Leveraging the power of technology to transform teaching and learning
Google Presentation is a great tool for helping students construct knowledge about a topic as they create. Here is an interactive tutorial designed to demonstrate how to use some of the handy built in features.
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If you are interested in learning more about the features in Google Docs Presentation, you might want to check out my recent post on GettingSmart.com.
Google Presentation for Collaborative Learning
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I am excited to share a ThingLink Teacher Toolkit of Resources.
The toolkit is designed to provide teachers and students with all the resources needed to use ThingLink as an efficient and effective tool for teaching and learning.
I used ThingLink to create an interactive graphic for Thanksgiving.
Feel free to use it, embed it into your own site, and use the comments section of the blog to send me links you feel would be great additions to the graphic.
Nominations for 2012 Edublog Awards are open.
The purpose of the Edublog Awards is to
“promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media.”
The nomination process supports the goal of the contest because it requires nominations via a blog post with a follow up link to that post submitted to Edublogs. What a great way to share, discover and credit the folks whose work inspires us and contributes to our own success!
Individual Blog – The Innovative Educator
In addition to the obvious ways to use the new integrated research tool, it can also be useful for checking for plagiarism. Just copy and paste a few sentences of text from a document directly into the search box of the research pane and the search will lead directly back to any article from which text has been plagiarized. I like to teach students how to do their own plagiarism check before turning in their work to help them understand the importance of creating original work.
If you’re looking for innovative ways to use free and user friendly digital tools to help students acquire vocabulary, please check out my session, Digital Tools for Differentiating Vocabulary Instruction at the K12OnlineConference. While you’re there you are sure to discover more terrific 20 minute sessions, available for viewing at your convenience.
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Technology can be a powerful tool to help us meet the Common Core Standards and move our students forward to prepare them for success in school and beyond. In general, the Common Core calls for the seamless integration of technology into the curriculum. There are also specific Common Core standards dedicated to using technology. The Speaking and Listening strand across all grade levels asks students to create presentations that are enhanced by a spiraling complexity of multimedia components.
I am excited and nervous about this standard. My excitement stems from a strong believe that students can construct deep knowledge about a topic as they engage in building a multimedia project. If used efficiently, a well designed student-driven learning experience can take the place of traditional methods of teaching content.
My nervousness stems from the possibility that some teachers might simply add a multimedia enriched project to the end of their unit as a culminating activity and then spend large amounts of class time giving each student an opportunity to present to a passive audience of their peers. In this case, there will be loss of instructional time, loads of frustration, and most likely lack of enthusiasm from students as technology is used to make them do more. Effective instructional technology integration calls for using technology as a tool for learning, not as an add on.
To truly make a difference, there needs to be an adjustment in instructional practices. My suggestion is for teachers to abandon the role of “Content Deliverer” and take an approach in which they become a “Facilitator of Learning”.
Tips for designing an efficient and effective technology powered multimedia project:
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| This image was created with ThingLink |
http://www.mentormob.com//learn/widget/61812/580/99cc33/3-0
The Google Wonders Project is an interactive website that allows visitors to discover many of the wonders of the world. Virtual visitors can get off the beaten path and explore wonders from 6 continents up close through Google’s amazing street view technology. Virtual visitors can find factual information, stunning images, 3-D models and YouTube videos right on the page, which makes the World Wonders Project an amazing teaching tool.
The newest addition to the collection takes visitors on an underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef. Divers used the world’s first tablet-operated underwater camera to capture high-definition panoramic images of the reef to create stunning content.
If you’re a classroom teacher using technology to helps students uncover knowledge and create something original, you are certainly making good use of technology as a tool for learning. Unfortunately; however, you may be struggling with time management issues if you’re still engaging students in traditional methods of presenting what they’ve learned by standing in front of the class. I’d like to suggest an alternate, more efficient presentation method to maximize instructional time and take advantage of an additional opportunity for engaged student learning.
One way to efficiently share presentations is to have students use screencasting tools to record and narrate their presentations, then publish those presentations in one place, like a Glog. This allows students to use class time to interact with the presentations and answer the Essential Questions that fuel the student-driven learning experience.
Here is an example:
Here is more information about the tools used in the example: Click on the links to jump to my wiki for more information.
Essential Questions: Deep questions that guide the learning and cannot be answered by copying and pasting.
Google Presentation: The GoogleDocs version of an online, collaborative presentation tool.
Screencast-O-Matic: Record narrated presentations
YouTube: Upload and publish screencasts, then copy the link displaying in a glog.
Glogster: Create a glog of presentations and add video
As educators in the 21st century, one of our goals should be to design student driven experiences that offer flexible learning paths, using a variety of tools to meet the diverse needs of all students. Fueled by essential questions, technology is certainly a fabulous tool for facilitating these types of experiences, but with limited instructional time, loads of content to uncover and varied comfort levels with the technology itself, implementing these types of learning experiences can be overwhelming and can be an inefficient use of instructional time. If educators are going to effectively use technology as a tool for learning, than the learning focus has to be on the content, not the technology.
How do we keep the focus of the learning experience on content and avoid being consumed by teaching students how to use the technology? A tool that I’ve found to be particularly effective is the use of screencasts to create quick tech tip tutorials to help teachers and students use the technology to succeed. A screencast is a narrated video that captures what takes place on a computer screen. It can be used to provide demonstrations and tutorials to teach the “how to” of using the technology. The primary benefit of using this tool is the pause button. Users can pause the tutorial, and replay it as often as needed to learn the “how to”, allowing the teacher to circulate around the room facilitating differentiated content based instruction through informal assessment, reteaching and enrichment.
There are plenty of screencasting tools available online. The free and user-friendly tool I have adopted is Screencast-O-Matic because of the simple push-button recording feature that allows users to easily create a screencast, publish it on YouTube, and make it available for teachers and students right away. A screencast created with this tool can be embedded into a blog, wiki, or website or linked to a Google Doc, so it is very versatile. Screencast-O-Matic has announced the addition of a new feature in February that will allow screencasts to be published right in a Google Doc.
Below I’ve embedded a snippet of an example from a lesson in which students used a Google Presentation template to construct knowledge. In this project, screencast tutorials were included right on the template to provide them with easy access to tech support.
Example: Using Screencasts to Support a Technology-Driven Lesson
Click on the images or links to access the tutorials.
Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners 