Secondly, we have many wonderful online resources bookmarked on Hylton’s Delicious site. The Jefferson Labs links are there as well as links to many other resources for each of our four core areas.

This site has been around for a very long time – http://webquest.org/index.php. A webquest is “an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web” and this site is chocked full of over 2500 of them that you can use for your classes! Be sure to click the link on the left that says Find Webquests. There are webquests here on virtually every topic!