Joined by a group of enthusiastic K-12 teachers and principals, we explored a number of apps at our District Pro-D session on February 21st. The feature story was Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin. After listening to the story and the oh-so catchy song, we used a strategy called Milling…
Tag: elementary
App #5 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #5: Many of us have our students write stories and then illustrate the text. While the artists in the bunch do flips and cartwheels (and I’ve had those students), what happens to those who struggle with drawing the simplest shapes. You know what I mean… somehow my tree just doesn’t quite look like a…
App #2 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #2: We all collect lists of websites to use in our classes or professional learning. Many of you use online tools such as Diigo (my favourite) or Delicious to organize these for easy retrieval. Another one along this line is Symbaloo or to be precise, Edu.Symbaloo. (I’ve written about this before.) This site takes bookmarks and creates imaged tiles for…
Send Fast Information to Class iDevices
You’ve prepared your lesson well, details carefully thought out. While the iPad or iPod/Touches can be used as pickup-and-go device, having a workflow in mind gives a stronger experience. Imagine my “oops” after handing out 25 iPod/Touches, I forgot to set the website URL on the devices so my students could easily launch the site…
Power of the Many – Writers Writing
Thinking extends to greater possibilities when we’re together supporting and learning from each other. Our second session of dynamic writers took us through a series of activities to explore ideas of “writing, what it means to write in the digital age, identified the principles of writing workshop, … We had a bit of time to…
Celebrating Writers and Learners
Our final learning session of Writers Workshop using Google Docs turned out better than I could have ever imagined. We have such a wonderful group of imaginative and fearless educators! Here’s how the session unfolded. We started with a video from Ted that I discovered on spoken word poetry by Sarah Kay. This spoke to me about how important it is to offer…
“Nudging” Writers with Google Docs
There are times when I have to pinch myself to make sure it’s really happening. Two instances brought the power of writing using Google Docs “front and center”. Watching it unfold was thrilling to say the least. One instance was with a teacher in our workshop series – we’ve been working on using commenting as a way…
Writers Workshop – Each Step in the Process
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” I was reminded of this quote as we worked through our recent session on ‘Writers Workshop‘. Not only the global concepts of ‘writers workshop’ (lots of time to write and explore, choice and voice, conferring during and not after the fact…) but what this…
Little Tools that Do Big Things
Do you ever want to do something with your class and the whole technology thing is just too much? I get that a lot so I’m always on the hunt for tools that “take the mystery out of things” and just work. Remember that we are also in a world of constant change so…
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…
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 – Session 1
This first session reviewed some of the basic tenets of Writers Workshop process. Much of the details came from Nancy Atwell’s work. We looked at the importance of setting purpose and identifying what is important to write about. We all have stories to tell. Consider the following: What I write about (topic) Who I write…