Sign-Up Genius

Sign-Up Genius is tool I learned about through my network of Technology Specialists. We learned about teachers using this tool to set up their parent/teacher conferences and wanted to share with you!

From what I can see, it is pretty easy to use. A few teachers have used it already and said it took minutes to figure out and enter all of their conference dates and times. Within minutes of setting up their "Sign-Up," parents were signing up for times. Easy and efficient. Every teacher loves a tool like that.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Have you seen our Structures?

Our third grade students have successfully completed another hugely successful collaborative project - Structures of the World. This is a science unit in thrid grade, but it really is so much more... Science, Literacy, Library, Technology, and Art. Students love researching about their famous structures in the library and in the classroom. Then they re-create the strutures out of all kind of materials.  Congratulations to all students and teachers involved!

See some of their work here:

Structures of the World 2010

View more presentations from Jenny Murphy

Top 5 Tools to Check Out This Summer

I’ve been thinking about what to post for a while now to inspire you for the summer, while you have a second to breathe. Since we can’t enter the OLS for the month of July, I thought I’d share some must-see tools and resources you should check out whenever you have a chance.

1. Free Technology for Teachers. This is an excellent blog that I read almost daily. It is maintained by Richard Byrne, a teacher from Maine, who writes about various technology integration tools, and much, much more.

2. Google Docs. If you’re not already using Google Docs, you should be. Google Docs is a collaborative tool that makes it easy to store documents, share documents, work on documents with others, make presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings too. The third grade team and I have been using Google Docs all year to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets. Here are some useful resources to help learn about Google Docs and what an amazing tool it is.

• Tour of Google Docs from Google
• Google Docs in Plain English

3. Edublogs.org: I started using Edublogs this year and love it so far. Consider a blog as a website for your classroom, or as a way to get students to write more, in a reading response journal for example. 4St has been doing this for 2 years.

• List of teachers using Edublogs
• The Edublogger is a great blog to check out also

4. Ed.Voicethread.com: I’ve written about Voicethread in a previous post, so I won’t go on and on, but if you haven’t gotten a chance to check it out, I highly recommend it. It offers so many potential learning opportunities for students. We found it extremely useful this year in the foreign language classroom. And, Grade 5 did a fantastic project in science using Voicethread. Here are some further links:

• Voicethread4Education
• Voicethread Digital Library

5. Edu.Glogster.com: Glogster is an online poster creation tool. We used this tool in third grade this year and the students took off with it showing their creativity and imagination in ways I never could have predicted. Check out their work!

Hope to hear about something that I shared with you that inspired you as much as these tools and resources inspire me. Happy Summer!

Voicethread Success

I am so excited about our use of VoiceThread this year.  We have integrated this fabulous tool into several grades and many different curricular areas.

VoiceThread is a collaborative tool that allows you to have a conversation around images, videos and documents, and allows you to comment in five different ways.  Teachers are able to create an educator account which allows for unlimited VoiceThreads.  Students are able to use the tool by logging in as the teacher to create their VoiceThreads.

What is a VoiceThread anyway? gives a good description of what the tools is all about and worth a view.

At Runkle, we’ve completed VoiceThreads in Kindergarten, Grades 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8.  One area that has really benefited from this awesome tool is the Spanish language classroom.  The teacher has found that Voicethread is an excellent way for students to practice and for the teacher to assess their oral language skills. 

Useful Tools

I’ve been using Web 2.0 tools for what seems like forever and I’m just learning about a very cool tool!  That’s what’s so exciting about Web 2.0 — new things to learn all the time…

BigHugeLabs is one of the coolest photo enhancing sites I’ve seen in a while.  At first glance, I see so many opportunities for education.  We do so many project with images in education and using a tool such as this, that you don’t have to log into, you can just use, then save your work, is a teachers dream tool.

Lately, I’ve been using VoiceThread quite a bit with students.  Sometimes, students want to gather multiple pictures together in a collage format before uploading them to VoiceThread.  BigHugeLabs is a perfect place to do this in a creative, nice-looking way, instead of plain old PowerPoint, which is always their default application.  There’s a link on the homepage called Mosaic Maker.  You upload all of the pcitres you want to make a collage out of and it makes a nice collage that you then take a screen shot of and save to your computer to use anywhere.

Check out BigHugeLabs and all the tools available on the site.  It looks very promising.  I wonder what other uses for education I’ll find as I explore the site more…

Winter Meeting Reflection

I recently attended School Reform Initiative’s Annual Winter Meeting in Cambridge, MA.  It was two and a half days of pure joy, learning, facilitation, feedback, probing questions, and smiling.

Ever since I attending Critical Friends Group Coaches Training in August 2006, I have learned so much about myself as a learner, an educator, a facilitator, and my profession. My facilitators were Gene Thompson-Grove and Beth Graham. When I started school that September, and gave a presentation about Critical Friends Group, I remember reflecting on that week as one of the greatest professional learning experiences I have ever been a part of.

However, as I continue facilitating, learning and growing, the experiences just keep getting better!  That is  how I describe my learning at Winter Meeting 2010.  I saw some old friends, and made some new ones, but most importantly, I opened my mind and LEARNED!

iPod Nano 5th Generation

The iPod nano 5th generation is very cool and affords us fantastic opportunities in education.  I was lucky enough to receive an iPod nano for Christmas, and ever since I’ve been discovering new possibilities for its use in education.

In my war with what I think is a faulty Flip Video camera (it’s frozen on the startup screen), I turned to my handy iPod nano.  I can take video with this!  And the screen is bigger and clearer, so why wouldn’t I just use this instead of the Flip?  Duh!  I can also transfer the movie files to any computer without launching iTunes.

Another dilemma solved… I have several classes starting VoiceThread projects.  I’m thinking to myself, hmmm, how are all of my students going to record their comments in my one educator account?  I know, my iPod!  Yes, folks it is true.  I can record voices using VoiceMemo on my iPod nano, plug it into any computer, and drag the voice memo files off.  How cool is that?

I am so excited about these possibilities.  Now, to share with my students and teachers!