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Showing posts from June, 2016

Personal Learning Community Reflection

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Blog Post: Social networking allows educators easy avenues to learn and share with other professionals. 1. How can teachers (or students) leverage this power in a classroom ? 2. How can building a PLC empo wer teachers (or students)? Post responding comments to two classmates' blog posts.  Hi all, Since I already have a Go ogle Plus personal account and I f ind it a poor imitation o f Facebook, I chose to explore the option of creating a professional Twitter acco unt.  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Twitter is awesome in so many way s ; it's immediate and organized and intuitively designed for easy cruising and it has that all - important qual ity of being visually tempting! You can follow me @mscynfey My Twitter page I just opened the account to day and Twitter wisely asked me if I wanted to add any T wi tter feeds of people in my Gmail address book. What a great idea, Twi tter! So I found out that lots of N iles tea chers and many Niles organizations have Twitter...

Google Classroom Reflection

LMS/CMS Lesson Reflection Blog Post: 1) How is a Moodle or Google Classroom site different from a traditional teacher website? 2) As you work with Moodle or Classroom, what advantages do you see it affording your students? 3) How can this tool help you transform your classroom into a more student centered learning environment? After reading a few articles and instruction pages about Google Classroom, I am impressed with this classroom management tool. I know other teachers who have used Schoology (in my daughters' school district) and TurnItIn (here at Niles North) but I love that Google has made a unified system that links the documents, spreadsheet and presentations and more that I or my students have created in Google.  (I do also realize that there are advantages to TurnItIn that Classroom does not have, such as the ability to detect plagiarism, but I enjoy designing writing assignments that make copying difficult or pointless -- requiring a personal experien...

Social Bookmarking Reflection

Describe your experience in setting up your Diigo account. How could you use this with students? Co-workers? Parents? Make sure to respond to at least two of your colleague's blog posts. Oy vey. This was a challenging lesson. I completely understand the advantages of social bookmarking in theory : the opportunities for collaboration and the cool highlighting/Post-it note options and the efficient use of following research paths that other educators have already forged through the wilderness of the web. I get it. Cool. But. While the social bookmarking is awesome in theory, I am not entirely thrilled with the Diigo tool, its format or design. I hate the ads that pop up since I have not paid for the advanced membership, blech! I need a way to organize my links into folders instead of a big long list -- tags are not enough for me. The visual layout is a bit of a mess. Compare the Diigo website with my Mac desktop -- I've got folders that are clearly labeled and arranged i...

Cloud Learning Student Assignment

Activity: Sharing Google Docs 1. Develop a student centered learning experience, assignment or assessment that utilizes the collaborative capabilities of Google Drive and Docs, Sheets or Slides. 2. Share your artifact via Google Drive with your instructor and provide a link to it in your Blog reflection for this unit. Hi Colleagues! Here is the link to my collaborative assignment using Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/a/d219.org/document/d/1gv5atcFpfFuqw9S8hAnDaRfJfAH5-k8foR_H0o5Zb8g/edit?usp=sharing I would assign this as an in-class assignment so I could see students working together and make sure that they are only using this assignment page and a dictionary page if necessary. The terms "allusion" and "literal language" would have already been defined and used frequently in class before this point.

Statcounter

Hi Colleagues! I noticed that this blog had received 96 views since I started posting and that reminded me to share with you a way to answer the question, "Who is reading my blog?" There's a tool that I use on my personal blog called StatCounter and it tracks the visitors to your blog, where they come from, what referred them to your blog, what pages they look at, how long they stay on your blog and other information you may find useful. Of course you can also find information about your blog readers in the Stats section of your Blogger Dashboard. Today I adjusted "Manage Tracking Your Own Pageviews" so I would not be counting my own views!

Cloud Learning Lesson Reflection

Schedule and conduct a synchronous video meeting using a Google Hangout with your instructor or one or more classmates. Blog Post: Post a reflection of your experience. List potential instructional situations where synchronous meetings would lead to innovative or improved learning experiences for your students. Post comments to two new colleagues' blog posts. Hi C olleagues! Jama li and I had a vid eo Google Hangout (my first!) on Saturday morning. We scheduled a time to chat live and then I read/watched th is instructional video and post about using Hangout. The Trevor Beck post (under "Google Hangouts" whi ch was under "Resources" in our lesson menu) was helpful, but t his v ideo ( under " Google Hang outs in t he Classroom" under ou r lesson men u ) muddied the waters for me because it was u sing Google Plus for Hangouts instead of Gmail.  (A personal a si de: I must tell yo u, I hate Google Plu s/Google+ and I don' t believe it ...