Weebly Web Page Maker

My new favorite website maker is Weebly. I will be teaching it to several of my classes.  It is extremely easy to use. Here are a few of the resources to get started using Weebly.

http://help.weebly.com/beginners-guide.html

http://67techcamp.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/4/6/1446140/weebly_intro_class_handout2.pdf

http://www.memphis.edu/lead/hiad/online/pdf/weebly-guide.pdf

Dropbox vs. Evernote

TCEA 2013

Here I am supposedly at my last TCEA conference in Austin. It is such a bittersweet  experience. I love technology. I love learning. I really love this conference.TCEA 2013 has been another educational experience for all that attended. Some of the life changing experiences for me are as follows:

I am now a Tweeter. You can find me at #msds75. Up until this conference I really could not find an educational benefit to it. I just assumed that it was people telling where they were, who they saw, or what they were eating. However, it is so much more. So now I will not only be stalking Facebook occasionally to see what others are doing and thinking, I will now be stalking Twitter for resources. I cannot see me Tweeting too many "Tweets".

I spent 6 hours in Mac Boot Camp to learn even more great features of our Mac computers.

I attended great workshops and presentations by well-known techies like Tammy Worcester, Dr. Howie Diblasi, etc.... I was exposed to many WEB 2.0 sites and  iPad apps.

Things I learned in my four days:

"Tweeter" can be used for educational purposes.
"Pinterest" can be used for educational purposes.
Dropbox and Evernotes are different and  the uses for each.
There is an "App" for everything.
Everything associated with Google is still wonderful.
Macs are still the best computer for me.

So as I say so often, ______ was no disappointment for me. This time it is TCEA 2013. Good Bye, TCEA - I have thoroughly enjoyed attending you the last 15 years.

Top 10 Apps for 2013

This was copied from this website:

http://dragonits.blogspot.com/2013/01/top-10-apps-you-should-know-about-in.html

Top 10 Apps You Should Know About in 2013

Jan 14, 2013 06:00 am | Kristie Johnson

Mobile Learning. Tablets in Education. Project-based Learning. The trend for mobile technology in 2012 started a movement for 2013. Below is a list of ten apps educators, teachers, administrators should consider trying in the year 2013. Each app is labeled with the platform, audience, cost, along with a brief description. Be sure to click on the app icon for more information. 

Spin
Platform: iOS (requires iOS 5.0 or later)
Audience: Anyone who wants to learn collaboratively
Price: FREE
Together Learn app allows online learners to create an online class, pause or fast-forward lectures, skip to another video, write on a digital chalkboard and debate with other users.

Socrative Student Clicker
Platform: Android (requires 2.1 or later); iOS (requires iOS 4.3 or later)
Audience: Students, faculty (6-12; Higher Ed)
Price: FREE
Socrative is a response system that allows teachers to gather student feedback with activities, short answer and mulitple choice quizzes and games. 

Nearpod
Platform: iOS (iPhone, iPod touch and iPad – requires iOS 4.3 or later)
Audience: Teachers and Students
Price: FREE
With Nearpod, teachers can bring the classroom to life with interactive mobile presentations that they create and customize themselves.

Educreations
Platform: iOS (iPad – requires iOS 4.3 or later)
Audience: Teachers and Students
Price: FREE
Educreations enables users to create presentations with interactive text, diagrams, audio and video on the iPad or web.

Explain Everything
Platform: iOS (iPad - requires iOS 4.3 or later)  
Audience: Teachers/Students/Administrators
Price: 2.99
Explain Everything is a design tool that lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. Click herefor quick overview guide.


ezPDF Reader
Platform: Android (requires 2.1 or later); iOS (requires iOS 4.3 or later)
Audience: Anyone who needs an interactive PDF player
Price: $3.99
ezPDF Reader is the only PDF viewer with the embedded multimedia file playing capability feature. It also supports annotations and PDF form filling.


Remind 101
Platform: Android (requires 2.2 or later); iOS (requires iOS 4.3 or later) 
Audience: Teachers/Administrators
Price: FREE
Remind101 is a safe way for teachers to text message students and keep in touch with parents and for administrators to send bulletins to staff. Remind 101 HelpDesk - click here.

VoiceThread
Platform: iOS (requires iOS 4.2 or later)
Audience: Students/Teachers/Administrators
Price: FREE
A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice, text, audio file, or video (via a webcam).

Ask3
Platform: iOS (requires iOS 5.1 or later)
Audience: Teachers and Students
Price: FREE
By recording your voice, drawings, and images, Ask3 helps you create videos that can be shared directly to your class. Students can watch the videos you create using Ask3 and can quickly ask and answer each other's questions. 

Genius Scan 
Platform: Android (requires 2.3 or later); iOS (requires iOS 5.1 or later)
Audience: Anyone
Price: Android ($1.09) Apple (free)
Genius Scan turns your mobile device into a pocket scanner and then share that document as a PDF or JPEG via email. Documents can also be exported to Box, Google Docs, Evernote, or Dropbox.

Credi ts:  Some information for this post came from a n article featured on Edudemic: 20 Apps to Know about in 2013. Click here to read that article.

How to Create a Brochure

Steps to creating a brochure in Microsoft Word:
1. Open Word
2. File > Project Gallery
3. Under Category > choose brochures
4. Click on the template that you wish to use.
5. Replace with your information.

Here is a video to watch:

Starboards and Cows

Oral Tests for Students - Two Methods

Method 1:  Embed oral test on a blog.

Here is a link on how to embed a MP3 on a blog:
http://freecomputech.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-to-upload-mp3-songs-to-blogger.html

Here is a sample for a test.


Method 2:  Audio Recorders
Record your test either in Garage Band or on a recorder.
If you use Garage Band, you will share it into iTunes. Make sure that it is a MP3 file.
After it is in iTunes, you will then drag it onto your computer desktop.
Plug in the Audio Recorder to you computer.
Drag your MP3 file into either of the folders labeled A-E on your audio recorder. Just remember which folder you put your file in.
Then drag the icon of the audio recorder to the trash can to eject it.

Three Workshops

I had the privilege of getting to teach three workshops to teachers. I have added two pages and one blog post with a slide show to this website with the links and topics that I taught. Here are the sites:

Google Docs and Forms
Web 2.0
Tammy W.'s Sites

I Can't Find my Phone

In preparation for my next workshop, I ran across this website. It was too good not to share right now.

This link: http://www.icantfindmyphone.com/  will call your cell phone from your computer. If you have access to the web, then you can call your phone. This is extremely nice if you loose it at home, and you do not have a land line anymore.

Google Forms - Tech Time

Skitch App

I borrowed this post from another Blog!

Skitch

Skitch is an app that was mentioned by several different presenters at TCEA (including Lisa Johnson  and Yolanda Barker from the techchef4u blog). I finally took the time to check it out this week. As I explored, I got excited about all the ways it could be used in the classroom with all ages in ALL curricular areas. Skitch allows you to annotate photos, maps, screenshots, or blank backgrounds with different colored text, arrows, and shapes. From within the app you can access a Google Map of the world, take a screenshot of it, and then annotate over the screenshot of the map. You can also pull in photos from your photo library, the web, or take a picture or screenshot by clicking a link within the app.

Why I like Skitch:

• It's free!
• It's very user friendly - students of any age will be able to navigate the app without much assistance
• Creations will be automatically saved within the app, but can also be saved to the iPad's Photo Library or Camera Roll, emailed to the teacher, or synced with Evernote.
• The possibilities for use in the classroom are endless! See the picture below to see how you can use Skitch to label the body parts of a grasshopper.

Classroom Integration Ideas:

• Math: Have students label all the geometric shapes found in a photograph.
• History: Have students map out a famous battle.
• Science: Students could label a map with low pressure and high pressure systems, tectonic plates, landforms, etc.
• ELA: When learning about descriptive words, have students find a picture and label it with all the adjectives that describe the picture.

Skitch is also available in the Mac App Store as a download for your computer, so teachers could use it to crop and edit photos and create visuals with annotations for their students. For more information about the Mac App Store, click here.

URL Shortener and QR Creator

Google's URL Shortener  QR Creator

Want to make a long URL shorter and turn it into a QR code at the same time? Then head over to http://goo.gl. Shorten your URL. Paste that shortened URL into your browser and add ".qr" to the end of the goo.gl-shortened URL to create an immediate QR matrix barcode.

TCEA 2012

This week is our annual trip to TCEA. As always it has been a wonderful experience. I will be adding a page to this blog with the many links that were shared with us this week. Some of the top, hot workshops this week were:
1. Anything iPad
2. Anything Google
3. QR Codes
4. Web 2.0 sites
5. 21st skills

Google Forms and Flubaroo

I may be the only one that did not know this, but I figured it out last night. If you use Google forms for tests or quizzes, you can download Flubaroo to grade your quizes. I have been using Google forms for quizzes so that I could help save a tree and so that I would only have to grade one spreadsheet instead of many pieces of paper. Now with this plug-in and the click of a mouse, the quizzes are graded.

Here is the link: http://www.flubaroo.com/

If you have any questions or would like to see a demonstration, let me know.

Care and Feeding of the Cows

Food Can Drive

More Websites

I found these sites:

Writing prompts for the Language Arts teachers.
http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/

Free On-line books:
http://www.openculture.com/free_textbooks

Math Website
http://www.mangahigh.com/en_us/?localeset=en_us

Technology tutorials
http://thinktutorial.com/

Advance Search, English to Spanish, and Audio Files

Click here to see a jing on how to create one audio file and then copy it to another digital recorder.
2011-10-18_0920

A Web Whiteboard

http://www.awwapp.com/draw.html

This is a web-based whiteboard that is touch-friendly. It will let you use your computer, tablet, etc to easily draw sketches, collaborate with other and then share them to the world. No installation is required.

Email and Video clips

Email
• Contacts – drag to your Parents Contact to your contacts folder. Check what you already have in your parent contact folder. You may want to delete the old one out and put in the new one.
• BCC
o Click on New email
o On toolbar click on Show Bcc
o Start typing students name in Bcc line

• http://www.emailcharter.org/
o Great site with good advice on emails

Always use spell check in sending emails!

Video clips
Here is a jing to show you how to access the film clips:

http://www.screencast.com/t/0UhgYJwrkC

Or you can follow these instructions:
Click on your Hard Drive
On the left side under "Shared" click on gms1
Then click on "Connect as"
Type in gms and tigers for username and password.
Go to the Public folder > Film clips > Film Clips for Mac


Coming……Pinterest