Meet the New Google Drive!

In case you have heard about the new Google drive, but still don't know why you cannot see it, you actually have to turn it on. You can do this in the settings area of drive.  Watch the included video to see the most recent updates to Drive.

BrainPOP brings us Concept Mapping

The concept mapping tool by BrainPOP, Make-A-Map

Introducing the Make-a-Map™ Concept Map Tool by BrainPOP – Powered by Ideaphora

Flash Cards in a Flash with Google Spreadsheets

Make Your Own Set of Flashcards using Google Sheets

1: Modify the Google Spreadsheet Template

• Copy this template into your Gmail or Google Apps account.
• Enter as many terms as you want.
• Name your set of flashcards by changing the name of the worksheet (at the bottom).
• (New Google Sheets users, use this template. Sign-in, File, Make a copy…)

2: Publish Your Spreadsheet

• Go to File, Publish to the Web…, then click Start publishing.
• Copy the link under Get a link to the published data.

3: Get Your Link

• Follow the instructions to get your Flippity.net link directly from the template.
• Or paste the link you copied in the box below and click Go:

4: Share 

• Share the  link with anyone you want to view your flashcards.

Tell a Story With Impact using Adobe Voice

Adobe's free iPad app called Adobe Voice allows students to create animated videos using a series of slides. With a selection of over 25,000 images, this impactful app offers background and transition options as part of its cinematic motion. It is user friendly and starts with a tutorial for how the app works. Students can create their own template or select from nine pre-made templates called "structures" and use the available photo and music library. They may also upload their own photos, add text to the slide formats and narrate each slide with their own recorded audio. The app will automatically auto adjust the slide timing to fit the narration.   To share their work, students can email a link to their presentation or grab the embed code to plug it into their own digital portfolios.

Randomize Answer Options in Google Forms

Google forms now allows you to randomize answer options for Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Choose from a list and Grids.  
Simply use the advanced settings drop down to shuffle your option order.

Formative Assessment With Zondle

Mrs Brown of St. Mary's Memorial High School shared her love of  Zondle as an assessment tool, "I am sure a lot of you have been been using Zondle already  but if you haven't checked it out I definitely suggest you do!   In general, you create review questions on the website and the site turns it into games for students to play on computers, tablets and smartphones. You can also set it up to play review games as a whole class. Students get points for getting questions correct and playing often.  Their current "place" is put on the leaderboard so it is like a competition for the students.  A lot of my students are just as obsessed with using zondle as I am.  Go to www.zondle.com and start playing around with it if you have time. Students can play again and again if you set the quiz as formative assessment, so its great for any memorization. You can see if their scores are improving each time and which questions they miss most. It also makes students answer questions they miss over again until they get it right. Yes, you can also use quizzes other teachers made. Also, if you want to take a grade on a quiz you can set it as summative assessment too so they can only play it once."

Programming the Future With STEM

  What do you get when you cross an adorable, programmable robot with a group of tech-savvy high school students? Self-directed elementary students with an interest in basic programming!  Teachers Adam Swift and Lynne Kesselman advanced Egg Harbor Township Schools’ STEM initiative goals with their Finch Robotics grant, which included bringing their high-schoolers into the district’s 1st through 8th Grade elementary computer classrooms to teach the younger students how to program the sturdy creature to follow their commands.  Common Core standard ties included problem solving, positive and negative number recognition and number lines, inverse operations, units of measurement, cause and effect, and conditional statements. The high school students were given the fortunate opportunity to practice their leadership and programming skills in a supportive environment.

Some advance work was completed by all students by participating in the STEM Hour of Code program during Computer Science Education Week in December. The young learners were able to draw upon their earlier experiences with Scratch programming when Kesselman and Swift’s students taught a similar program, Snap, to make Finch come alive. This STEM activity was more memorable and active because they could watch an actual robot respond to their on screen commands in a physical environment. Students manipulated the robot’s operation using the JAVA programming language to engage motors, light sensors, infrared sensors, temperature sensors, accelerometers, and speakers.

 It was gratifying to see seven and eight year old students learn the first few programming commands  from their fifteen to seventeen year old  instructors, then direct learning themselves by taking over the display computer and modeling the next programming tasks.  Swift and Kesselman were true "Guides on the side" as all activities were student-based and student-led.  

Egg Harbor Township High School Students
directing the programming process.

For more information on the Finch visit http://www.finchrobot.com/. 

Subtweeting, Avoiding Confrontation, and Disciplinary Action

Teens know how to negotiate social media to get their point across and avoid outright confrontations through the art of the subtweet. The hashtag #subtweet reveals  passive aggressive posts with real targets. The biggest celebrity names subtweet their heartaches, hates and frustrations and our students are using the subtweet as well as the most popular twitterers. Many opt out of the hashtag and just post subtweet-like comments on their twitter feed to fly even further under the radar.  Comparable to the slambooks of the 80's, students use subtweeting to make a point about someone in particular or to draw attention to themselves for a particular purpose.  Using subtweets allows students to avoid disciplinary actions, because they do not name names directly.

Subtweeting from Devils Advocate on Vimeo.

SRI & ETTC Offers Teachers a Lesson in Social Media Uses, Pitfalls

Post by SRI & ETTC at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Who we follow on Twitter

10 years ago today, a bouncing baby rover landed on Mars. Explore Oppy's "90-day" mission https://t.co/7WZYIVyBvT #10YrsOnMars

— Spirit and Oppy (@MarsRovers) January 24, 2014

Win a FREE workshop at the SRI & ETTC

We are running a facebook "Like" campaign, to win a free workshop, like us on facebook and share one of our posts on your wall. We will announce the winner here on our blog and on our facebook page. 

Best Science Fair Resources 2014

Science fair help has never been closer, with these four websites, your students can enroll in challenges and competitions as well as access organized science resources to meet their objectives.  Siemens Science Day Learn by Doing offers monthly activity themes and experiments listed by difficulty level and a chance to win an interactive science assembly.

3M’s 2014 Young Scientist Challenge is “The nation’s premier science competition for grades 5-8” requiring new innovations or solutions that could solve or impact an everyday problem that directly affects student, their families, their communities, and/or the global population.

Discovery Education partners with Elmer’s to offer a Science Fair Central with projects, presentations and a leveled idea finder to assist students in finding their science fair investigative passion.

 The Science of Everyday Life sponsored by Discovery Education and 3M makes accessible the science of everyday life to make meaningful connections. Student explore the science around them with games, families  can find learning activities to try at home,  teachers have standards-based lesson plans and videos, and in Innovation Headquarters, innovators explore virtual labs.

Using Edmodo to Collect Data for Science Fair Projects

Middle school teachers battling with science fair projects and the collection of real data have many resources at their disposal.  Students can create surveymonkeys, polldaddys or Google forms to collect data.  The problem lies not in the creation of the collection tool, but in the dissemination of the actual surveys to a participating audience.  Here is an example of a science teacher from Virginia reaching out to his professional learning community in edmodo to assist his student in her objective. This plea will garner many responses, beyond what the student needs, because teachers love to help one another. As a result of Mr. Bearman's post, there will be teachers who will use this link for their own students to complete in science classrooms across the globe. This student will have more responses than she could have ever dreamed of and will be able to find correlations for her research based on a huge sample size.  If you want to add your own response to her project use this link and complete the survey yourself!

Are You Preparing Your Students for PARCC?

A look at the PARCC models for ELA/Literacy reveals that student will be expected to read more than one reading passage; the main article and the sidebar. Requirements include close reading, finding relationships among key ideas, and comparing information covered by both topics.  Teachers are scrambling to find complimentary resources for student practice.  While daunting, the task is not impossible.  New Jersey ELL teacher Carol Novick  has even included technology in her practice with her ELL students.

Carol found a short video clip on the South Pole Allied Challenge for the students to view on her ipad in a small group. The Youtube transcript feature was not accurate and she decided not to use it. Then Carol paired an edited online article with a short publisher created reader to recreate the assessment task.  The online article was run through the Chrome readability app to increase the text size and remove the ads for some students.  For others, she used readability text tool called http://read-able.com/ to determine the reading level, then ran the text through http://rewordify.com/  to reduce the reading level by simplifiying  the text slightly. Finally, she developed her assessment questions based on the PARCC samples. Carol's strategy of using current events paired with existing educational materials will fill the gap until more testing samples are available.

Screencasting on the iPad.

This interactive thinglink shows some apps for screencasting on your ipads.

Where in the World is Your Classroom?

Connect geography and culture using a Mystery Skype session with another classroom. The Global Classroom project and their partners, Hello Little World Skypers have brought their collective brains together to offer an experience where student use maps, communication skills and critical thinking to solve a geographical mystery. Students take on the roles of Map Keepers and Logical Reasoners in this exercise where they are required to find out the location of another classroom by asking only yes and no questions in a mystery Skype session with that class. For the past few years, many distant classrooms have forged connections and learned from one another. The Mystery Skype founder is a teacher from Holmdel, New jersey, Caren MacConnell or @Carenmac as we know her.

What is An Hour of Code?

Coding is making its way across the face of our elementary classrooms. This month the word is spreading thanks to the push generated by Computer Science Education Week's campaign to introduce one hour of coding for as many as 10 million students. They provide tutorials for students to get them started with absolutely no previous training needed.
The integration of computer literacy, graphics, mathematics and personal narrative allow students to tap into the higher levels of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy as they create worlds of their own using tools like Scratch and Minecraft. Watching your students as they develop their own robotic friends and make shapes and entire worlds appear on their screens will provide the buy in that you may need as an educator to include an introductory, interactive learning experience that will only take an hour. Mr Tyler Watts, Computer Applications teacher for grades 6-8 at Arrowhead Middle School in Kansas City, KS, "Believes that all children should be introduced to programming to teach them Computational Thinking in order to better navigate our technology-rich world."  He provides a sample of a problem one of his students encountered during their use of scratch to help other teachers who may encounter similar situations.
 

Coach Mentoring

Are you aware that the SRI & ETTC offers coach mentoring?  That is correct, you can use your ETTC hours for a personal learning experience in a one-to -one setting, either in your district or at one of our locations. Teachers and office professionals can request this service. Simply tell us what skills you are seeking and we will select the best mentor to assist you from our retired educators and experienced classroom teachers and trainers.  Topics, content, pace, and scheduling are at the mutual conveience of the participant, the mentor, their organization/school and the ETTC.

Sites for Creative Commons Images

Learn more about the Common Core

Learn more about the Common Core - from faculty at Stanford University - for free!  Have you ever wanted to try a MOOC?  Here's your chance to try this Professional Development delivery model that has been written about, talked about, and made available across the world.   https://novoed.com/common-core. If you do register and complete this online course, please share your experiences with us!

Seven Free Tools for the Creation of Podcasts

If  you are going to create with your class by podcasting, we propose some free tools to achieve them.  Podcast are important resources in teaching, learning and displaying mastery of content. Podcasts are very useful tools for children with specific learning disorders.

Here we provide a list of seven programs, to create and distribute podcasts.

Audacity  

 

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MP3 Encoder: LAME 

Once you create your podcast in audacity, you need to convert it to MP3 format before you upload it to the internet. Converting your audio to MP3 makes the file size smaller and easier for others to download and listen to.

LAME is a program that works with Audacity to convert your audio to MP3.

You can download LAME here.

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MP3myMP3

 

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Podbean

  

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Podomatic

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Odigo

 

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Yodio

 Record audio from your phone, add photos and captions. 

How much is 1 Gigabyte?

by chatsky.
Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

Bring images to life with Thinglink

So many wonderful projects are being made recently using Thinglink.  It is time to showcase some of them here for you.  Perhaps they will spark a creation of your own! They are embeddable and so much fun for students and teachers alike to work on. We appreciate the ability to integrate formal writing and opportunities for further engagement with images and links that are revealed through mouseovers.



Kelsey Vroomunn uses Thinglink in her High School AP European History and French Language Classes and her blog post "Using Thinglink to prepare for the AP Cultural Comparison" exhibits some student samples.



  History project driven by essential question


Here is some help on getting started using this tool yourself, and you can visit this Thinglink toolkit on wikispaces.com

 

Online Workshops Available at the SRI & ETTC!

Check out our online workshops and learn from the comfort of your home or classroom.

At this time, we have five offerings with very competitive pricing.

Online Workshops

Child Abuse/Child Neglect

Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom Web-based Workshop

iMovie for the Classroom, Web-based Workshop

Windows Movie Maker, Online Course

iMovie for the Classroom, Web-based Workshop

iMovie for the Classroom, Web-based Workshop

Description:

iMovie is the easiest tool to use to create high-quality video projects. This online webinar will cover all of the necessary techniques that you and/or your students will need in order to make impressive video-based projects. In addition to discussing many of the less obvious uses in the classroom, we will go through: Capturing Video, editing video, working with still images, using titles and transitions, adding multiple tracks of audio, recording narrations and even creating animated maps. Once our projects are complete we will explore the many options that are available for sharing our projects including making DVDs. This workshop is a must for anybody who has access to iMovie and has not been using it or has only used it within a limited capacity.

Audience:

Workshop Code: OD14001

Dates:  This is an Online Workshop - What does this mean?

Cost: $29 OR 1 ETTC Hour(s). For info on membership, call the ETTC.

Instructor: Philip Polsinelli

Location: On-line

REGISTER!

Travel Grants enable women to attend Math Research Conferences

Grant Name:
Travel Grants
Funded by:
Association for Women in Mathematics
Description:
The objective of the NSF-AWM Travel Grants program is to enable women to attend research conferences in their fields, thereby providing a valuable opportunity to advance their research activities and their visibility in the research community. By having more women attend such meetings, we also increase the size of the pool from which speakers at subsequent meetings may be drawn and thus address the persistent problem of the absence of women speakers at some research conferences.
Program Areas:
Math, Science/Environmental, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)
Recipients:
Public School, Private School, Higher Education
Proposal Deadline:
10/1/2013
Average amount:
$2,000.00
Telephone:
703-934-0163, ext. 213
Email:
jennifer@awm-math.org
Website:
http://www.awm-math.org/travelgrants.html

Availability:
All States 

Chromecast has landed

A neat little package arrived yesterday, Chromecast was on my doorstep.  The instructions for setup were very simple, though I originally thought the USB charger was optional. It does not work without that USB being plugged in, so be warned.  Luckily I did have a USB port on my tv and didn't have to mess with the power strip buried in the back of my entertainment center. Setup took all of 5 minutes, mostly finding out that the chromecast doesn't work with my 5G wifi, only the slower connection.  It could be my TV or the chromecast, who knows without me delving into the forums.  If you want decent sound, turn up TV volume  PRIOR  to casting. For some reason, this was the only way to get volume control, as my remote failed to work for me after I started casting. Netflix experienced a lot of lag, weird since I have great Internet and no trouble with iPad, surface or android tablets while streaming from that service. YouTube was better, but not by much.  Thank goodness I can get Netflix through Xbox.  I assume the limited amount of castability options will change, as more services integrate.  I do not have Apple TV, so I can only compare to Xbox at tis point. Xbox is a pain, so running chromecast from the iPad or laptop was so much easier, just wish the streaming was better. You absolutely can use other tabs and strema at the smae time, so that functionality is what they promised.  I am going to try it out in a classroom this week and update this review. Since I know I have strong Internet at home, I have no allusions that the streaming will be faster in a school, but there is always hope.  I also know that any new product has bugs that will be fixed. For the price, if it works it will be great value.  I also saw online chatter that I may be able to get netflix free for three months with the chromecast, so I will be checking into that.  I will update as I get information.

Science History Rap Videos on our "What's New in Stem" Scoop.it

These are Science Rap history videos created by students, they are quite comprehensive and full of interesting scenarios that bring science to LIFE!

Literacy Fun with Google Story Builder

Students create narratives in Google Story Builder by plotting their story line through connections they must establish in the text. Simple writing task are elevated with critical thinking skills. The story builder appears as a google doc, where characters appear to be sharing in the writing and editing of a document. You can check out our story, then create your own and share it with us! Some ideas to use with your students include creative writing projects, and  conversations between two characters in a novel  You can share the link to your story or capture it using screencasting software like we did below.