We sent Jennifer Frazer, one of our high school English teachers, who also serves on our tech committee, to the METC preconference workshop on integrating technology tools in English Language Arts to Meet Common Core Standards. She came back with lots of great ideas to share with her department colleagues, but we also asked her to do a short screencast of some of the webtools she learned about that would be of interest to all subject areas. So, Jen chose Newsela, Rewordify, and Instagrok. I particularly like how Rewordify makes a text easier to read not by shortening it (which most automated sites do rather in-eloquently), but by substituting easier words or phrases, while still allowing students access to the original word and its pronunciation.
Month: April 2014
Hargadon’s Big Event Announcements
If you’ve never attended a virtual conference, you should check out Steve Hargadon’s announcement this week about some upcoming virtual conferences including Learning About Learning, Reinventing the Classroom, ISTE Unplugged, Gaming in Ed, and Library 2.014. All of the conferences are free to attend online.
There are also some opportunities to present at some of these conferences. I’ve presented before for Hargadon, and he truly makes it easy to do! The deadline for calls for proposals for The Learning Revolution Conference is April 15, with the conference happening April 21-25, 2014.
Using Google Apps in Your Google Drive #METC14
One of our technology teacher leaders, Alicia Brand, shares something she learned at METC this year: connecting apps to your Google Drive. After a brief review of how to access your Google Drive, Alicia explains how to connect/disconnect more apps, including MindMeister, Pixlr Editor, Drive Template Gallery, Realtime Board and Simplebooklet.