Early Dismissal Days: Parent-Teacher Conferences

Can you believe that the end of the first reporting period is almost upon us? I have noticed that teachers have started looking for the paper forms to send home to parents to make appointments for parent - teacher conferences.

                                                                    Image Retrieved 9/28/2015

All the preparation reminded me of a back to school hint about using Choice Eliminator Add-On in Google Forms to help teachers move the process to digital.

So I created instructions for you guys if you want to try it. Give it a go and let me know how it goes. Also, contact your Instructional Technology Facilitator if you want to have the parents automatically receive a confirmation letter to their email via a cool tool called Autocrat.

Cross Post from Teresa's Technology Thoughts.

Elementary Students - Citing Sources

The Keep Calm-O-Matic

Standard 3 of ISTE Technology Standards for Students focuses on research and information fluency. The expectation: Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate and use information. Our state standards for information and technology skills expect learners as young as 5 to "recognize the importance of respect for the work of others." By 5th grade, the expectation is for the student to "understand ethical behavior (e.g., copyright, not plagiarizing, netiquette) when using resources." The expectation isn't that the students will cite in APA or MLA style. Thank goodness!

So what's an elementary teacher to do when faced with helping young learners from K - 5 cite sources when writing non-fiction texts, reports, presentations, and even producing video content. We do what we do best, we teach.

Beginning with kindergarten, we teach that everyone's work belongs to that person and we shouldn't use it without permission and we should tell how we found the work. Begin with something as simple as having students ask permission of others before taking photos with those iPads. Maybe even have a paper the student must have signed by their buddy before snapping that pose. When using Internet resources, keep it simple by allowing them to copy and paste links at the end of their work. Model for students when you are writing in front of them or even when you are finding resources and sharing with them, include where you got the information.

Fortunately, in our district there are tools to help us during this teaching journey. For example, Discovery Education provides appropriate citation for any item the student uses, all they need to know is where the citation is located and how to copy and paste.

We are are Google Apps for Education district, so utilize the research feature in Google Docs that will help automatically cite...complete with footnotes.

And don't forget to use resources available to us for free such as an easy site to use to help students come up with a copy and paste citation - Easybib.com.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention all the awesome, free lessons for grades 3 - 5 available on this topic from Common Sense Media. Common Sense Media is a great partner to enhance digital citizenship for all ages.

Do you have other thoughts or ideas of how to help teachers with this topic? Please share!

Cross Post From Teresa's Technology Thoughts 

Add a Frame to Your Greenscreen Video

Thinking of bringing history alive or any other subject by making some videos.  

Green Screen by Do Ink is a great tool to make that happen if you have an iPad.  

Often when greenscreening you just replace the backgrond on the video.  I have found that adding a frame such as a tv set or newspaper headline can make the video more interesting or help to focus the topic for the viewer. The images below let you make this happen in a notebook page, old newspaper or old tv set. 

Download created backgrounds: Old TV  -  JFK New Paper  -  Notebook  - Bonus New York Times

Making this happen: (Video below)

Line 1: add a frame from one of the examples above or create one yourself.  

Line 2; add your greenscreen video.

Line 3: add the background that you would like to replace your Greenscreen with.  

Cross posted from Inside the Technology. 

Writer's Workshop: Small Moments & Google Docs

Retrieved from Can't Stop Smiling

Across our county this month, teachers and students are launching writer's workshop Lucy Calkins style. The first unit for writing is about small moments. The goal is to help students grow as writers as they take everyday events from their lives and turn them into stories. Stories that communicate through pictures and lots and lots of writing. 

By the time they have finished, they want to publish their work so others can celebrate the writing with them. Since we are a GAFE district, Google Docs often becomes the first place students learn to publish their writing online for the world to read. Elementary teachers are somewhat hesitant to start the typing process with our young learners because their lack of typing skills makes the process long and laborious. 

Google has been working hard at releasing some updates and they are releasing several that are perfect for the educational setting. I mentioned templates in this post and linked to several other updates.

One of the linked updates is about Voice Typing. Yes, dear teacher friends, your students can read their story and Google will take the dictation and type it for them!

You can find this wonderful gem under the Tools menu. Check out the video below to see just how easy this is. 

Cross posted from Teresa's Technology Thoughts. 

Google DriveTemplates, Oh My The Possibilities

Have you experienced the latest changes with the core Google Apps? Now when you start a new document, you have the opportunity to select from templates similar to starting a new doc in Microsoft Word or Pages.

As you can see from this screenshot, you can still choose a blank document, but you have the option to choose templates from various categories. And, wait. for.  it.  You can do this with Slides and Sheets as well.

This is awesome for me because I am always creating new templates for Slides. To get to all the goodness, click the home icon for the particular App you are working in located in the top left-hand corner. For example, in a Google Doc click the blue box with the white lines.


For more Google Goodness, read Google Docs and Classroom, your school year sidekicks.  

Cross post from Teresa's Technology Thoughts.