Category Archives: Professional Development

Summer Video Series: Friday Favs Episodes 1 – 4

This summer I offered an option to our district staff to receive a weekly video I’ve been making called y Friday Favs.  In each video I share an educational resource that is one of my favorites that I think other people may like, but maybe they aren’t a broad enough topic to offer an entire training on.  Sometimes they are web resources, apps, books, activities, tech skills, or ways to save time so you can learn more about technology!

I have about 35 people signed up to get the videos delivered via email, and a couple have said I need to be sharing them on my blog and elsewhere.  So I’m going to share the first 4 episodes here and for the rest of the summer, I’ll post each as its own blog post.

As a reflection to this process after the first four videos, I’m glad I committed to doing them because it has made me continue to work on my own video tutorial/screencast skills.  I’m not a naturally personable and witty on-screen personality, so I trying to let some of “who I am” in to the process has been challenging.  But I know that as we move forward, video is only going to be more important for students and teachers and I’m glad I’m pushing myself in this way.  I’ve been using You Tube’s Creator Studio to record the videos as live events which is nice because then it automatically is saved to YouTube in one step when the even is ended.  Maybe more details on the technical side on another day.  For now, here are Episodes 1 – 4.  (Followed by the sign up form if you want me to add you to the mailing list to get the videos delivered directly to your email)


 

Give it a Try: Twitter Chats

I’m getting ready to try my hand at my first opportunity to co-host a Twitter Chat and I wanted to make a brief guide for some of my colleagues who might have never taken part in a Twitter Chat before!    So this guide assumes first that you have a Twitter Account.  If you are brand new to Twitter, a better place to start is here:  http://cybraryman.com/twitterforbeginners.html.  Otherwise, follow these steps and tips to make a Twitter Chat a good experience:

  1.  Use a third-party app to help manage the “flow” of information during the chat.  I like, HootSuite but TweetDeck is also good.  These tools both have both app versions and desktop versions.  I prefer to work from my laptop AND iPad during a chat!  Once you choose one of the above tools, set up a column to follow the hashtag of the chat you’ll be participating in.  This filters out all the other Tweets and allows you to focus on just the relevant information at the time the chat takes place.
  2.  Understand the lingo and shorten words where you can to save characters.  Otherwise you won’t be able to fit your comments into 140 characters.   Ss = students, Ts= teachers, convo = conversation use the ampersand (&) and drop a few vowels where it won’t make the word impossible to read:  frm = from, f/ = for  Think about how you took notes in your college classes and shorten things up in logical ways!
  3. Questions will come out with a label:  Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and you should respond to questions with answers with corresponding labels:  A1, A2, A3, A4.  If you forget an post with it…not to worry this happens occasionally and others will still be able to tell what you’re responding to most of the time.
  4. MOST important tip:  If you respond, be sure to include the hashtag of the chat so that others following it will see your contribution!  #CSedChat is hashtag I’ll be adding to the end of each of my tweets during the chat I’m helping to moderate!  It will be in each question and each answer!  (Bonus:  after the chat, I can still search for tweets that were made using that hashtag and find them all when I have more time to look through the resources!)
  5. Lurking is ok…jump in and watch if you’re too scared to contribute.  That’s a fine way to start!  But don’t be shy about sharing your expertise!

Adobe Voice iPad App: A Tip Sheet

image of tip sheet

As part of our district’s emphasis on college and career readiness for our students, in a few weeks all teachers are going to get a 1/2 day to visit local businesses to learn more about how their content and/or the “soft skills” we teach students are applicable to today’s employers.  Following the visit, we are expected to create a digital artifact of our visit.  I’ve been brainstorming all the cool ways these visits could be documented, and I’ve created a tip sheet for a fairly new  free app that I’ve been experimenting with and plan to use to document my own visit for the day:  Adobe Voice.  I’ve created a tip sheet for new users of Adobe Voice that can be downloaded from this link:  Adobe Voice Tip Sheet.  The screen shot in this post is of my tip sheet.

Adobe Voice allows the user to insert  images of their own OR icons from their vast library, then record audio narration over the top.  Multiple images can be added to tell a story and the app even has its own background music and themes to choose from.  Once you’re done the app saves directly down to your photo library on your iPad as movie file . . . that’s right . . . a movie file!!  How cool is that?   (I just had a little flash back to my old Windows Photostory days, only Adobe Voice is way easier!!)

Google Classroom Video Resource: Sharing!

Here is a Great video on using Google Classroom!

In today’s blog post, I’m sharing a video I ran across through a useful resource I use to learn about Google Tools:  www.thegooru.com.  I’m often asked by staff to show them quickly how to use Google Classroom, but this tool has become more than a “quick share,” so I’m hoping that being able to help folks create their first classroom and then sending them to this blog post will be useful!

This video is about 50 minutes long, but you can forward through the first part of the video because this is a recording of a live webinar and the first 6  minutes (or so) are the presenter inviting the live viewers to join his Google Classroom account so they have live participation.  As a viewer of the archived video, I just suggest you forward in the video to about 6:15 and start it there.  (This should make the viewing length about 45 minutes total.)  The video was published in September of 2015, so as of today, it is pretty current on what Google Classroom can do.)