Google Discussion and Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts, with its screenshare option, proved to be the perfect tool for a conversation with Mrs. Schmidt and Mrs. Olson.  The English teacher, Mrs. Schmidt, and the science teacher, Mrs. Olson, are collaborating on writing reflections pertaining to the annual science egg drop.

Mrs. Olson wanted to share hundreds of photos from the egg drop with students and decided that a Google Group would be a great place to put the link to her Picasa Web Album.  In addition, the Google Group is a great place for students to conduct prewriting comments and suggestions by student for students that Mrs. Schmidt provides.

Since the Google Group has a private setting, below is a screen shot of the number of views and comments.

The collaboration between staff/student and student/student also meets an ITLS Standard 2A, Skill 2B 

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Twitter Failure Produced TodaysMeet Success

Back in October 2012, Mr. Seamandel wanted to use Twitter with his ninth grade students as a means for communicating about writing.

Many problems occurred:

• Couldn't log in on iPad consistently
• Couldn't log out on iPad consistently
• Couldn't adjust profile
• Students really didn't understand (at that time) how Twitter worked
• Couldn't access computers consistently to accommodate the learning environment

From that stemmed a great trial of a technology tool, todaysmeet.com , that created an incredible learning environment.

A room was set up for students to create and comment on Haiku poems that were created by students.  As Mr. Seamandel states,

First we did a basic exercise to ensure that students knew how it (Todaysmeet) worked.  Then, I had them write a haiku alone, or with a friend.   It had to fit the standard conventions of a haiku -- 5-7-5 and relating to nature. (Some students became stuck, and I allowed them to write about whatever they could think of.)  This worked out great because no student was really willing to read or share what they had written, but jumped at the opportunity to post it online and have peers read it as it popped up on the board.  Ended up being a great exercise and a way to showcase writing/poetry without tying a name to it!

While the room that was created for this has expired, a great feature of todaysmeet.com, the opportunity to use a technology tool to engage students in poetry was outstanding!

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PicCollage For Writing In The Workplace

Mr. Mentink, the Writing In The Workplace teacher, asked me how he could enhance a traditional poster learning activity with technology.  The result is an engaging one and a half days of learning that previously occurred over four to five days.

See how PicCollage enhanced and empowered the students in the educational experience.

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Text2Mindmap.com For Computer or iPad

@teachweb20 sent me Text2Mindmap.com which provides another opportunity to organize thoughts into a web.  Her students are using it for writing.  I am passing it along to speech teachers and our FACS teachers who have students cook or bake.  Every person who uses this can organize their thoughts into clear web images.

The interface is very friendly.

It can be used on the iPad with the Chrome browser which is depicted from the screen shot below.

The video below explains all of the features of text2mindmap.com 

View how Mr. Krause used the technology resource.

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