This week on Teaching Like it’s 2999, Jennie Magiera shares her 5th grade students’ video submission to The White House Student Film Festival (whose deadline is today). Jaylen, Jean Paul, Grevelle and Latrell did an awesome job turning Lorde’s hit song, “Royals” into a music video about their love of digital learning. Go here to watch the video and learn about their process for creating it, including the use of a shared Google Doc to transform the lyrics. WTG, guys!
Month: January 2014
At 30, The Original Mac Is Still An Archetype Of Innovation
All Tech Considered has a post about the Macintosh’s birthday, as well as the Morning Edition story that interviews two members of the original Mac team. They offer insights into Jobs’s goal of making a “computer for the people” that placed an emphasis on making a personal computer that was extremely approachable and did not require reading an owner’s manual to get started. This cornerstone of intuitive design of Apple products is the standard to which I judge all things tech when evaluating them for potential use in the classroom.
Use Tech Challenges to Motivate Teachers with Andrea Keller [ECM #45]
The Cool Cat Teacher Blog advises us to give a listen to the Every Classroom Matters Podcast this week with Andrea Keller. Keller explains how she uses “Technology Challenges” to motivate staff & students to get connected beyond their classrooms. If you’ve never listened to an educational podcast before, check out ECM!
57 wonderful student blogs to share with your class
Want to inspire your students to blog? The Educational Technology and Mobile Learning blog at educatorstechnology.com suggests that you have your students check out the student blogs that have been nominated for the Best Student Blogs Edublog Awards. The 57 blogs represent a wide variety of student interests including a high school help desk that describes itself as a “student run genius bar” to a blog entitled “austicandproud.” Most of the educational blogging I see teachers doing with students is content-related classroom blogging, which is great. Yet, many of the finalists for this award show what can happen when teachers encourage their kiddos to let their blogging become true reflections of their personalities and interests.
Shannon Steimel 