Tots and Tech Galveston and Frisco

Did I mention I was presenting at TCEA Tots and Tech Galveston? And in Frisco too! #tceatots
Well I did. It was awesome once again but this time no sea weed or tropical storms so we actually had a "vacation" of sorts and stuck around for a few extra days and explored Galveston. But I digress....

Presentations in Galveston included:

Edmodo in the Classroom
Edmodo, My Personal Learning Network and More
Fun Web Projects and Resources
iPad Projects that Wow
Quiet on the Set: Making Movies with Your iPad- Green Screening
Let's Do the Paper Slide and Mime

If you would like to see any of the presentation material, you can go to my co-presenter's site. You can download everything from Hold the Mayo (nothing to do with sandwiches- her last name is Mayo!)

http://www.tceatots.org/

TCEA Tots Frisco sessions will include the following:

Edmodo in the Classroom- Beginner
Engaging Your Students with Interactive Lessons using Nearpod
Fun Web Projects and Resources
Formative Assessment using Technology

Again- any presentation material will be available at Hold the Mayo
If you are local to Texas/Dallas-Fort Worth, you should definitely check out this mini conference in Frisco -> TCEA TOTS
I highly recommend attending. Very well done and not as intimidating as the regular TCEA conference that is held in Austin in February.

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.

UDMC and Avatars

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to present at the University of Dallas Ministry Conference on Oct. 25th. I was a part of two very different presentations- one tech, one not. The non-tech presentation was done with my very dear friend and colleague, Beth Belcher. Beth and I spent nine years encouraging children to have reverence and familiarity with Church devotions and Mass. If you might be here and looking for "The Catholic School Mass- Better and Better" there is a QR code to the right. If you scan it or click it you will find the shared Google folder. If there is an error please be sure to let me know. You can also find Beth's site in my Blog list.

The other presentation I was involved with another dear friend and my "partner in crime" Carol Mayo,  was "Encouraging Writing with Weebly". A great session but our tech was less than desirable. It was pretty sad. The laptop we had access to was XP, no flash installed, not hard wired to the internet, Office not registered and who knows what else. My mac and the projector wouldn't talk to one another so we were left with static images (and not enough of those!) and our enthusiastic speech. Despite the tech glitches we had a nice sized group that stayed, asked good questions, and were most kind about our tech problems which we had absolutely no control over. I thought it still went well. It was just so disappointing to not be able to demonstrate how easy Weebly is to use. You can find some of the information we use to present Weebly by following this link.

I think I mentioned before about my elective at school where I introduce some fun tech for my class. I am always looking for things that don't  require you to create an account and you don't see a gallery of inappropriate items. I have found my students love to create things online. Recently I showed them two different sites for creating "avatars". They had a lot of fun with them. The first is DoppleMe . You can make a fun avatar for free. To save it you would need an account but we just snipped it and saved it.

The other site I showed them was Build Your Wild Self. I was afraid they would think this site was more for little kids but they spent more time here than the other. This site comes from the New York Zoos and Aquarium so you can imagine that it is very kid friendly. Again free. You start with creating a "normal" looking avatar and then begin to add animal parts. When you complete your new wild self it gives you a name based on the parts you chose. It also explains what each part is, from what animal and some information about it. (When I created this one what I clicked on was not what I was getting so I don't know about the glitch.) You can send to a friend or snip it and save or print it out. I really enjoy this site also.

"After" the animal parts!

My normal avatar before the animal parts.