Summer Shout-Outs!!!

Today I'm going to tell you about THREE of my favorite blogs/resources to follow in the world of #EdTech. I'd encourage you to give them a follow and check them out this summer. You'll be shocked at how much you can learn and apply for the 2015-16 school year. So... here are my top 3 in no particular order:

#1: Free Technology For Teachers
website: www.freetech4teachers.com/
Author: Richard Byrne
Why: This blog is awesome. Richard always has quick and practical tips for teachers of all grade and ability levels. He updates it pretty much every day. This week he is hosting some guest bloggers which has been especially cool to get some different perspectives. Byrne is also a Google Certified Teacher and maintains these other blogs you should check out:
iPadApps4School.com, Android4Schools.com, andPracticalEdTech.com.


#2: Tammy's Technology Tips for Teachers
website: www.tammyworcester.com/
Author: Tammy Worchester Tang
Why: Tammy's website is full of ideas and resources that are especially great for elementary teachers. She has taught at every grade level from Kindergarten through Middle School. I think my favorite section on her website is her Tip of the Week. There are a TON of great (and simple) things for you to try out that I guarantee you'll love. Her section on "Google Stuff" is also excellent.


#3: MBG
website: www.mattbgomez.com/
Author: Matt B. Gomez
Why: Gomez is a Kindergarten teacher from Texas and a lover of all things technology and creativity. What I love about his website is the way he embraces technology even as a teacher of K-students. I get approached by K-teachers all the time asking me for ideas of how they can use iPads with their students. Almost every time, I direct them to this website and tell them to check out some of the cool things Matt has done with his kiddos.

I hope you'll take the time to start following these blogs/websites. I know you'll find them very helpful.

Don't forget to subscribe to my blog if you haven't already and leave a comment if you have any other blogs that are your favorites.

Thanks and hope you have a wonderful day! :)

Lesson Learned

Today I wanted to post about something a little different. There won't be a video or even any app recommendations. Today I want to share with you about my latest experience working with students. I'm sharing this story with you not because it was the greatest lesson of all time. In fact, it was quite the opposite. OK, maybe it wasn't the worst lesson ever, but it wasn't a whole lot better. I want to share this because I think we learn best when we learn from our mistakes and failures. It is important to be able to embrace your errors and do your best not to repeat them. Also, sharing your "learning" with others can help them not make the same missteps as well... So, you're welcome!! :)

So yesterday was part two of my lesson on using Aurasma in the classroom (the same lesson I've shared previously in this blog). I had already been to this same 4th grade classroom and worked with the students the previous week. Things had gone splendidly, and I was pumped to show them how to take the pictures and videos they had created and mesh them together into an amazing Aurasma experience!

First Lesson Learned: Prepare

I'm generally a very well-prepared person. However, for this lesson I made a couple crucial errors in preparing for the lesson. I failed to verify ahead of time that the Aurasma lesson was already downloaded on the student iPads. Thankfully, I did remember in the morning to ask the teacher, and she was able to grab a few students during recess to help her download the app on everyone's iPad. Also, I should have asked her to hand out the students' pictures ahead of time. This would have saved a couple precious minutes later in the lesson.

Second Lesson Learned: Don't Assume

There is that old saying about what assuming does... it makes "something" out of "u" and "me"... well... I assumed a couple things. First of all, I assumed that since my first lesson with these kids went so well, this one would as well. Wrong... I also assumed that since I had previously done this exact lesson with four other classes, I had this down and could breeze through it. Wrong... The other classes were all 5th grades and from a school that has much more access to iPads. Those factors may have contributed (and possibly the fact that it was about 105 degrees in that classroom on a late May afternoon) BUT I will readily admit that my guard was down when it came to classroom management. I didn't come into the classroom on my game, and I paid for it. The rapport I thought I had established on my last visit was quickly gone simply because I didn't do a good job of setting expectations again when I came into the classroom.

Third and Final Lesson Learned: Technicalities 

If I were to get a redo for this lesson there are a couple of other technical things I would have done differently. First of all, I would have quickly walked the students through a "how-to" on one of their iPads while everyone else watched. That way they would have been able to see the big picture first and we wouldn't have gotten so bogged down in the weeds. Some of the sharpest students would have gotten it right away and been able to help those who didn't understand. Then I would have gone back through the details a little slower for those that wanted to see it step-by-step. The other thing I would have done (and will do from now on) is this: Lead the students through this process--go into Settings > Privacy > 1. Location Services 2. Photos 3. Camera and verify that the app (Aurasma in this case) has permission to share locations, pictures, and access to the camera. This step can save you so much time in the long run. We had so many students keep getting stuck during this lesson because they didn't have all those permissions granted. Having them do this on the front end would have been the best way to eliminate all those interruptions.

What I did right...

The lesson wasn't a total flop so at least let me tell you what went well and what I'll do again... A projector with my iPad showing what I am doing is essential. I wouldn't do a lesson like this without it. Also, I think I did a decent job managing the chaos. I had to redirect the kids a couple times to go back to their seats and get a fresh start. This at least allowed the lesson to get back on track and not go completely south. I encouraged the students (as I always do) to collaborate together if they got stuck. I want to empower students to teach their peers. During a lesson with 31 kids in a classroom, there just isn't enough of me to go around. Other than the couple redirects, like I said, this helped quite a bit.

I did get a nice email from the teacher this morning thanking me for coming in. In the email she said:

"... the kids came in again today "on fire" excited about yesterday's lesson.  SEVERAL came in again saying they downloaded the app.  The ones that did not finish theirs yesterday are already completed today AND we have them all up in the hallway."

So I guess even in the end, even our failures can amount to something. I'm thankful it at least sparked interest for the students, and now they will take it and run with it, I'm sure.

I hope you found this helpful. Leave a comment or question if you've got one. Be sure to subscribe to my blog if you haven't already, and if you have anything you would like me to post about, please let me know. Summer is coming and I'll be looking for some fresh ideas to help teachers get prepared for the upcoming school year!

InstaShare a Keynote

Recently I had a teacher ask me what the best way would be to have her students share Keynote presentations they have created. After doing a little research, I figured out that using InstaShare would be the best option for the environment we are in. If you are not familiar with InstaShare, here is the icon for it:

We have made it available in our student App Portals so everyone should be able to download it. In the video below, I'll walk you through the steps to take a Keynote presentation and easily share it with another device. The reason teachers want to be able to do this in our district is because the iPads that students use are shared devices and therefore don't always have their email setup on them. This is a way for them to send their Keynotes to the teacher so she will then be able to email it to a parent or even herself to print it off.

I hope you find the video helpful and as always, please let me know if you have any questions. Have a great day!

Friday Funbag

Hope you are having a wonderful Friday so far. It is a beautiful day here in the Fort and hoping the nice weather continues throughout the weekend. Today, I wanted to share a couple things with you that I thought might be helpful as the year winds down...

Last month at our Talking Tech session, we had a special guest: Fran Hewett. Fran is the Instructional Coach at Croninger Elementary, a Four-Star school on the northeast side of Fort Wayne. She shared with everyone 5 tips she recently picked up at a conference that could be used immediately in the classroom. I thought I'd take this chance to pass them along to you...

• Answer Garden: http://answergarden.ch/ 

This is a very cool tool to help form word clouds based on responses that students give. The more an answer is given, the larger the word becomes. It is a wonderful (and free) formative assessment tool that can be used with either an iPad or a computer. 

• Discovery Education Video Streaming: http://www.discoveryeducation.com/

This incredible resource is often overlooked in our district. Every teacher has access to it using your network username@fwcs and "media" as the password. Students would use their 9 digit student number as their username. You can find videos that match our new 2014 Indiana Academic Standards. Fran also suggested using Discovery as a way to safely search of images (it's not just full of videos!) to use in projects.

• Plickers: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/plickers/id701184049?mt=8

Plickers might be the coolest app out there for the iPad. It is mind-blowing!!! When Fran demo'd it last month it was the first time I'd actually seen it used, and it was every bit as cool as I heard it was. You really do have to check it out for yourself, but basically, it turns 1 single iPad (your teacher iPad) into an entire set of "clickers" for your classroom. All you have to do is print out some cards that your students can use for answering questions. Then you simply ask a question, give students time to respond by holding up their cards, scan the room, and view your results... Incredible!! Seriously, anyone who doesn't already have a class set of iPads permanently in their classroom needs to check out this app immediately. 

• Kidrex Search Engine: Kidrex: http://www.kidrex.org/  

This is a great (and safe) way to have students use a Google custom search in order to be sure only safe websites are searched when students are doing research. Fran also pointed out that you can search by article complexity levels- Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced when doing a Google Search. In order to search by level, just click Search Tools, All Results, thenReading level. Click on the level to see sites with that reading level. Another unique search engine to check out is Wolfram Alpha. When you search for a specific topic, person, or date, you'll be shown tons of data and information. Try it now by going to https://www.wolframalpha.com/ and typing something like "Indiana" or type in your date of birth.

• SpeakIt! Chrome Extension: http://goo.gl/xvKYeh

There are some pretty amazing Chrome extensions out there and this is one of them. "SpeakIt!" allows students to have highlighted text read to them. All you have to do is download the extension to your Chrome browser. It will appear as a little gray speaker icon on your Chrome browser. All you have to do is highlight text you want read to you and then click on the icon. A very friendly voice will then read the text to you!

I hope you've found these few ideas helpful. Thanks again to Fran for sharing the things she has found to be the most impactful in the classroom. Please comment or email me if you have any further questions or would like to see a more in-depth review of any of these tools. Have a great weekend and God bless!

Aurasma Examples

I wanted to show you some of the results from all the great work the 5th graders did on the Aurasma Civil War project. The video below shows what the final project looks like for people who walk the halls at Harrison Hill and use the Aurasma app to check out the kids' work.

Several examples are in the video including work done by Special Ed and ELL students. Some of the students were comfortable putting their faces on the video, while others just prefered to show their artwork while they talked about it. Regardless, every student loved this project and they all did an excellent job!

Aurasma Part 2: Bulletin Board

Alrighty... so in my last post I showed you how awesome the Aurasma app is, and so today I want to show you how you can use it to create your own Augmented Reality Bulletin Board.

If you remember, the task I gave the 5th graders at Harrison Hill (and you if you were playing along at home) was:

• Draw a picture of something having to do with the Civil War. It could be a general, a battle, or any person who was a significant figure during the Civil War. 
• Record a short video of yourself talking about your picture and the significance it holds to the Civil War. 

In the video below, I walk you through the steps of taking that picture and video and putting them together to create one AMAZING "Aura" where your picture comes to life! It really is a pretty simple process, and I think you'll catch on quickly. In the video, I also show you how to create a simple login that you can share with your class so that all of your work can be shared under the same "Channel". This will make viewing of your students' projects much easier for people when they see your beautiful bulletin board displayed.

So now all you have to do is put up your students' work and let others enjoy! It is also a good idea to post instructions on how to view your bulletin board for those who may not be familiar with Aurasma. Here is an example of what that might look like:

Thanks again for checking out 54tech. Please subscribe if you haven't done so already and leave me any comments or questions that you might have. I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Aurasma is Au-some!

Yes, I've heard of Aurasma for a few years now, but it wasn't until recently that I really took the time to dive into this app to see how great it is... This week's 54tech post is Part 1 of a two-part series showing how Aurasma can be used in your classroom. The video below is just a quick overview of how Aurasma works. 

With Aurasma you can simply make boring pictures come to life using Augmented Reality. This technology isn't exactly new, but is becoming increasingly popular. With Aurasma, you can create your own "Auras" that can be shared with everyone in your class or even around the world.

Check out the video and let me know what you think. I'm doing a pretty simple (yet very cool) project with some 5th Graders at Harrison Hill on the Civil War. 

Feel free to participate in the project if you'd like. All you need to do is create a picture on regular (non-digital-tree-wasting paper) and a short video of yourself talking about your picture and save that video to the Camera Roll on your iPad. Your picture doesn't even have to be about the Civil War if you don't want it to be. 

Next week, I'll show you how to take that picture you drew and the video you made and link them together so others can view your Aura (your own Augmented Reality) using the Aurasma app. What fun!!

I'm Back!

It has been wayyyyyy too long since my last post. Call it a case of Spring Fever combined with a lot of other stuff going on. At any rate, I'm back and ready to give you a few thing that I hope you'll enjoy.

First of all, one of the reasons for my extended absence from the Blogosphere was due to Spring Break. If you are looking for a beautiful place to go next year, let me highly recommend Anna Maria Island in Florida! We went with my folks and my sister's family and had a great time. Between the beach and the pool, there wasn't a whole lot of time to work on my blog :)

Here's the fam "chillin" in the hot tub.

Ok, back to reality... So just a couple things I thought I'd share with you that I found really cool recently. First of all, check out this awesome Venn Diagram that students in Shannon Harris' class created at Holland Elementary. They have been using both Kahoot and Socrative this year in her classroom and decided to compare and contrast the benefits of each of these amazing "clicker apps".

Such a great idea and the students did an excellent job of capturing the most important features of these apps. If you are not familiar with either Kahoot or Socrative, check out the links below... and if you'd ever like me to do a 54tech post about either of them, let me know in the comment section below!
Kahoot: https://getkahoot.com/
Socrative: http://www.socrative.com/

Here is the other thing I'd encourage you to check out... Once a month several of us have been doing a "Hangout" in the evening to discuss some of the things we've been learning about related to technology in education. Here is the latest installment from March:

These videos are typically about 20 minutes long but packed full of information, including ideas from teachers and coaches from around the district. If you would be interested in participating in one of these Hangouts, please let me know ASAP. We will be doing another one in the next week or so and would love for you to join us!

Well, that's all I've got for now. Look for another post by the end of the week. I've got an app that I'm really excited about diving a little deeper into and hope to have a new tutorial for you soon.

Don't forget to subscribe to my blog if you haven't done so already (top-left side of this page)... and as always, leave me a comment or question below if you so desire!

'Remind' Rocks!

I want to tell you today about a tool I recently saw a presentation on that I think EVERY teacher should use. It's called 'Remind'... now I had heard of it a few times over the past couple years (it was formerly called Remind 101) but it wasn't until recently that I saw it in action when one of our district's best 4th grade teachers, Derek Burgette, demonstrated it at one of our Technology Talks. I was blown away with how simple yet powerful it is.

In this 5-minute video, I'm going to cover the following things:

• Why you want need Remind as a teacher, principal, etc.
• Setting up an account on Remind (www.remind.com)
• How simple it is to have parents/students sign up
• Basic navigation of the site
• Ways you might use Remind

I hope you enjoy the video. Please leave a comment if you have a question or want to share other ways you've used Remind.

save a tree... go paperless! (or at least close to it)

For my first official 54tech post, I'd like to show you how you can take steps to becoming paperless. You'll see how simple it is to share a document with your class or another group of people using QR codes and/or a URL shortener. In this 5 minute video I'll walk you through the following steps:

• creating your document
• sharing your document so everyone can see it
• creating a QR code using qrstuff.com
• creating a short URL using bitly.com
• easy distribution for all-access

This video moves through the process pretty quickly, but feel free to pause it along the way so you can follow along and do it yourself!

I hope you found this video helpful. You can leave a comment below if you have any ideas, questions, or would like to see me cover something else next time. I'd love to hear from you! My goal is to do a new post at least once a week so check back soon. 

Thanks for stopping by and taking FIVE FOR TECH!

It's About Time...

...It's about time I started a blog. My wife blogs. I've blogged before. Coached golf- had a blog for my team. Taught 2nd grade-had a blog for my class. Taught 4th grade- had a blog for my class. We have a family blog that chronicles our journey through adoption and the lives of our four precious girls... But it's about time. About time I started a blog centered around the two things I spend the majority of my time with: Technology and Education. It's my job after all as an Elementary Technology Coordinator to help teachers in FWCS integrate those two enormous entities. So it's about time I started this blog.

A little background on me: I spent 8 years in the elementary classroom before taking the role that I am in now. I got into teaching because I love children and I love watching them learn new things. I also have had a strong interest in technology since I was a little kid. I'm pretty sure I got that from my dad. When this position became available, I couldn't have been more excited. My dream job! I might be a geek, but this job combined so many of my interests and gifts...

Here I am now, a couple years later, sitting in my office (cubicle) on a quiet Thursday afternoon. I think we hit another record low today. Yuck! I really do love my job, but in all honesty, I do miss the classroom. I miss interacting with the students. I miss seeing the joy on faces as they learn something new. Over the past couple years, I've learned so many new things about how to incorporate technology into education. I wish I would have had these tools and this knowledge back when I taught! But now my role is different, my role is to HELP TEACHERS realize the potentially AMAZING things they can do with technology. My hope is that this blog will serve as another way to help get that message out.

The title for this post is two-fold... It's also "about time" because your time as a teacher is limited. I get it- You're busy. We're all busy... you don't have the time to sift through the WWW to find a couple nuggets that you might use-let alone the time it will take to learn how to make it work. Well, that's where I come in. I want this blog to be your nuggets! I want to provide you with the coolest ideas, apps, web tools, etc. that are out there and do it in a format that is quick and easy.

The name of this blog is 54tech as in taking 5 minutes for Technology... because that's all it takes. In just 5 minutes you can learn something new and then use your incredible TEACHER BRAIN to figure out how you'll incorporate it in your classroom. I hope this blog also becomes a forum for others to share ideas or ask questions so that we can all learn from each other. I'll be doing lots of short tutorials, screencasts, and hands-on demonstrations to make learning something new as easy on you as possible.

Thanks for stopping by 54tech. Please be sure to subscribe so that you can be notified whenever there is a new post!