Digital Citizenship

One of the goals this year in our diocese is for our schools to become a "Certified Digital Citizenship School" through Common Sense Media. I started the program two weeks ago with my students. I ended up purchasing the Nearpod curriculum for grades 3-5 and 6-8. For the most part I am pleased with the Nearpod lessons. Some are a little less engaging than others but I appreciate not having to create the lessons. It has saved a tremendous amount of time. The cost was more than I had hoped for but again, a HUGE time saver. They are currently $49.99 for a bundle of 15 lessons and end of unit assessments. A chunk of change but I doubt that I would have had the time to do all the work that went into creating these lessons.
To change up the classes I am also using Digital Passport (free) for grades 3 and 4. This has some fun and engaging activities that cover five topics:

• Communication
• Privacy
• Cyber bullying
• Searching
• Creative Credit

I did not have time to do a full lesson with some 8th graders so they explored Digital Compass (free). This takes students through scenarios and based on their choices the game story can go different directions. It also covers a variety of Digital Citizenship topics. My students were engaged and thought the characters were silly but fun.

All of these items, the Nearpod lessons, Digital Passport and Digital Compass, are available through Common Sense Media. I think we have met our requirements for our certification. I'll need to go through my check list, fill out the forms and do some finally things before we can submit our application. Even though we may be done with the minimum requirements, I plan on using more of the curriculum because of the importance of the information.

The digital world is a great place but our students need the tools to navigate it safely.

MATCH 2015

Music and Technology Conference Houston 2015

Wow- what a great tech day long conference! This past weekend I attended this very first Music and Technology mini conference. The organizers did a fabulous job arranging this mini conference for the area music teachers. I had the honor of presenting two sessions; Music Centers with Limited Technology and Take Me to the Computer Lab! The two sessions were kind of related to one another since I felt the tools, etc., could be used alone by one person or with a group. I used Tackk to house my agenda and links for both sessions. Below are links to each presentation.

Music Centers with Limited Technology

Take Me to the Computer Lab!

Highlights of the day were the two keynote speakers: Amy Burns and Cherie Herring. Always a pleasure listening to what these two have to say.

Collaboration

One of the things I have been getting my middle school students to do is collaboration on documents for their work. And it has worked out surprisingly well! Some of the tools we ave used for collaboration are: Google Docs, Google slides, Padlet, and just collaborating inside of Edmodo.
The Google products are very easy to use because of the larger work area. Although the doc was tricky since I limited them to keeping all the work on one page. Padlet is a nice area to share information. Depending on the layout of the posts (I used stream) this can have an effect on the organization. One of my favorite collaboration projects was to work in their small group in Edmodo doing research about the history of Big Tex. Their group had to divide the jobs up and only one person could input the information on the timeline. (We use the timeline from ReadWriteThink. Excellent resource.) The info that they found had to be posted in their small group for the Timeline person. They also had to find links to images to use. The project worked well and everyone's timelines turned out nicely. I believe that teaching students to work in collaborative groups is an important skill and helps them become an asset to their future employers.

New Year Assessing

The new school year has started and I am in new territory. Which leads me to considering how I can assess what my students know since they are ALL new to me. I started using a few tools that are probably familiar to most computer teachers but they are new to me.

First I wanted to assess their keyboarding skills. Mostly looking at accuracy rates. Not so much wpm and I am not hovering over them to see if our hands are in the correct location although I did walk around and remind students to use the home row, thumbs on the space bar only, etc. For this I decided to set up accounts for my students on Typing.com. Teachers are able to create classes and easily import students. There are a series of exercises from Beginner to Advanced. The site keeps real time records of when they sign on and what they do. For the free side, which means ads on the page, it is pretty nice. I used this site for my 6th, 7th and 8th grade students. I will introduce it to 5th and 4th grade (maybe) within the coming weeks.

For 3rd grade I wanted them to just have fun typing and Typing.com does have games on it's site but you have to wait through a video ad and it just wasn't loading very well in our lab. So one class suffered and another class go to go to BBC Bitesize Dance Mat Typing. Really cute! The second class had a lot more fun with their typing! Since we just went and started from the very beginning it starts them on the home row. Slow for some but fun for all.

I also wanted to assess what my middle school students knew about Microsoft Word. Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment turned out to be pretty cool. No account needed and no cost to take the online assessments. Just pick a module at the bottom of the page and begin. I had my students do #5 on Microsoft Word. There is audio that goes along with the assessment reading the questions. When the students get to the end, their scores are available showing them what they passed and what they had trouble with answering. The site has a higher passing score than 70 and I had my students take it until they had a passing score. Quick and easy grade for me. The site was originally designed for adults to assess basic computer skills for work. But this worked great for my purposes.

New Beginnings and a Search!

Happy Birthday to me (today is my birthday in case you didn't know) so a perfect day to pick up the proverbial pen and get back in the swing of things. School starts soon, tomorrow actually, and I am embarking on a new adventure. Getting to work with technology full time will be such fun. And so now comes my search. 

I have an interest in geocaching and really would like to do something with it this school year. An elective perhaps? I have found some great resources out there for lesson plans and such but what I am in search of is an app. Now what do I want this app to do? Not entirely sure....not very helpful is it? I was looking at scavenger type apps but didn't like what I found so far. I want it to be free, easy to use, kid friendly (very important), I'd like to be able to input my own "finds" for students, needs to be private, hmmm......wonder how I can make this work? Really need to put my brain to work. 

Edmodo Training

So I have been working on the Edmodo Certified Trainer course. Wow- lots of work. I've been using Edmodo since 2008/09 or sometime very close to when it first came out. So I feel pretty comfortable in using it, talking about it and teaching others. But as with anything, you have to present things how those that developed it would like it presented. Sometimes that can be tricky because "that little thingy picture" is probably not in their terminology describing the cute little icons on the page! Just kidding- it was all good and I think I am done. Or at least I hope I am. I tried to really keep track of the assignments so I really hope I didn't miss any. Our final project was to create a case for using Edmodo for something and I chose using it to extend your class time with your students. I can honestly vouch that Edmodo is the answer to succeeding at this task. Because of all this hard work I now have created a ScreenCastOMatic channel and you can view my final project there.
Enjoy Extend Your Once a Week Class with Edmodo at the TailWagger Tech Training Channel on ScreenCastOMatic!

QR Codes and Organization

I was having a discussion with a colleague about students who seem to be struggling in a class because they fail to turn in assignments. Our teachers are expected to post homework assignments on our online grading system on a weekly basis. Unfortunately I think this has resulted in many teachers not writing it on the board as they might have done in the past. Consequently, if a student has any issues with logging into the system they will likely not remember the assignment and therefore not turn it in on time. The teacher and I talked about how some students need to physically write down the information. Just seeing it posted online doesn't make the connections for them. A 7th grade student also commented that she felt too rushed at the end of class to write the assignment down and always felt like she was in a hurry to get to the next class. We also have students who, no matter how many times they do it or are reminded how to do it, having trouble logging into websites to get the information they need.

So what to do? One of the solutions we discussed is one that I have often recommended to teachers to use for their students. Yes, this does require some technology but I do think it would help many students. A dynamic QR code could easily solve the problem of "what is the assignment?". So what is a dynamic QR code? This is a code that does not change but the information attached to it does. Another option: You could also have a QR code linked to any type of editable webpage where you might list the daily assignments. As a teacher, you would go back to the site on a regular basis and change/add the information on the page. The student would only need one QR code glued to the inside of their notebook, assignment book, calendar or whatever tool they use. It could even be printed off and hung up on their refrigerator at home! The point is, this QR code would stay the same all year long but every time they scan it they would see new information.

So try this out. Here is a code:

i-nigma

Come back in a day or so and scan the code again and you will see the page has changed. The QR image is the same but the information on the page has changed. For students who have trouble logging into sites (remembering passwords, etc) this would be a very easy solution for them. The only thing needed is a QR reader for a smartphone or tablet. There are many available but I recommend i-nigma. It has been a favorite of mine. Fast and reliable.

Want to see a nice list of QR code generators and what you can do with them? Check out my colleague and co-presenter's website Hold the Mayo.

Tots and Technology

Do you live in Texas? Live near Texas? Just wish you were in Texas?

Well you should consider attending Tots and Technology presented by the Texas Computer Educators Association. Awesome little conference geared toward PK-5th grade teachers but middle school teachers (6-7-8) could benefit also. You get a lot of bang for your buck so you really need to check it out! And it's in Galveston...on a beach...

Let's Make a Movie!

My sixth grade students are working on a research project about composers. Each student researched one composer and wrote a brief summary about that composer including items about their life such as education, influences and compositions. They will each dress up as their composer and we are going to video them giving their talk as their composer. The cool thing though is that we are going to "blue screen" it and put images relating to the composer in the background. It has it's challenges but this is a project well worth the time. So I'd like to share some awesome resources that I and my students will be using to create these composer movies. I'll share one when we are finished. We are going to be using Windows Movie Maker 2.6 to edit our movie.

Let's start with some videos that will tell you all you need to know about how to do this.These come from Lamar CISD in Texas and their Interact Cafe. The videos are presented by Chris Nilsson. I first saw Chris present at TCEA. Chris includes on the site the XML files you will need to add to Movie Maker to use the blue screen. This is a great resource. While you are there, you should check out some of the other things on the Interact Cafe site. Some excellent tutorials.

To read their script, the students will be using a site called Cue Prompter It is exactly what it sounds like, easy to use and FREE.



We are using iPads to record. Online-convert (another of my favorites) to convert the videos to wmv so we can import them into Movie Maker.

And btw- my "blue screen" is a plastic party table cloth that I bought from the local party supply store. Works perfectly!

And yes, there are other tools to do what we are doing. And yes, there is an iPad green screen app. BUT, using the tools we have this is what we are doing. Doing it this way though does give the students an experience that they won't find with an iPad. I think knowing that you can make a program like Movie Maker do something it didn't before is valuable knowledge. I also think putting all these pieces together gives you a sense of greater power over a creation. Yes, there are easier ways with different tools but why not this way? And to top it off, I just read this great article on how creating movies involves Higher Order Thinking skills so there you go!

NCEA good stuff like OZOBOTS

I recently returned from the National Catholic Educators Association conference in Orlando (nice!). Co-presented on two topics: Extending the Classroom with Edmodo (dear to my heart!) and Formative Assessment: Requirement for Learning. Both sessions went very well. My co-presenter, Carol Mayo, and I were quite pleased. The sessions I attended were good also. One of my favorite was Full STREAM Ahead with Fredy Padovan. (remember this name and follow him on Twitter and wherever else he roams) And while you are at it you should check out Immaculata-La Salle's 1:1 iPad program website. 

We got to play with Ozobots. Nice and simple robots to introduce students to robotics and coding. App is free. Little robots are @$50 each. But you don't even need an app to use these cool little robots. All you need is a piece of plain white paper and red, green, blue and black markers. Quite impressive and tons of fun!

New Year, New Name, New Look!

2015 has rolled right in and I am back in the game. Changed my blog name- Tail Wagger Tech- the last one just didn't roll off my tongue very well and I had to have something to do with dogs. Had to change the colors and background too just to keep up with all the changes. February kept me pretty busy with some presentations at TCEA in Austin. We presented on Formative Assessment: Required for Learning, Extending Your Classroom with Edmodo, and Using Edmodo Apps to Enhance Learning. The sessions went well and if anyone is interested in those presentations you can find them on my colleague's website www.holdthemayo.org. We will be presenting Formative Assessment and Extending Your Classroom with Edmodo at NCEA in Orlando. Looking forward to some Florida sunshine!

Speaking of Edmodo apps....My sixth grade music class is working on some composer research and they are using the InstaGrok Lite app in Edmodo. Using the apps in Edmodo is very handy since students don't have to log in to more than one thing. The apps operate right in Edmodo. InstaGrok Lite helps students gather information from websites, etc into a mind map of sorts. Another tab is their Journal where they can actually write their paper and take notes. It keeps their pinned websites in a menu to the side. I think it has made organizing their research much easier. If you are an Edmodo user don't be afraid to visit the "app store". There are many apps that are free to use with your classes and many are unlimited use, meaning they can be assigned to all your classes.

If you aren't an Edmodo user, well you really have to take a good look at that! And once you sign up and get a FREE account, check out InstaGrok Lite and all the great apps in Edmodo.