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Tech Level: Easy

Looking for a simple way to track all of those slippery cash purchases?
Me too.
I decided to make a simple google form that I could access via my web-enabled phone.

The form is ridiculously simple, just two inputs in the form of questions. So simple it’s one of those, why didn’t I think of this before…

Q1: Create a drop down box with categories (groceries, dining out, entertainment, personal care, clothing, medical, parking, etc.)
Q2: Create a Text input (Enter dollar amount here)
You could add a third text input for notes if you need it.

After saving the form I emailed the link to myself & accessed it via my phone so I could bookmark it.

Result: A timestamped spreadsheet that can be exported to excel/software if I needed too.

IDEAS
Student Project: allowance tracker

Class Project: collaborative data collection tracker, collaborative note capture tool

Personal Project: Note capture tool

Screencast and Link

Option 1: Save a copy of this form to your own google docs and make private. Use the link to your private form to track your cash.

Option 2: Make your own and customize. The screencast gives you an idea of how to do that.

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Welcome MassCUE members. I am excited to present Wednesday (3:15 Blue 14). Our session at MassCUE10 this year describes how the ideas of a grassroots technology group in a high school spread to include the whole school and how using this simple idea in your own school can help improve the use of technology schoolwide. The presentation we developed is here . More information, further thoughts and ideas on the topic are included below.

Supplemental Material

Why this session?

If your having hallway conversations with teachers about technology. Use this idea to amplify these conversations.

Learn how to foster ubiquitous teacher tech use.

“A leader doesn’t create new followers a great leader creates other leaders” -Tom Peters

Do you seem to busy to help? Build in time and invite everybody in.

How to create a demand for teacher to teacher professional development and be your school’s secret change agents.

If you’re struggling with the naysayers. Create a movement for change, so you can live this quote

“It’s not your job to change minds, it’s your job to find minds that want to change.”

Get your permission slip

If you would like help or advice on making this work in your school send me an email.

The Books we mentioned:

Drive

The Art of Possibility (book) (video )

The Tipping Point

The Idea Virus

Photo Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/48600090482@N01/

Continue reading »]]> If you have a google form on your website or blog and occasionally someone might submit some information. It would be useful to get an email alert to let you know there has been activity.

For example, I have a google form HERE that I want to publicize and have people use periodically while at conferences. I want to gather ideas on how people share what they learn with their colleagues back at school. Occasionally  the form might get a submission, and I want google to email me if this happens. So I asked on twitter.

I got a response from @ashuping

How to add email alert to a google form

With the google spreadsheet open, in the top right you will see this share button

Choose Set notification rule

Check the option A user submits a form and then choose whether you want a daily digest email or an email right away.

This screenr shows how

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i-am-marvin

Save time by eliminating the need for photocopying,

• Publish your class materials using googledocs,  scribd or issuu
• Bonus: Super easy is to share short docs or post its by simply capturing a photo and publishing it, similar to these classroom rules from Keri Smith’s blog

Save time by taking your quizzes online and away from the photocopier,

• Give and grade a quiz using googleforms (for a how to do this screencast, watch here from Jesse Spevack)
• Bonus: This also saves valuable class time by avoiding the paper shuffling, handing out and collecting assessment

Save time by not collecting homework in class,

provide an electronic dropbox like dropio

take homework online using wiffiti or voicethread to post questions and gather comments

Save time by taking reviews online instead of, or in addition to in class review

• upload your powerpoint class materials to slideshare

Save time by delivering instructions or outline project criteria

• creating a screencast using Jing or screenr
• create an online timeline for your course or unit using timetoast

Save time by communicating student projects with parents

• post video’s and  classnotes

Save time by gathering information/feedback/taking a class vote to make decisions

• create a poll using polleverywhere or vorbeo
• Use an online collaboration space like dabbleboard where students can brainstorm ideas together
• To collect student photos from their multiple cameras try troovi this site gives one url where all students can upload, no login required.

Save time directing students to their reading resources

• Direct students to the exact part of a website you want them to read using Kwout
• Create your own library/online reading list using google bookshelf

Share with students

All of these sites will offer the option of sharing on your class online place…this could be a blog, a startpage, or a wiki. The link and embed code looks complicated, but all you have to know how to do is copy and paste.

Use these links to explore some online places you can use to centralize all this content:

Use a class blog:

example from @zbpipe

example from @mariaK

more examples here

Use a classroom start page:

example from zurich international school

example from @jasonwelker

To find out how to set one up these instructions will help you:

For netvibes

Check out this wiki for class blog instructions

Remember this will save you time, year after year, as many of the resources can be used over.

Why Blog?

Hopefully this post will be useful if you are a teacher looking for ways to save time using technology. But it also serves me. This is a framework for professional development sessions and helps me organize all the resources in one place. The topic spans more than one day of professional development session so go easy on yourself, this is a lot to absorb in one reading. I intend to continually update the post with ideas and additions, it is easy to update a blogpost. I set it up once and use it many times. One of the many reasons to blog, it is a good memory, a personal repository and it will save me time!

Please share this post with your colleagues this year and please share any resources you think would be useful for this workshop in the comments below.

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Capturing ideas has been on my mind lately. I use evernote when working, but I often get the best ideas away from my computer either while on a walk or on a bike ride. I usually have my phone with me, I often message pictures to evernote, but I would love it if I could leave myself quick voice messages.

This email, dropped into my mailbox today. I have one question. Could it be any simpler?

So, I have created a drop and have the link to that in Evernote. No more lost and forgotten ideas.

Check out the message dropio left at http://drop.io/maynewsletter

Uses for the classroom

1. Calls from field trips

2. Use as a homework reminder

3. Use as a parent message

4. Record student responses to a special event or discussion and then embed calls on your class blog or webpage

5. Provide a daily class update

6. Have students call in with their project idea assignments

7. Check out this demo drop showing how a teacher can use drop.io as part of their work  flow at http://drop.io/mrdavidson

Below I embedded the voice message from that demo drop to show one of the many ways you can distribute drop content.

Continue reading »]]> Conference Crashing 101

Massachusetts Computer using educators annual conference takes place this week. To have one place to monitor, listen and watch what is going on I created a public page on netvibes that monitors the tags masscue and masscue09.

As soon as actual attendees post online via twitter, flickr, delicious, diigo, and blogs, it will feed to this page, making it easier to connect and listen to what is going on in sessions. I get so much more out of a conference this way, I lose that anxiety about choosing one session from the many great sessions on offer. I know that I can go back and check out links and bookmarks from most of the sessions, if and when I have time.

You can create a similar page for any conference, you may or may not be going to (just change the tag). The same ideas could work in the classroom, it would be just as easy to set up a page to follow any “tag” that is related to your curriculum topic. For collaboration and teamwork make your own tag & have the group post resources which are then aggregated automatically on the page.

Twitter search widget

This widget feeds every tweet that includes the word “masscue”. Helpful to connect to others on twitter and expand your personal learning network.

In the netvibes Add Content section choose twitter search from the essential widgets list.

Delicious and Diigo RSS feeds

To stay on top of what attendees are bookmarking in sessions, go to delicious and search for the tag you want to include. On the page with the search results you will see an rss icon. Click on that and copy the feed address (url). It will look something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/masscue?count=15

In netvibes, go to add content click add a feed, then paste in this url.

Blog Search

This widget will find all blog posts about a specific topic entered into the search. Add this content to your page using the blog search widget

Photos & media

To follow photo posts and other media being archived and tagged at the event, similar feed widgets can be created using

• flickr & rss,
• youtube & rss,
• slideshare & rss

If I was organizing an event, this would be job one, job two would be publicizing it. So, whether you travel to attend a conference in person or crash it via a netvibes page, share what you create & learn so others can follow you there, virtually of course.

Another blogpost with similar focus:

Create a listening dashboard for your organization

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It continues to amaze me how the learning network that I am immersed in seems to have a life of its own. This was the conversation it was having this weekend.

I was reading this brave post by Lisa Thumann “I just don’t like technology” about how to deal with a comment from a professional development participant that really threw off her whole presentation. Great title, about a teacher expressing her fears, her needs about technology. It was not about Lisa, or her activities for the day, although the fallout impacted everyone in the session. Anyone who has delivered professional development to teachers has at some time or another run into a few with this set-in-stone attitude.
After reading the comments, it stayed in my mind, wondering what I would do in that situation, what would the answer be?

Sunday rolls around and another post by Buffy J Hamilton on the unquiet librarian about digital literacy and reading e-books.
Short Stories + iPods= Happy Readers « The Unquiet Librarian
Buffy has a great photo showing one student reading a book and another reading on her ipod. Both can co-exist-of course..and then
in the last paragraph short and succinct, but so true.

“The kids know this—what part of this don’t the adults get? At the end of the day, our focus needs to be about meeting their needs, not ours.”

That was the answer that I was looking for, for the teacher that “just doesn’t like technology”. It’s not about you teacher….it’s about meeting the needs of your students.

It was quite the librarian weekend this weekend for me (and 80 others online). I spent time in the classroom 2.0 session with joyce valenza and buffy j hamilton learning about copyright and creative commons in the library. Archive here.

THEN the final piece of the puzzle was delivered. Joyce Valenza also wrote in School Library Journal about how to retool yourself, a roadmap for teachers to start to learn more, take control of their own professional development and start to remove their own blocks that prevent them from meeting the needs of their students. As teachers become more in control of their own learning, their resistance will drop away as they meet their own needs more easily and can tune it to the needs of their students. The learning network that I am immersed in is made up of most of the aspects mentioned in this article and will form part of a graduate course I am teaching on developing a personal learning network for professional and classroom use next February.

Ta da! PLN works for me, really. On it’s own.

(PLN=personal learning network)

Continue reading »]]> This youtube video about using twitter in the college classroom came to my attention from a retweet by @edutopia to student’s blogpost at Butler Collision Repair Blog
This is really worth taking the time to watch. It explains how twitter can be used to encourage deeper student participation in a discussion when they are in a 90 minute class with 100 other classmates.

The students can add their tweets via phone or computer. These tweets are distinguished from the mass of other tweets by using a hashtag. All of the tweets with this hashtag are projected onto the board at the front of the class for all to see, share and respond to.

Benefits to this way of learning:

• All voices can be heard and have equal weight
• 140 characters is a limitation, yet also a filter to quality information
• Participation can include students and staff who are not present
• There is a record of the discussion that can be used as a study guide later

It is only at the end of the video when the teacher mentions that she told the students “it was going to be messy”. I think this is the key component to introducing something like this into the classroom, it will be more likely to succeed if all participants go into it with the knowledge that everyone in the class is learning, that it is a process and that the form will shape itself as it goes along. On the video it didn’t look messy, until the teacher brought it up. I’d love to hear your thoughts and whether you have used twitter in the classroom.

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Back to school is a good time to commit to searching out tools online that students can really use to make learning more effective. These are the top 12 free tools that I use with teachers and students and they can be found year round on my public netvibes page.

Many of these tools help make learning more visual and offer the opportunity to create personalized meaning and connections. Once these learning artifacts are created, students often feel more ownership and instantly want to share. Mindtools.

Picnik

Edit images and photos online for free Picnik

Visu-words

Explore words and their associations, chack definition and pronunciations using a visu-words

Timetoast

Create interactive timelines, for novels, historic events, your life and share them on the web using timetoast

Imagination Cubed

Draw, write or solve on an interactive whiteboard that has an unique playback feature at imagination cubed

Tiddlyspot

Use a wiki-to-go to save notes and links for each subject at tiddlyspot

Jing

Screencast a concept, solution or key topic to aid understanding by downloading Jing

The Big Picture

Stay on top of a project or organize a complete curriculum using The Big Picture

Etherpad

Collaborate with others to create a document or flesh out an idea using Etherpad

The Awesome Highlighter

Signup and use The Awesome Highlighter, which lets you highlight webpages and share them with others.

Dropio

Share and move files from home to school and back using Dropio (you may never need that flash drive again)

Text 2 MindMap

Gain control and organize all those ideas for your essay with Text 2 Mind Map

Save & Share

Don’t forget to create a space online where you can save all of these useful tools at Delicious. Did I mention that all of these are FREE!