“To play on purpose is to take risks. To challenge what you know. To ride the edge between what is and what might be, what never was and what should’ve been..” — Bud Hunt Over a week ago we launched this year’s SCIT (Skills and Curriculum Integration of Technology), a district program to support teachers on their journey of integrating technologies in their classrooms. All…
Tag: communication
Take Your 3-Ring Binder Online or Bookmarking Gone Extreme!
This is a “have your cake and eat it” situation. Last time I shared bookmarking through the use of Symbaloo (a great tool that lays websites out in visual tiles). Today it’s LiveBinders. This tool organizes your resources and presents your content in a binder format. (They even look like little binders.) Tabs provide the organizational structure so that…
Visual Bookmarking
Bookmarking is probably the one of the most useful methods for gathering and storing a huge range of information. Of course, the key is retrieving that content when needed. More importantly in a classroom, you know your bookmarks have been vetted – a starting point for research and deep questions. I’ve been playing with…
Using Plan Boxes in Writing Workshop
You send off your group to incorporate the ideas from your mini lesson – at least that’s your plan. And sometimes that’s exactly what happens. However, its more likely that some students may wander and forget what they’re supposed to do. So how do we get every student (at varying levels of writing proficiency) to…
Magic in a Flashdrive – MyStudyBar
The updated version 3 of MyStudyBar from the Regional Support Centre – Scotland, is out for those of you looking for more options for students with difficulties in reading, writing and organizational skills. While this is not nearly as robust as Kurzweil 3000, it certainly has tools that can be easily utilized and is FREE,…
Kurzweil 3000 – Session 3 Writing on the Calendar
This third session of Kurzweil 3000, which deals with writing supports has been rescheduled on the Staff Development Calendar to Wednesday February 23 (3:30-5:30) at Schou – TLC. Questions such as “How can Kurzweil support students who find written output challenging? What about the writers workshop process of braining, organizing, and drafting?” For more…
Digital Writing – Digital Teaching – Session 1
Digital Writing is… Session One (February 9, 2011): “If we engage students in real writing tasks and we use technology in such a way that it complements their innate need to find purposes and audiences for their work, we can have them engaged in a digital writing process that focuses first on the writer, then…
Words Their Way – Shedding Light on Process
Words Their Way is a program that offers a developmental curriculum for phonics/spelling instruction, reading fluency and vocabulary development. The hands-on activities engage students as they actively categorize their ‘word sorts’ and the assessment inventory provides a clear indicator of where each student is in the process of word development. We’ve been working with a…
Handy Apps that Make a Difference
Some tools are just fun and some are handy to have. Then there are the tools that come along your way that you just know will make a huge difference in some of your students’ lives. This list will change over time and across the environments you work. eType is a downloadable application that provides…
Writers Workshop Learning Series #3 – Mini Lessons
Once again we gathered as a group to explore the writing process. Some things we tackled this time: how to create colour coded folders and move our google documents into those folders (AAAhh, you can just feel the sigh of relief with this organizational structure) how to use the revision history as a way to…
Kurzweil #2: Annotating – Making Thinking Visible
When you read anything, many things happen in your head that nobody notices. But good readers know and can identify these things. Sometimes we call them “movies in our head, thinking abouts, connections, questions or just plain wonders…”. The Study Skills toolbar in Kurzweil 3000 allows great flexibility in making this thinking visible so we…
Blogs – Learning Series – Challenge #2
Here is your homework for Oct 20th: Challenge Activity #2: To get a feel for how your blog will act in posts, please create a few posts and create categories (logical words meaningful to you) to organize them. (Some examples may be homework, events, news of the day, questions to ponder, questions to launch a…
Blogs – Learning Series – Challenge Activity 1
Before the next Blog workshop, please try to complete the following tasks: A) Upload 2 – 3 images to your media library. 100 pixels by 100 300 pixels by 300 original file upload and resize in editor B) Create a List of 3 Links C) Change your current theme and identify the changes observed? What…
Learning Sessions Focused on Connecting, Communicating…
Imagine a simple way to share and connect information with your parent community, your student community, your teaching community. Imagine being able to update that information or receive comments anytime, anywhere. In our busy schedules it is increasingly difficult to share everything that we feel is important — enter the web world. Using platforms like…