If you’ve used Inspiration, you may want to venture to use the web version which will allow your students to access this Visual Thinking, Concept Mapping & Writing tool from home. Webspiration is an ONLINE tool with features that assist students in capturing ideas, organizing information, diagramming processes, and developing writing. Files can move from Inspiration to Webspiration seemlessly…
Tag: differentiation
Choice Words
Things happen when you’ve return from a conference. New ideas attach with old ones and a host of “how does this all connect” is sifted through a lens of “what if…”. At FETC, keynote speaker Michael Wesch (watch TED talk) talked about the fast rise of the new technologies (Youtube 2005; Twitter 2006) resulting in a new culture…
Digging Deeper – How to Introduce Blog Commenting
How to Develop Blog Writing: Brainstorm Session Sometimes our questions may be “how do we start our classes blogging past the basics?”. Here is one way that may help to introduce the students to the idea of commenting. (We did this at our recent SCIT gathering.) This starts in the classroom with good questions. Record…
Cultivating Conversation – Spoken Ink
Moving from the last post on Reimagining Conversation, I wanted to dig deeper into the importance of oral language as foundational to literacy development. We are creatures of connection and we use language to communicate our needs, ideas, feelings and discoveries. The abilities to express ourselves grow over time and practice…lots of practice. Yes, I know…
Reimagine the Conversations
Many of you have dipped your toes into cyberspace by launching your blogs, whether they are class blogs, specialty group blogs or professional blogs. They all have something in common – a place to gather, connect and have conversation. The key factor being the conversation or communication. The flexibility of the tool is that it allows for…
Purposeful Play
“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…
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…
Apps Big and Small…
It’s nearing the end of the year and looking forward to a little warm weather and a slower pace. Over the next couple of months, there’s a bit of time to do a little play and see what’s just around the corner. In that vein, here’s a little bit for you to discover. Interactivity –…
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…
Powerful Messages Come Alive with Stop Motion Animation
Everyone has a story. The challenge is choosing how to bring it to life and who to share it with. Our Learning Series on Stop Motion Animation started today. Besides the technical “how to’s”, we discussed how to create voice, mood and motion. For example, what role does background music play in setting the tone,…
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…