It seems like in a blink of an eye, the leaves have turned vibrant red, yellow and orange and the winter rains have struck. These are busy times and I know you are trying to balance the needs and wishes in your buildings. Just a heads up that our new licenses have been updated and…
Category: How To's
Learning Sessions – Making the Most of Fast ForWord
Fall is definitely in the air – crisp, clean and clear. For those of you starting Fast ForWord or returning after a break, we have set this year’s 3 part series: * October 15, October 27, December 1; 8:30-12:00 at Schou-TLC Each session will build upon each other (from neuroscience basics, how the program fits,…
When Opportunity and Resources Meet = Success Happens
Connecting a ‘just right’ opportunity to engage in independent deeper thinking and a resource that allows that to happen is a challenge. When the two meet, it’s almost magical, especially when it can include students who struggle with reading and writing. For these, time is spent mostly on the mechanics of reading/writing, leaving little cognitive energy for…
Interventions – Positive Steps in the Right Direction
Those pesky red flags made your heart sink. And they were doing so well. At some point every student reaches this wall. Actually this can be seen as a good thing. It means that both the student and the program have located the area of need, that point where the student missed along the journey…
Secret to the Universe When Motivation Wanes
Many times I’ve been asked “how do you motivate students”? This is usually during the time when the newness of the exercises wear off and it’s clearly drudgery that takes over. This might happen during week one (sigh) or perhaps pop up in week three. If you’re lucky, you won’t see the effects for quite…
App #10 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #10: Partner a beautiful image that you’ve drawn or photographed with interactivity and you’ve got Thinglink. These rich interactives provide another way to curate and organize information. I’ve written about this before using the SAMR Model as an example (developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, Ph.D) and also here where I was participating in CLMOOC. Thinglink offers interaction tools that tag photos or images…
App #9 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #9: In our effort to highlight the SAMR Model of integration of technology, we’ve been considering what activities might fit into Redefinition (technology that allows creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable). What activities might have significant impact to student outcomes? The “tell your story” concept remains one of the powerful ways we have to teach others, to increase audience,…
App #8 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #8: Image editors are the tools that help your ordinary images dance off pages. IrfanView is a free program (on your school computers) that does a variety of basics like compression. I love the “batch conversion” feature when I need a ton of images resized for the web. (click here for instructions) When I need to add…
App #7 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #7: How do you present information from research projects? Usually we default to PowerPoint. Another option is Haiku Deck for all platforms. I wrote about this app for the iPad before (click here). The presentation software offers a beautiful, yet simplistic way to to share information. Each slide offers options for layout, format (bullet points), images (including…
App #6 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #6: QR Codes (or Quick Response codes) are everywhere – in magazines, on professional cards, on billboards, websites, newsletters all because those little squares can be packed with information. You can even find them at the grocery store gracing the fruit section (giving you additional details of the grower). Teachers have used them to create…
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 #4 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #4: “I hate Google Docs!” stated a student in an advanced writing class. The teacher being stunned by this emphatic state turned my way with a “now what!” look. After probing, it became clear that this writer liked the thesaurus dictionary in MSWord. A quick introduction to online visual dictionaries opened a whole different world…
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…
Reading the Impossible
Many of you have asked me if there is support for those who struggle with reading digital content especially when it is written above instructional reading levels. Every time a class attempts research out on the web, students are faced with information they cannot comfortably read. For the brain to have enough neuronal resources to…