Tech for the Behavior Needs Classroom

Thank you to everyone for attending my session this morning at #ice12! You can view my powerpoint from this session here. 

If you have any questions from the session please feel free to contact me!

10 Thoughts From #ICE12 on Thursday Morning

Ten things I've learned, thought about, been inspired by, or need to keep in mind since being at #ice12 this morning:

1. Thought from keynote speaker Peter H. Reynolds, "Don't ask people what they do, ask them what their mission is."
2. You can be taught at any time of your life and learn.
3. $10.00 for a lunch? Not even a homemade cookie...boo.
4. Like the teacher who framed the picture of the dot, recognize all the accomplishments of students as the start of something great. You aren't hanging up art- you are displaying the possibilities.
5. Ask your friends to search "Egypt" on Google and compare the results. You may not see it but you aren't getting the same results. Google is, in a way, controlling what we learn.
6. According to a recent French study comprehension reading an iPad vs. a traditional newspaper is 20% less.
7. Sites want people to click on things. Clicks equal money- not better learning opportunities. Your brain has to decide what to do when it comes to a click opportunity, which distracts from real content comprehension.
8. Do you want your students to be able to find stuff or do you want them to be able to think?
9. No matter how much you pre-plan what sessions you are going to attend, you change your mind. It's nice to have a good mix of heavy philosophy sessions and fun web 2.0 tech. 
10. A lot of people

Welcome to #ICE12. This Year's Conference is Underway!

Good morning internet world and welcome to this year's Illinois Computing Educator's Conference, better known this year as #ice12. I'm here presenting two sessions, "Edmodo in the Special Needs Behavior Classroom" and "Tech for the Behavior Needs Classroom."  After the conference I'll be sharing my notes on this website. Stay tuned for additional information!

Kozzi Photo Site

Here is another great site to add to your list of places students can find free photos for projects.

Kozzi earns revenue for the advertisements placed on its page. This allows them to provide their professional photo images free. I stumbled upon this site today and found it to be an incredibly rich resource for finding pictures. Using a simple copy/paste was much easier than downloading the images from the lightbox.

Lessons on the Presidents

http://lessonsonamericanpresidents.com/ seems to have some great lessons on presidents! Worth checking out!

Mouth Power- Fun Game About Brushing

Mouth Power (http://www.mouthpower.org) can be done individually by students in a lab, but would be better on an interactive board as a class. Users take a trip through a lab to learn about dental hygiene and work through activities to earn teeth for their smile. The activity goes beyond the basics of telling students to brush and shows how to brush and the correct way to floss. It also has a neat time lapse feature to show what happens when you don't take care of your teeth.

Cons: There isn't voice audio on everything, so non-readers will need assistance.

Inspirational Blog Post

Check out http://blogush.edublogs.org/2012/01/24/20/, an insipirational blog post from Paul Bogush about giving students 20% of their time for free learning and exploration. I may consider doing something like this next year!

SMART Training Notes

Tonight I participated in our local Regional Office of Education's SMART Board Intermediate Training- Session1. My notes from the training are below, both for my own reference and for anyone else to see some ideas I learned! 

New things I learned:
~Using the keyboard to read the words that are typed or written.
~You can change your pens to be defaulted to a different color/font.
~The color of the box changes for objects that are infinitely cloned.
~You can lock an object so that it can be moved but the size won't change, or you can lock it so you can move and rotate (but the size won't change).
~You can layer multi-colored text to give a 3D effect.
~Transparency layer lets you use the tools over the internet (or other software) and record some notes. Is there a unique use for this?
~You can change the default colors of the caligraphy pens just like the other pens.
~You can double click on a shape box and automatically type into the shape! Then you can drag the box smaller and hide the text.
~Use the "Groups" button on the tabs menu to organize slides into different categories. 
~You can add visuals to your "My Content" folder (specific to your computer)- just by dragging and dropping.
~Use the page recording feature to record directions to have students go follow. (save the file and it will save the recording)
~Looked at Lesson Activity Toolkit to see awesome ideas (Anagram- used to arrange letters for spelling, Sentence Arrangement- put phrases/sentences into the correct order- although beware the color never changes and kids catch on to that-, Hot Spots- has a neat human body checker!, Timeline editor is great for students to make timelines, the maps work by letting you drag the states or countries into the map on the correct spot.)

Things to look up or follow up on:
~teq.com - "free learning objects" (neat garbage can she showed us)

Ideas for use:
~Using table with table shade for vocabulary or review questions.
~Creating a Presidential Technology lesson, where students have to match up which president would have used which technology for communication.
~Use the "Category sort (image)" on the Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0 to have students put ideas into order (maybe PC troubleshooting tips!)
~I really like adding the question mark ? information button from the Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0
~Use the memory game tool to match pictures of famous "techies" with their names.

What I still have questions on:
~What's the point of "pinning" a page?
~Unit 5 has it set so that the "My Content" travels with the teacher's logins (so any computer you use with SMART notebook you can access your content)- this is really cool, can it be done at my school?
~Where is that US Map?
~How do I make the hidden tunnel?

Visual.ly Lets You Search Infographics

Visual.ly is a search engine for looking up infographics across various websites. With a quick search for "government" yielded about twenty results. According to their site they are working on a feature to let you create your own infographics, but you can currently upload yours to add to their collection. 

While doesn't make my top list of resources yet, it is definitely one worth checking out and keeping an eye on.

Drawing Site: Beautiful Curves

Beautiful Curves is an HTML5 web based drawing app that lives up to its name.  Tim Holman created the site which is simply too fun to stop playing! 

This would be an interesting site to let students create an artwork of their feelings. More curls may represent feelings of more chaos, maybe change the thickness to represent emotional intensity, and of course color choice. 

Setting Up Nook Tablet with MyMediaMall

I received a Nook Tablet for Christmas from my loving husband who so generously indulges my fervent reader mood. Of course on a teacher's budget I can't afford to purchase ebooks all the time, so I'm taking advantage of our library's subscription service to mymediamall. I couldn't figure out how to make the books work on my tablet however so I had to poke around the nook boards on B&N's website. A very helpful post on how to do this was here. I also thought the video explanation here was incredibly useful. 

Now if only I can figure out how to get android games on here...

Where in the World? A Google Earth Game

Where in the World?! is a great game for students to identify places around the world. Each picture gives you three choices which can spure discussion. Do you notice a lot of green boxes in the picture? What could it be? Cities? Farms? Which country do you suppose has lots of open farming areas? 

As neat as this project is it would be very cool to create your own game using your local community. Taking simple screen shots and posting them to a class website or community would be relatively simple Have students guess the location based off your previous discussions! This would even be a great quick activity when students come to class or a daily blog post. Students could even make up their own game using photos of their favorite places

Holiday Stress Relief

Five more days of school remain before we break for the holidays, and this teacher is definitely feeling the crunch of semester's end! Students and teachers alike are more than a little frazzled these days!

If you're looking for a few minutes of mindless stress relief tryhttp://thisissand.com/ to create virtual sand art- complete with the relaxing sound of pouring sand.

The only problem is that you can't save your creation . When it's time to get back to work your art work must go. You can save it to a gallary collection but I do NOT recommend you do this (there are innapropriate images on the gallary- don't let students on the gallary page). 

ICE Conference- Proposal Accepted

I'm thrilled that my poster session was just accepted for the 2012 Illinois Computing Educator's Conference. I will be presenting "Edmodo in the Special Needs Behavior Classroom" on either Thursday or Friday (details to follow).

This is a great opportunity for our school to showcase how we are using student safe social networking with our junior high and high school students. I plan to have handouts with tips & tricks. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Website Evaluation Checklist

I created this checklist for students to use to evaluate websites. When you walk a website through the checklist you stop if/when you get a “No” answer; that means the website is not valid for academic research. If everything is a “Yes” then the website is probably valid for use.

Paper saving idea: I put the pages in sheet protectors and had my students use dry erase markers.

Gearing Up for Friday Kickoff

I'm leading a 4 session training starting Friday over the next four weeks at school. Each week features a different theme (with a football theme twist). This week's session is called "Kickoff Fall with Web 2.0." I'm hoping to showcase at least 20 different Web 2.0 sites. This week I get to make a list of the key sites to feature and pray they aren't blocked at school. Wish me luck!

A Bee-utiful Project Idea

As much as I appreciate the vital role bees play in our ecosystem I still can't bring myself to add a few hives to my backyard. Today however I stumbled upon a website encouraging people to plant native plants in their yard or garden to encourage natural bee populations, and then join them in collecting and reporting data about the bees that they see. This, is much easier than donning a netted mask and figuring out how to keep boxes of bees away from my toddler. 

The Great Sunflower Project, http://www.greatsunflower.org/, seems like a unique authentic learning experience for a classroom project. Students would first need to research native plants to the area, would have a wonderful time actually planting them and maintaining the garden on part of the school grounds, and then could collect data (math, science, social studies...any subject!) This would even be a great school-wide project!

Knock, Knock: Let Me In To Your Virtual World

At the beginning of the school year, at a new school, in the newly created role of technology teacher, I found myself grappling with the question, "What am I supposed to teach?!" (It is after all very easy for teachers to preach about how important it is for students to be taught 21st Century learning objectives, but it is another thing entirely to actually start doing it.)

Now that I'm into the second quarter I've restored my footing on what I'm supposed to teach and instead am focusing on how to teach the content. I find that even though my classes are very small- four to eight students- I often have two or three different instructional strategies going on simultaneously. Working with special populations I quickly found it would not be possible to have a wonderfully synchronous class working together. Some of my students find more success working independently on software tutorials, others need one-on-one guidance with a step-by-step approach. Some students can accomplish their tasks after viewing a quick demonstration on the SMARTboard, and then I have a few students who need the actual assignment altered in some way due to special learning abilities. 

Slow, but steady, I'm gathering a collection of instructional strategies (read: bag of tricks) to use for various students. One population I still struggle with is my group of middle school non-readers. I want to teach the technology (computer basics) in a fun and creative way, but I'm having a difficult time finding resources that offer more audio and less text- AND (here's the hard part)- aren't juvenile.  Lectures, mini-lessons, demonstrations, and the like so far are not proving effective. Our teens respond well to anything that can be passed off as a video game. Trying to teach students who live in a virtual world seems rather difficult when you don't have the resources (or they don't exist) to access that virtual land.

Maybe programming language should be part of our next in-service.




 

Can Social Networking Help Teachers with Brain Based Learning?

The article I just read by Jane McGeehan (which has no published date on it and that irritates me) on brain based learning brought up three key ideas:

• emotion is the gatekeeper to learning 
• intelligence is a function of experience
• the brain stores most effectively what is meaningful from the learner’s perspective. 

Scientific knowledge about the brain states that students will not retain information that is not meaningful to them. The article states that teachers can not know what is meaningful to their students unless they know their students. Students I work with are reluctant to share information about themselves- but almost everything I've ever read talks about how social networking in the classroom (like through Edmodo or Schoology) can make even the most reticent student open up in new ways.


So.... if social networking can help teachers get to know their students....and getting to know your students = knowing what is meaningful to them (which would then lead to)... teaching meaningful "stuff," it can then be assumed students will retain more information.....

Perhaps yet another interesting thought to share with social networking naysayers. 

Using Your Class Website As A Productivity Tool

I've used a class website every year I've taught, generally as way to inform parents of class activities, share deadlines with students, and occasionally post student work.  This year my class website is taking on a transformation as a productivity tool. Two key changes are:

• I switched from using yola.com to Weebly's education version. The only reason I did this was because yola is blocked in our school, and instead of going through the long process for unblocking requests it was easier to make the switch. Weebly is a little more user friendly for newbies, but I do miss the extra features yola provided.
• Because I have several non-readers I added more graphics to my homepage, students will rely more on the graphics than the text.

Previously for my "What Are We Doing Today" page I've used individual class blogs to share objectives and links. With seven preps this was incredibly time consuming.  My favorite new feature is the use of PlanbookEdu. I discovered this today through a random search and am quite pleased! . I've always wanted my plan book in an online version for students/parents/teachers/admin, and this provides a great way to do this.

Tips:

• Create your account in PlanbookEdu and make your lesson plans.
• Share the book with a random address (I choose abc@mail.com- completely fake but it doesn't matter).
• After doing the above you will get a link for abc@mail.com to view the plans, add that link to your website.
• When students click on the link from your website they will be prompted to enter an email address (the fake one again) but then they will be able to see the plans.

My class website is set as students' homepage. Students click on the "What Are We Doing Today" button when they log in to see the plans, which includes the hyperlinks for any activities we have that day. This is also very helpful if I'm not in the building one day.

The one downside is that in order to have the plans shared you have to be a paid subscriber. I think the $20.00 a year fee is incredibly cheap to make my life easier.