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.

Quick fun Tech

The middle school students where I teach get to choose an "exploratory" or elective type class once a week. It can vary from sign language to drama. They go to this class for one quarter and then get to pick another class. I usually do a Tech Tools for School topic. I try to pick fun, easy tools the kids can pick up quickly since our class time is only 30 minutes. Sometimes we find a way to use them for school work and sometimes they are just for fun. I thought I would share some of their favorite fun links.

GeoGreeting

It's amazing how they could spend 30 minutes looking at every letter of the alphabet. The cool thing is that it tells you the location of the building (city) and then they want to either try and find it themselves or they go off and do some independent research on the place where the building is. Well look at that- self motivated learning at it's finest!

Spell with Flickr 
Another fun site, although today the letter N was not working on my computer. I tried all the browsers but nothing. When things like that happen with my students I remind them that it is a web based tool and sometimes things don't work perfectly. So we go to plan B! What I really like about this one is there are different letters to choose from. When you click on a letter it cycles through about 5 or so letters and you can pick the one you like. You are not stuck with one choice as in GeoGreeting.

CoolText

Another pretty cool text creator with some really neat fonts. You have many controls like color, size, gradient, the list is long. Some you can download the image in a variety of formats. One word of caution- this site does have ads so use it carefully.

So there you have it- Three fun tools to create your headings, use on powerpoints, anywhere you can use an image.

Remnants of past conferences- Exit Cards

 

I am sitting here going through a pile of flyers, business cards, conference programs, etc., that I picked up from some of the different conferences I attended recently. It was one of those things I said to myself "I'll go through this at home when I have more time". HA! I'm actually looking right now at a program from 2010. Seriously?

Well in the midst of all the junk (and the throw away pile is much larger than the keep pile) I am finding a few things worth keeping and repeating. I thought I would share them with anyone who happens to find my ramblings here.

A find worth mentioning was from a talk on Assessment. I remember this one. I felt it was important to hear what they said but I do remember it was not a very stimulating talk. Good information: Bad delivery. However- what I found in my pile here was about EXIT CARDS. Many of you probably have used exit cards before and I have heard different questions, etc, that teachers use. Maybe you will like this one. They suggested a 321 CARD:

• 3 things I learned
• 2 questions I still have
• 1 way I see _______ used in the world around me.

It was the last part of that that I really like. I think that is one of the most important things teachers need to remember the relevance of what we teach to the students' life. We really need to consider that if they do not see how it benefits them, unfortunately they probably don't care.

Tech tools to use for your 321 CARD? How about Socrative? I talked about that in the last post. Another you could use is Padlet (formerly known as WallWisher). I like Padlet, which is like a bulletin board with sticky notes, because you can make it private and you can moderate the posts. And it's close relative Primary Wall that is very similar but geared toward the lower elementary crowd.

August Squeeze! Socratve and LiveBinder

I did this! Not such a slacker, eh?

 I seriously though about this being the last day of August and if I wasn't going to be a total slacker I better get a post in. So pathetic!

But- I do have two good tools that if I did not mention before they certainly deserve a closer look. Let's start with Socrative. Awesome FREE Web 2.0 tool. Create a free account and your students are able to log in either through the web or the iPad app with no account necessary from them. Once there you can use Socrative for review questions, exit tickets, test, and more. Socrative is especially helpful for formative assessment because it makes the checking quick and easy. There are games to play with any of your tests or quizzes. My students loved the Space Race. If your students have access to computers or iPads on a regular basis you may find this a regular part of your lessons. 

The other web based tool that I finally used to create and share with people is LiveBinder. LiveBinder is exactly what it sounds like- a binder, with tabs and everything. What I used it for was a professional development session my principal requested I help him put together. He gave me two videos he wanted us to view and a series of questions to answer. The challenge was how could I put this all together online and keep it all in one place? LiveBinder to the rescue! 

What I discovered was that by using the tabs and inserting the different content choices I could put videos on a page and have sub tabs underneath each main tab containing a question to answer. I then inserted a Padlet (another great web tool) right on the page. All the teachers had to do was read, click, type and they were done. So simple! I also love the option to make the binder private and require a passcode to enter. This made our PD just for our school.

My principal was happy, I was thrilled and I think the teachers found it easy also.

I have been at workshops where a leader has used LiveBinders to organize the details of the workshop but I had never used it to create something for someone to actually use. So....Go check out LiveBinders. There are many great public binders that might be helpful for your own use. But do think about how you might be able to use this for your students.