A Newspaper of Tweets?

Click the icon to visit paper.li.

I follow Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher on Twitter, along with her other 29,000+ followers! Here was one of her tweets today:

“The Cool Cat Teacher Daily Tweetpaper is out! http://vsb.li/wgtdwK.“

So, I clicked on her link and found her daily newspaper compiled completely from her tweets!  I said to myself, “How did she do that?”  Then, I did what any 21st century educator would do, I went to my Google search bar and typed, “How do you create a Twitter newspaper?”  Within seconds (and I seriously mean seconds), I had discovered paper.li, created an account, and published my first Tweet Paper. 

New to Twitter? Click the icon above to read my blog post to get you oriented with Tweeting!

Paper.li is a free service that takes links from the people you follow on Twitter and organizes those links into a virtual paper for easy reading.  Plus, it is incredibly simple to create an account.  Sign into paper.li with your Twitter account, and you are ready to publish.

After I had published my first paper, I realized that you might not be interested in some of the musicians, politicians, or athletes I follow, so my first paper really isn’t a great example of a good instructional paper.  But…that is how you learn.  I quickly discovered that I can publish a paper based only on my own tweets,  from those I follow, from specific tags, or even create my own custom paper. So, I went back to my settings and customized my sources.  The result:  my second paper is more specialized to education and instruction.

Another feature I really like about the paper is that the original tweeter’s name appears under each post, so the source is transparent.  I am going to continue to play with the settings, but I can already tell a difference between the content of my first and second editions.

Here’s it is.  What do you think?

Click the photo to visit my online tweet paper.

Then, I began to imagine the possibilities for classrooms and school districts!

What if, you tweeted a series of web pages, videos, articles, etc. on a certain topic, and then your students read your Tweet Paper for the day to get information.

Even better…what if students tweeted information they found on the web that coincided with concepts, topics, and units they were studying.  They could peer review Tweet Papers, choose favorite resources, and explore topics in a way we have not done so before.  A Tweet Paper might even be the foundational piece of assessing student understanding.  By asking, What did you learn from this video?, or Why did you tweet this article?, we can have our students articulate their reasoning through analysis and evaluation.  Excited yet?

If you are interested in subscribing to my Tweet Paper, click on the icon to visit my paper.

What about our instructional leaders, curriculum folks, and instructional technology specialists out there?

Paper.li is the perfect resource to provide teachers, principals, and other stakeholders with the latest and greatest information pertinent to their needs.  If your focus is the Common Core, go out there and tweet away.  If you are looking for literacy resources, find them and tweet them.  The great thing about your tweet paper is that you can create a new one each day, and each of your old papers is archived by date, so you can recall them at any time.  You can change hashtags, authors, or even who you follow to create a customized experience for your readers.

I can’t wait to get my morning paper!

How cool is that?  Are you ready to create your tweet paper?

Once you get started, if you are interested in more advance options, paper.li has a great FAQ and support page.

Get The Math

(Modified from Donna Murray’s Blog:  Explore the Possibilities.)

Click the Icon to check out the Get the Math website.

Looking for ways to incorporate real world experiences into middle and high school math classes?

Get The Math provides algebra-based real-world challenges for middle and high school students. The challenges focus on fashion, videogame design, and music production.  Students are provided with an interactive problem to solve. By watching video segments where professionals encounter algebraic problems, students become engaged and use interactive tools within the website to try and solve problems themselves.  Students then return to the video to see the professional team’s solution.

This site includes lesson plans and related resources for teachers as well.

Watch this short video to see how you can use Get The Math to support algebra instruction in your classroom. http://www.thirteen.org/get-the-math/teachers/overview-of-the-lessons/26/

C4LPT Announces the 2011 Top 100 Tools for Learning

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies recently finalized the 5th Annual Survey of Learning Tools. The rankings this year were compiled from feedback from 531 learning professionals worldwide – from education, training and workplace learning.

Each slide contains the following information:

• Tool Name and Icon
• Website
• Short Explanation of Purpose or Use
• Cost and Availability Information
• 2011 Ranking as well as Rankings from Previous Years

 

Don’t Stumble… Wait! Yes, Stumble!

Stumble Upon is an amazing, fun, and constructive use of your "browsing" time.

Just so you know, this post is really not specifically for your classroom!  That being said, of course, I know if you use this site, you will most certainly find something for your students and yourself!  Stumble Upon is quite possibly one of the most innovative Internet search tools ever created.  As I mentioned in Oh, the Places You’ll Google!, often the BEST things we find on the web, we just “stumble upon” as we are looking for something else.

Here’s how it works:

Stumble Upon  makes it easy to discover new and interesting sites and information on the Web.  Once you create an account, which takes just a few seconds, you click on topics you are interested in finding out more about, and Stumble Upon will transport you to amazing web pages, videos, photos and more that you may not have found on your own.

When "stumbling", click the "Stumble" button to see another site. Click the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to help Stumble Upon customize your experience.

As you Stumble through great web pages, click the Like or Dislike button at the top of the page, and Stumble Upon will customize your experience even more.   The more pages you Like and Dislike, the more specific your stumbles will be.

Members of Stumble Upon have describing this experience as “the entire Internet, all in one place,”  ”an epic journey” and “a map to an adventure you wouldn’t otherwise have found out about.”

Watch a tutorial here!

Oh, the Places you’ll Google!

Google can take you a world away from where you wanted to go originally. Save yourself some time with 7 Google search techniques to maximize your time

I’m sure it has happened to you.  You go to Google to look for something specific – maybe it is for your students or your teachers, or maybe you are searching for something like a recipe, a vacation spot, or a news topic.  This is when it happens…

You stumble upon something you weren’t looking for, but you were rewarded with a great “find” that you can use!  Sometimes, this new “find” actually sends you on a completely different path of “googling,” and before you know it, an hour has passed, and you haven’t found what you were originally looking for.  However, what you have discovered is an array of interesting sites that have a great deal of merit, and now you have 10 other ideas for things that you can do either in your professional or your personal life.  What’s so wrong with that?

That being said, the purpose of this blog post is twofold.  First, I think I can help some of you ADD Internet searchers to be more explicit in your searches and provide you with some great tools I discovered on Simple K12 to narrow your searches and keep you on task.  Next, if you are one of those daring searchers who can’t wait to see where the web will take you next, I want to share a great site called Stumble Upon (that’s coming in my next post.)  Just keep reading…

As promised, here are  7 Google Search Techniques that can help you be a more precise searcher reblogged from Simple K12!

SafeSearch

It’s surprising how many people don’t know about Google SafeSearch!  SafeSearch filters allow you to modify your browser settings so that inappropriate content does not display in search results. More on SafeSearch here.

Word Definitions

To quickly pull up the definition of a word, use “define:” followed by the word.

Example: define:webinar

Numeric Ranges

Useful if you’re looking for information that relates to a range of numbers (such as a price range or years).

Example: television 1950…1960

Phone numbers

Curious who keeps calling your cellphone and not leaving a message?  If their number is listed, you can find it via Google by using “phonebook:” followed by the number.

Example: phonebook:555-555-5555

Excluding words or phrases

If  you’re looking for something a little more obscure, narrow down your search results by asking Google to omit certain results by using the “-” symbol.

Example: Florida vacation -Disney

Specify results by document type

Looking for a PDF? Word doc? Powerpoint? Many people don’t realize that you can filter results by document type in the search bar.  Just use “filetype:” followed by the file extension after your keywords.

Example: “World War I” filetype:ppt

Recipe View

Have you noticed the recipe view in Google Search?  Type in a recipe title, and on the left-hand side, you’ll see various options that allow you to specify whether or not certain ingredients are included, the amount of cook time resource, and calorie count.  This tip is my personal favorite, so make sure to check it out!

Example: Pumpkin Bread

Scientific American: 60-Second Science Podcasts

Find out what's happening in the scientific world in only 60 seconds each day!

Looking for a science bell ringer that won’t eat up your instructional time?  Scientific American uploads a new 60-second podcast every weekday.  Each audio podcast is accompanied by a transcript of the audio so that students can follow along or click any links mentioned during the update, vocabulary can be taught explicitly, and the text can be revisited.  Visit their site:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/podcasts.cfm?type=60-second-science

Search hundreds of podcasts that discuss archeological finds, meteors, hand washing, working out, El Nino, rivers, US teen birth weights, and the list goes on and on…

Check out this podcast Social Media Tracks Disease Spread,  that explains how researchers used social media and Internet news channels to track the spread of disease outbreak almost two weeks quicker than by traditional data collection methods.

 

The Periodic Table of Videos

Click the photo to visit the website.

High school chemistry teachers, you are going to love this!  The University of Nottingham has created a short video for all 118 elements of the periodic table.  These videos demonstrate experiments and information about the elements.  I watched the Hydrogen video where the researchers fill balloons with Hydrogen and discuss why an explosion takes place.  I thought this was a great resource for all you chemistry teachers out there.

I particularly like “the professor.”  He will bring to mind Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future.

To access the videos, simply go to the website http://www.periodicvideos.com/ and click on any element.  Or, simply check out their YouTube Channel by clicking here!

Does your Candidate Support your Beliefs?

Click the photo above to take the quiz.

USA Today has a wonderful free resource called The Teacher’s Lounge (more on that in a later post), and when I was exploring that site, I happened upon The Candidate Match Game.  This short 11-question quiz will challenge you and your students to take a stand on issues from energy to defense and from medicare to immigration.

The quiz works like this:  Multiple-choice questions pop up on the screen one at a time.  After you answer the questions, your top three most compatible presidential candidates are revealed.  Then, you can click on the bar graph below the icon that represents you or the candidates to see their stances on each issue.

As an educator, I certainly wish there had a been a question added about education. It would have made for interesting conversation with students.    However, there are still many wonderful teachable moments within this resource.  First, we get a clear definition of where each candidate stands on these important issues.  In addition, we realize that we may need to do more to educate ourselves on the impact of some of the positions of all the candidates.  We may also realize that just because a candidate has a certain political affiliation, he/she may not share the same values/beliefs as we do.  One thing I learned from my experience with this quiz is that I need to research the implications that some of the positions will have on our country 5, 10, and even 20 years down the road.  (You will see what I mean when you take the quiz and begin to think about where you REALLY stand on these issues.)

I sure would like to be a classroom teacher right now to hear what my students learned from this quiz and from a student-led discussion around these issues.

Simple K-12: Changing Education through Technology

Click the icon to visit this great resource!

Once again, through Twitter, I have discovered one of those blogs that I just keep visiting over and over.  Each time, I find another quality post that is relevant, accurate, and useful.  I ♥ Ed. Tech is definitely a blog worth a subscription.

The blog is one element of the Simple K-12 website, and the motto,  Changing Education through Technology, is evident in every post.  Dedicated to ensuring teachers and school leaders are prepared for teaching and learning in the 21st century, the resources on this blog are current, innovative, and intuitive.  That’s exactly what educators need.  Blog posts are short, simple, and to the point.  Most provide a brief introduction followed by a list of resources with links to each and a short blurb about how to use the resource with students or colleagues.

By signing up for their E-mail list serv, anyone can get access to 11 Hidden Webtools for your Classroom.  This resource provides some excellent free, easy-to-use web resources with direct links.  Blog posts such as:  14 Reasons to Have a Blog, 5 Ways to Transition Classrooms into Web 2.0 Learning, and 6 Must-Have Teacher Tech Tools  are quick reads that can have a great impact on student engagement, student inquiry, and instructional delivery and design.

If you are looking for something specific, the blog uses a tag cloud, a search bar, lists of recent and popular posts, and offers archives listed by month.  Plus, you can subscribe via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS feed.

So, what are you waiting for?  Go, sign up today!

Purdue University’s “Hotseat” – Yet Another Indication that the Backchannel is Here to Stay

Purdue University has developed Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application that creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enables professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site.

Imagine the possibilities for your classroom or school district.

Learn more here:  http://www.itap.purdue.edu/studio/hotseat/