katie.christo.blog

I do love the beginning of school.  There are so many exciting opportunities and everything is still a possibility!  All the great ideas from summer conferences are being put into action (or at least a plan for action).  And the best is seeing all my teacher friends and the students again. 

My teachers are off and running this year.  Now I just have to keep up with them… 

• I’ve got one 8th grade math teacher who has already completed a Voicethread with her class on the Origins of Algebra.  Students had to research the history of Algebra and then make a text post about what they found most interesting from their research.  Students then commented on each others posts.  It was a fabulous project and one that was mainly homework.  What a great way to use valuable face to face time for other topics.
• Another teacher is having 7th grade math students create their own review games on http://www.superteachertools.com/index.php. 
• A Spanish teacher is having her 6th graders take the data they collected from from a classroom survey and creating graphs in Excel.
• One of our ESL teachers is embarking on a movie making project and an audiobook project (she is very ambitious).
• We’ve had teachers using the SMART Board and video cameras already.
• We also have had many beginning of the year PowerPoint projects (I was sure to give my Presentations 101 training first to the students). 
• Students used video and audio for advisory assembly presentations. 

And these our only the things I know about…

It’s nice to work here!

How’s your year started? Any great projects going?

Image Attribution
Image: ‘3, 2, 1 …‘
www.flickr.com/photos/7729940@N06/2354238160

I’ve been looking at a lot of lists out there and am working on getting my summer reading list going – the six below are the ones I want to read most!

• Beyond Discipline by Alfie Kohn
• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen
• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson
• Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
• Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robinson
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Here are two lists I found helpful:

• NPR’s Summer Books 2009
• Read Like Your Hair’s on Fire: An Educator’s Summer Reading List

What is on your summer reading list?

I’ve really been enjoying twitter so much more since I installed TweetDeck!  It makes it so much easier for me to follow and participate in conversations (I’m on twitter as @katiechristo).  I’ve also found the three links below very valuable for finding people to follow.

• International School Teachers Roundup – A great list of International Teachers and their twitter ids. http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2009/05/10/update-international-school-teachers-roundup/
• Twitter4Teachers - http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/ (scroll down on the page to search by your subject/area of interest)
• We Follow – Search by tag at the top. http://wefollow.com/

I am really enjoying reading on my iTouch and I have to say that I was a “paperdork”(Aaron’s fabulous term) before I downloaded Stanza on my iTouch.  Stanza is a free reader for your iTouch/iPhone.  I’ve tried out many different free apps on my iTouch but Stanza for me is the best.  The only thing I don’t love is that you can’t annotate text yet but I know many users have asked for that function.

I especially like that while in Stanza you can download ebooks right to your iTouch/iPhone with their Online Catalog.   The Online Catalog links to many different online sites but by far my favorite has been Feedbooks.

Feedbooks is a universal e-reading platform compatible with all mobile devices where you can download thousands of free e-books, publish and share your own content, and create customized newspapers from RSS feeds and widgets.

One of the other great things (thanks Kim) to do with Stanza is to use ePub2Go to convert your PDFs.  You simply go to the ePub2Go site and either upload or link to a PDF you want.  Once you have uploaded your PDF and it has been converted you will get an option: “I’d like an e-mail sent to my iPhone so that I can download the book to Stanza.” Then you just open your email, click on the link, and the PDF is downloaded into Stanza.

Also don’t forget to check out some free PDFs to add to your iTouch/iPhone using ePub2Go.  Check out The Manuals and ELI 7 Things You Should Know.

Links:
Stanza – http://www.lexcycle.com/
Feedbooks – http://www.feedbooks.com/
ePub2Go – http://www.epub2go.com/
The Manuals – http://the-manuals.com/
ELI 7 - http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/ELI7ThingsYouShouldKnow/33438

I’ve been working on a page for my Middle School students to access for a little while now.  Through a lot of revisions and talking to kids I think I’m starting to get a page together.  The rough draft of it is on my wiki where I keep adding content: http://katiechristo.pbworks.com/Student-Page Currently I’ve got information on copyright, downloads, online identity and general FAQs. The site students are accessing now is here: http://bit.ly/TCv6m

What do y’all think?  Suggestions?  Things I’m missing?  Links to your own student sites?

If you haven’t seen Wolfram|Alpha yet it rocks!  Instead of trying to tell you every little thing about it go watch the video: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html Even if you only watch the first 3 minutes you will get a great idea of it’s power!  I think this is going to be a fabulous tool for schools.

Here are my thoughts:

• One of my favorite parts of Wolfram|Alpha is the ability to save a PDF of any data you find.  (Look at the bottom right of the screen when you get your results.)
• Instead of having to search for an answer to a question you get all of your information on one screen.  Even more importantly your results are vetted and are by acknowledged experts (overcoming the hurdle of sites like wikipedia).
• The compare and contrast functions will be amazingly useful in all different subjects.
• You can type a word and get definitions, synonyms, and even a synonym network (much more than just the define: function of google).
• The math and science functions are (obviously) off the charts.

I truly think there is probably a way this could be used in almost every subject.  What do you think?  How do you see it being used?

Two great lists of videos were put out this past week and I just had to blog about them.  Showing a variety of videos this year has been one way I’ve really gotten my teachers, administrators, and students to think and talk about new ideas in technology and education.  The two lists below are great resources and I’m so thankful to Scott McLeod and Alec Couros for putting them out there!

Top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators

80+ Videos for Tech. and Media Literacy

Enjoy!

There are some very interesting posts going on over at ISTEConnects.  The first is a post by Wes Fryer Handouts at Educator PD Workshops.  This post is near and dear to my heart as I’ve been trying for the last couple of years to move away from printing whenever possible!

The second post I wanted to mention was by Joe Corbett – Share your Tips on How to be a Green Educator.  This post evolved from the responses to the one above and is collecting data on a Google Doc.  If you have a second please go over and add your thoughts!

Image Attribution
Image: ‘Soy distinto ¿y qué? / I’m different,+so+what?‘
www.flickr.com/photos/8991878@N08/1592903964

I’m sure some of you have heard of emurse before – but I’ve just got to write a post on it! This past week I did my training on LinkedIn and also showed emurse.  emurse was the big hit!

emurse allows you to create, share, and store your resume online for free.  I’ve been using emurse for a number of years now and love it!  The teachers in the training were especially loving:

• That you can send someone a link to your resume and they can print or download it in a variety of formats.
• That you can create your resume on the site.
• That you can view who is viewing your resume through the Website tab that shows you the IP Addresses and Domain Name of people viewing your resume.

If you haven’t used emurse I serious suggest checking it out!  http://emurse.com

I’ve written a post about the 6th Grade Health project and they have gone great – see the post here: http://katiechristo.edublogs.org/2009/05/08/6th-grade-health-project/. The 7th and 8th Graders also did technology integrated health projects.  All resources for the projects are here: http://katiechristo.pbworks.com/Health-Projects

The 7th graders were working on Responsibility and were responsible for their own baby (our babies were watermelons) for a week.  They had to take their baby watermelon everywhere, arrange babysitting, and take photos of their week with their baby watermelon.  The students then created a Photo Album that they presented to the class last week.  Many students used http://smilebox.com/ to create their photo albums, others used Windows Movie Maker or PowerPoint.  The presentations were great and the students had a great time with the project!

The 8th graders were working on Substance Abuse and created a Public Service Announcement.  The students used Windows Movie Maker and had to use all copy”right” images and music.  Their projects also turned out great!  The students were introduced to the project by watching many PSAs on YouTube.  Below is the playlist of 10 videos shown for the project.