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My Technology "Teacher" Page

This is my district webpage site where I have TONS of resources for educators in our district- from teachers, lab managers, to administrators!

Tech4Teachers-Memorial Cohort Wiki

There are two groups from Memorial Elementary School that I have been meeting with this school year.  Group B is a beginner group and Group A is an advanced group. They are together in one wiki so that everyone in both groups can have resources for all information given in classes.  This wiki also has an overall  What We Did This Week page.

Edmodo is a platform I model with my classes.  Our district has special codes for each school and is gaining in popularity.  

In the younger grades, it is more of a resource to share with parents so they can see what is going on in classes and can even have access to some resources a teacher shares.  

With upper grades, it is a powerful tool for the students to communicate with their teachers.  Students not only have resources, but assignments can be turned in, polls can be given, grades can be posted, and communication between teacher and student can take place.  Many of the high school classes that use this see traffic through the Apps on student phones.  

Remind 

I use Remind (formerly called Remind 101) with my classes.  It is a great service where you have participants sign up to receive the message through text or email.  In a classroom environment, this is great for students and/or parents.  No phone numbers are shown for either the person creating the messages or the receiver of the messages.  There is no reply feature.  Just a "here is the short message" which is limited to 140 characters.  A great feature of this service is that you can schedule when to send the messages.  So, as an example, our High School principal schedules all of the messages she needs to go out to various groups of teachers, students, or parents on Sunday as she creates her weekly announcements.  Then each morning (or as scheduled), her Remind messages are sent for her.  What a great tool!

Mrs. Parten's Wiki

This is my first wiki, one that I created originally for one school to use to access all of the different websites they had to go to during their days.  I also started a page for kids to get ideas for science fair projects, homework help, and some fun educational sites.  The computer manager used to give them Wiki Day occassionally and said the students loved those days.

Now, it has grown!  I continually add to it, but traffic is no longer just one school or even just our district.  I have seen traffic from many states and even countries!  Wow!  If you are on this page, you probably got to it from this wiki's home page.

I welcome suggestions on how to make it a useful tool for you!

Prestine's Tech Talk Blog

I am a strong believer that Wikis and Blogs should be a part of a student's learning, although I wouldn't expect students to use both at the same time.  My blog has some traditional entries, but also models  how it can be used for a student to learn how to embed items with an example of a lterature project on S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders.  This example shows how students can showcase their hard work and even get comments from peers.  There is an example of a Voki (animated avatar) to describe the main character in the novel, QR Codes with questions for review of the novel, an example of using Animoto (a free 30 second video from images, although my preference for this type of resource is PhotoStory), Tagxedo (interactive word cloud) that adds vocabulary from the story and links to an online definition, and  Glogster (an interactive online poster).

My wiki page mentioned earlier about Blogs gives you some recommended sites for classroom blogs which have features to limit who can see their posts for privacy in your classroom.

OneDrive for Business is your online storage.  It is virtually unlimited in space.  It is connected to your Office 365 email account.  Once you log in, you simple click on the words Office 365 in the banner across the top and click on OneDrive from the tiles, or if OneDrive link is showing along the top navigation, click on it. (sometimes it doesn't show due to your set screen size)

A great feature is that you can store everything you want (like a flash/thumb drive) and you can get to it anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Another great feature is that you can share files.  This is great for collaboration between teachers, grade levels, departments, etc.  or student groups!

Word Clouds:

Wordle 

Tagxedo

ABCYa

Word Clouds are words put into an image.  They can be typed in, copied from a document, or copied from a website.  The more often the word is used, the larger it appears.

Wordle is great for finding out if a document has many misused words (my students always overused "and" and "said") 

Tagxedo is another word cloud program that allows you to change the shape, as well as making the words interactive so that it connects to a search engine and in most cases, provides a definition online for the word.

ABCYa is a word cloud program descigned for younger students.

For more word cloud sites, please see this wiki page (this is the What We Did This Week page on the Memorial School Cohort Wiki page) and scroll down to 

Session 3 (A Group) October 22, 2014 3:30 - 4:30