Friday, April 24, 2015

Thing 8 Collaborating, Connecting, Sharing

I have used both Skype and the “Skype an Author Network” on several occasions and always had a great experience withi it. As the K-12 Library Media Coordinator, part of my duties are to arrange author visits for students in all grades. Of course, budgets are tight, so the Skype an Author Network is a great resource. It did take a fair amount of time to go through the alphabetical list and match authors to books I already had in the school libraries, but if you have an author in mind and can search for them directly, it would be quite easy to use. Keep in mind of course that big name authors probably won’t be found on this site.  Authors I have Skyped with include Jean Marzollo, Garth Stein, Michelle Knudson, and Caroline Starr Rose to name a few. I highly recommend!

For collaboration among students, I’ve actually had success using a tool not listed on this site - so I thought I would mention it. Prezi has a great “share” option that allows users to edit the same Prezi project simultaneously from different locations. Each person can see where the other(s) editor(s) are working with little “Mii” type characters. My 6th graders loved this feature, and it allowed for extra work progress to be made outside of class time.

I am part of a Google Classroom pilot project through my school district and BOCES this year, and have had a couple of training sessions on it. It seems intuitive, but I have not actually used it with my classes as a means of project grading… Google Docs shared documents/folders seem to be sufficient for my classes - but students do like the accessibility that having their work saved in Google Docs provides, and I can see my District moving in that direction in the future. 


I thought it’d be helpful to use the Calendar feature, and set up a system for my family’s schedule of after-school activities and special events. I shared it with my husband in hopes of it being a dynamic and useful tool, but it turned out that I still rely on my iPhone, so I didn’t find the calendar something that “took” with my family, and don’t see myself using it in a collaborative manner. HOWEVER - I plan to look into using it in school as a reference for teachers. I'm hoping I can set it on my library webpage and use it as a dynamic calendar that reflects library closures (for class use, etc.). Teachers can quickly look and see which periods the library is available. I think this would be very helpful!

Lastly, I further investigated Google Drive and LOVE it - particularly for the accessibility features (makes life easier when I can access work files normally stored to the District server while at home!) AND for the shared documents feature. I set up a folder for each of my classes and have had students share classwork with me via that shared folder. So easy and the kids love it, too! This allows me to provide guidance and feedback more efficiently than just relying on in-class conferences.

Thanks for some more great resources!

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Thing 7 Podcasting and Screencasting

What a fun topic with so much to explore! I think the easiest and most helpful thing for me to do this time is simply go through which resources and tools I spent time exploring. Besides meeting the requirement for this class, I like to think of this blog as my "go to" for refreshing my memory when I'm ready to use these tools with my classes.

I really enjoyed watching the video about the Sequoyah Book program and how the 4th & 5th graders used audioboo.fm and QR codes to post book reviews online. I think this is a great idea and something I hope to try with my 6th graders. We have MacBooks for class use though, so I will need to see if using them instead of iPads and iPods will work.

Although probably not something I plan to incorporate into my own class in the near future, I will definitely share the StoryCorps.me site with other teachers who may require interview based projects. I love how the templates and question ideas are already there to guide interviewers based on their relationship with the interviewee. Looks like a great resource.

Another tool that I really liked but will probably not be able to use in school due to Internet radio being blocked is AudioBoom. The way Polly's example was so easily embedded in our Thing 7 text shows just how easy to use this source can be. I may play with it at home though, and see if students can at least listen to the files I embed... will need to investigate this further.

I LOVE the idea of how Flipgrid works and will definitely try this out with my classes at the end of the quarter as a means of informal assessment. I may ask them to share the most valuable thing they learned during our 10 week class and then use the Flipgrid on my webpage as part of my introduction to future class sections.

Screenr is a resource that I have checked out and found really easy to use. Due to my current recovery from strep throat and sinus infection, I opted not to record my already nasally voice! But you can view a brief screener I created to show how to search for a book about horses on our library catalog at https://www.screenr.com/qhL7 .  I think it might also be helpful to use Screencast.com with my 10 week Digital Literacy class. I probably wouldn't need it to record a class lecture; However - I often run out of time for class presentations and end up grading a student's project without them present. I loved the idea of using screen casting while grading their projects so that they can still get that more "active" feedback, rather than just a rubric and grade handed back to them. Very cool!

Overall, I found Thing 7 to be very helpful and the tools easy to use. Thanks!! and on to Thing 8 :-)