SY20/21 so Far

  This school year is certainly shaping up, not as we had hoped, but things are going well despite teaching and learning taking place from home. 

I spent a lot of time over the summer researching, taking online courses and getting caught up on EdTech changes and enhancements for this school year. I have been busily updating my training website and have been equally as busily updated lessons and trying out new tools to use in our daily online learning.

I was also privileged to participate in a ISTE STEM Spotlight publication.

A few takeaways from the year so far. 

Favourite Teaching Apps:

Google Classroom (carried over from previous years)

1. Pear Deck (I have come back to it today, after many years)
2. Jamboard, Miro (and Mentimeter for presentations and responses)
3. Kialo for online debates

The LRC

Everything is now online, all of our clubs, events, and as many books and subscriptions as we can get.

I revamped the entire website over the summer and launched it on a New Google Site. The improvement and growth of which is one of my big projects for the year. We have made interactive, user-friendly access rooms, added all of our online content to it, and are in the process of linking our online activities for the year through a central hub on the website.

We are currently in the process of preparing our Destiny library system for new users so that the community can easily log in and reserve books and we are sorting out our best practices for book quarantine and lending practices in anticipation of a partial or full reopening in January.

It has been very busy, but everyone is doing their very best to make the most of the tools and technologies we have available and working closely with the community to build positive working relationships with all members while helping them to access and navigate all of the provisions we have put in place for them.

Here's to a very different but very successful SY20/21!

More Cool Web 2.0 Tools

This is short list of some really cool tools I have come across through my feeds. I have already fallen in love with the first three on the list and am about to get to know #4 much better.

Mygazines.com provides free uploaded mags online we can all enjoy. Are there copyright issues here?

Flowgram.com is a great app. that allows you to upload and/ create unique presentations while adding audio, notes and other content to them. It is something similar to Voice thread only BETTER for presentation purposes, not as good however for collaborative work and feedback, which is really the beauty of Voicethread!

Go Animate is a web app. that brings animations to life with themed characters, audio, backgrounds, sound effects. I just recently go very excited about toondoo , using it to generate cartoon strips. Go Animate however, breathes life into your toons as you organise your stories along a time line.

Finally there is PicLIts.

"PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture."

Update: For a wonderful collection of web 2.0 tools (one of the best I've come across) go to Cooltools.

Embeded Code

The availability of web applications that allow you to use embeded code has increased dramatically over the last year. This in itself has had a major impact on how I publish to the web. As a once strong proponent of frontpage and html and part time website administrator I have been pleasantly relieved of many of my prior trials involving our school website. Over this past school year I have had to tinker very little with the Upper Primary School website once it had been restructured for sy 07/08. Much of this is due to our school's new blogging system which has allowed me to convert the teachers in Upper Primary into blog masters instead of the traditional webmasters that were previously required. This in itself has been a great step forward and empowered more people with not only the tools but the enthusiasm to go forth and publish

All of this is wonderful, but perhaps the greatest intitial hook for many staff members and students is that not only can they publish written work with ease, but they can embed a great range of presentations into their blog posts. The cool factor is what snags them immediately! This year we have experimented with mind maps using bubble.us, slide shows with picture trail, slide, picassa, We have begun to experiment with Time Line Creator, as well as other apps. While this list appears short there are a huge number of other web applications out there and we have a long trial list ahead of us. I have to keep reminding myself that as exciting as this is there is a need to take it slowly in order to determine which are the best tools for our school to adopt for our students. This in itself can be challenging.

I must admit that while I am a huge proponent of web applications with embeddable code, the versatility of which has spoiled me in many ways. Being spoiled can sometimes lead to disappointment when things don't go as expected. I came across wordle over a week ago and fell in love with it immediately. As soon as I had my playtime I took the next logical step, trying to paste my word cloud into a blog. Initially I thought my frustration might have been the result of a goof-up on my part, but no, it appears that while you can link from this application you cannot embed your work. On further investigation, I found out that I wasn't alone in that particular boat, others, many others had bemoaned the same tragedy. I can't figure out why someone would go to the trouble to create such a great application and then allow it to fall short by not supplying embeddable code. That said I am an optimist and expect that there is a good reason for it. Maybe it is in the works still. I certainly hope so as I can see such educational potential in wordle.

This is my cloud. I print screened it then cropped it and saved as a pic. The long way around but here it is-my del.icio.us tag cloud. Not very original, in the sense that I am probably the millionth person to wordle their tag cloud, but very informative...just look at the large words and you can tell immediately where my interests lie.

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