Web Tools

Elementary Students Tweeting

I was so inspired by Alice Keeler’s recent post, Class Twitter Account: How Your Students Can Tweet, that I decided to take her idea and generate a Google Form for our soon-to-be-instituted elementary school student tech team to allow them to quickly submit tweets for consideration by our new Twitter feed. That part was easy but I also wanted to make it easy for them to see the Twitter feed as well. I decided to make a Google Sites page containing the embedded Google Form as well as a Twitter widget of the feed. For some reason, I just couldn’t get it to work so I headed to Google Search. I landed on a Tech Tip published by the IT folks with West Hartford Public Schools: Embed a Twitter Feed – Google Sites.

The steps are pretty straight forward if you don’t mind digging into HTML a bit. They suggest using Note Pad but I used Dreamweaver. If you are looking for an alternative HTML editor, try TextWrangler.

I created a Google Sites page and made it totally blank (or at least as blank as I could make it) and set the width to 100%. I embedded the Google Form I created on one side of the page and the Twitter Feed on the other. The end result looks like this:

tweet-page

Sadly, Twitter is blocked on our campus so a big gray area comes up when viewing this on campus.

Screen Shot 2016-05-31 at 11.02.41 AM

As a way around that, I headed over to IFTTT. I started with appending the tweet to a Google Sheet that I was going to embed in the Google Site. It just didn’t look right. I tried appending the tweet to a Google Doc which, again, just didn’t work for me. I ended up using a recipe to create a Blogger post every time the account tweets. I chose to grab the RSS feed for that blog and embed that beside the submission form. It still isn’t very pretty but, for now, it is functional.

Screen Shot 2016-05-31 at 10.58.37 AM

I’m looking forward to getting more of our elementary students practicing their digital citizenship skills while also highlighting the great work our students are doing at my school.

 

 

SVG Issue from Illustrator to Tinkercad

I just wanted to drop a quick post on here in case anyone else is running into this issue (and to remind myself of the solution when I forget it).

I wanted to make a 3D print of my school district logo on my Polar3D printer. I brought the PNG file into Illustrator and manipulated it as needed. Then I exported as SVG. The problem was that particular SVG file would not import into Tinkercad. The file type wasn’t wasn’t recognized.

tinkercad-error

The fix is pretty simple.

The SVG file is actually an XML file but when Illustrator creates it, it doesn’t add the first line of code to the file that specifies it is an XML file. So, the fix is to open the SVG file in your text editor of choice (Dreamweaver is mine) and add the following at the start of the file.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

Here is my file!

 

Seriously? Come on Evernote!

I pay for a Premium Evernote account. Recently, as I have been working on my literature review for my dissertation, I have been using my Evernote account for organizing and searching PDF files of journal articles. I find it easier to search the PDFs in Evernote because of its fabulous OCR capabilities. I am not sharing these notebooks with anyone; they are for my use only and all files were gathered legally. I am not even halfway to my monthly usage maximum and I get this in my email today. It’s one thing to let me know there has been an uptick in usage and suggest best practices but the accusatory tone of this email rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe my level of stress has me oversensitive. Maybe not.

EverNO

To be fair, I received this from @evernotehelps on Twitter very shortly after sharing this blog post there. “That email auto-sends when we detect high upload; it’s not meant to be accusatory.” I certainly understand the auto-send but still think the email may benefit from a little bit of rewording. 

Top 25 Rated Learning Websites

I am in the midst of reviewing literature for my dissertation and came across a very interesting paper from the International Journal of Self-Directed Learning (Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2014), “Analyzing the human learning and development potential of websites available for informal learning” (p. 12) and wanted to share a handy list included in the work. After developing a list 305 free websites for informal learning, eight criteria were used to evaluate each and all were placed into one of six categories. Included in the paper is a list of the top 25 rated learning websites according to this study. Here is that listing (Table 3, p. 19).

Language Learning

Outdoor / Adventure learning

Social Change / Global Learning

Virtual Education

Learning Portals

Shared Online Video

What do you think? Any of these new to you?

 

 

Make a Soldier Smile

Powtoon has a great way to honor our fallen heroes and veterans this Memorial Day by reaching out to those who continue to serve and protect our country!

SmileThey are calling on teachers, students, military family, friends, and anyone else who would like to salute our men and women in uniform (past & present) to create and send a personal video message to a veteran or soldier stationed abroad.

This takes less than 5 minutes.

  1. Select one of their special templates. Templates are available for teachers/students as well as family/friends.
  2. You do need to log in to Powtoon but if you already have a Google account, you can sign in with Google.
  3. Edit the scenes of the template as you wish.

Powtoon workspace

  1. Save and click the Share button. You will be walked through the publishing process.
  2. Get the URL to the video and email it, post to social media, embed on a school website, etc.

Here is one I made in just a couple of minutes.

 

Also, if you know someone in the military who could help Powtoon spread this to more soldiers they would love to hear from you. You can email Ari at support@powtoon.com and they will follow up with you asap!

 

 

Introduction to Screencasting

I put this module together for one of my graduate school classes and am sharing it here in case it can be helpful for anyone else. I intend to share with the teachers at my school as a flipped element for a PD session on creating screencasts. Not only does it have helpful info about screencasting but it also includes some Visible Thinking routines AND shows how you can push Google Sites a bit.

GO TO:

Introduction to Screencasting

Intro to Screencasting

How Symbaloo Made My Year Better

I don’t even want to think about what this, my first year at my school, would have been like without Symbaloo. Last summer, I set all the student computers to start up to a specific page on our district server and that page holds an embedded Symbaloo mix.

The main mix we use is here – http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/lessymbaloo1 – but we embed it into our own HTML page to make it look like this – http://lakelandk12.org/les/start.html.

LES Symbaloo
 

When we need to add a link to a computer, I add it to the Symbaloo and sync it. Job done.

I added grade-level tiles that link to grade-level mixes (also embedded in our own HTML pages) and those are managed by teachers in that grade-level. While that part hasn’t really taken off this year, I expect it will next year because we are going to be moving much of the “practice games” off the main Symbaloo as we add some structure to the computer lab rotation.

FYI – We have a link to it on the school website so students and parents can easily access from home as well.

If you have to manage links on lots of computers, consider moving to this kind of setup. It sure has made my year better!

 

 

News

Free EdTech Goodies for You and You and You!

Once a month I assemble and distribute a Technology Newsletter to the teachers at my school. I shared the recent edition on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook and it was so well-received that I’ve decided to post them on this blog as well. Some have been edited to remove school-specific login information but most are exactly the same.

All the newsletters are posted on a page under the Resources menu on the navigation bar of this site. I hope you find these, and the information they contain, helpful.

 

Newsletters
 

Picmonic provides mnemonic illustrations

I’ve been busy gathering sponsors for our upcoming EdCamp Memphis and am pleased to list Picmonic among them. Before yesterday, didn’t about them and that’s a shame. Another sponsor, BirdBrain Science, shared a link with me to the article 7 EdTech Startups Revolutionizing STEM. Both Picmonic and BirdBrain Science are listed in the article and both deserve a moment of your time.

Picmonic is a web-based application that delivers audiovisual mnemonics designed to improve memory retention.

Homozygous vs. Heterozygous Picmonic
Homozygous vs. Heterozygous Picmonic

They offer lots of resources for medical students (by subscription) but are offering free resources as well. Right now they have picmonics covering topics in Inquiry as well as Reproduction & Heredity for 8th grade Science. Current picmonics include:

  • Bias
  • Experimental Group vs. Control Group
  • Measurements and Tools
  • Mice and Cheese Experiment
  • Observation and Inference – Blue Hair
  • Observation and Inference – Green Egg
  • Observation and Inference – Green Stalk
  • Plant Growth Experiment
  • Quantitative vs. Qualitative
  • Question and Hypothesis – Distance
  • Question and Hypothesis – Heat
  • Question and Hypothesis – Height
  • Roller Coaster Cart Experiment
  • Validity vs. Reliability
  • Blood Types
  • Cells and the Nucleus
  • Charles Darwin
  • Chromosome and DNA
  • Dominant vs. Recessive
  • Genes and Alleles
  • Genotype vs. Phenotype
  • Heredity
  • Homozygous vs. Heterozygous
  • Hybrid Punnett Square
  • Purpose of Cell Division

This technique could certainly be used by teachers of other subjects. I can envision teachers utilizing blended learning creating their own mnemonic illustrations (maybe combined with the concept of sketchnoting) to help students with memory and making deeper connections with what they are learning.

 

 

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