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CUE 2015 Conference logo

CUE marks the spot

nancy

CUE 2015 Conference logo

I have decided that, rather than follow my usual modis operandi [i.e. make myself crazy] and attempt to complete all the #youredustory prompts that I have missed, I am going to try something new. I am going to follow Elsa’s advice and Let It Go. I am getting back into the challenge starting with week 18, even though this is week 19, because it is an integral part of who I am as an educator. The prompt: What is your favorite education conference you’ve attended? Why should others attend?

I have been to many conferences (and unconferences) over the past few years. Some were larger, some were smaller, and all but one (which shall remain nameless) yielded valuable new knowledge, ideas, and connections, yet I have to say that the annual CUE conference in Palm Springs is my favorite. It has a special place in my heart because it was at the 2013 conference that my journey as a connected educator began. It opened my eyes to what was possible in the world of education. You can read more about that in this post.

Why should others attend the Annual CUE Conference? Because it is a wild and crazy ride, but if you are open to new experiences and willing to put yourself out there, you will learn a lot and have a great time doing it.

Before they fade completely from memory, here are some thoughts on the 2015 event.

Change the Size of Your Google Drawing

nancy

Google Drawing is a wonderful tool that has many classroom implementations. Students can use it to develop advertising posters for invented products during an economics unit, build custom headers for a website, make infographics to show information on any number of topics, and much more. Sometimes, though, when you are working on a Drawing, you discover that you need to change its size. There are two main ways to do this.

Option 1: Click and drag the diagonal lines in the lower left corner.

diagonal lines   

This is easy if you want to make your drawing smaller or wider, but if you want to make it taller, you need to adjust the view first so you have room to drag it down. Simply go to View and choose a small percentage or Zoom Out. This will give you room on your screen outside the canvas to drag the corner down.

view options         empty space below image

Option 2: Use File>Page setup.

You c an choose one of the standard sizes (these will match the size of the slides in Google Slides exactly) or a custom size. When opting for a custom size, you have the option of measuring your drawing in inches, centimeters, points, or pixels. If you will be printing your drawing, you will want to use inches, centimeters, or points, but pixels are useful when creating website headers or other drawings that will be shared online and need to have specific dimensions. Whether you choose a standard or custom size, don’t forget to click OK when you are done.

page setup options2015-05-13_20-41-39

child holding up hand

5 Things We Have to Stop Pretending

nancy 2 Comments
child holding up hand
Image by Pezibear via Pixabay.com, Public Domain

Today I was challenged by @jaygreenlinger to share my list of 5 Things We Have to Stop Pretending in education to #makeschooldifferent. Challenge accepted.

Right off the bat, I had several ideas but, like Jay, I had to struggle to whittle them down to five six sentences. I’m sure I’ll change my mind as soon as I hit Publish, but here they are.

  1. Today’s students are digital natives and already have all the skills related to safe, appropriate, and ethical technology use. (Corollary: Most teachers are familiar with these skills and can teach them to students.)
  2. Good teachers have no need for an online PLN (personal learning network).
  3. When it comes to staff development, one size fits all.
  4. Having students connect to the world outside the classroom is nice, but is not a necessity.
  5. Giving out grades is the best way to assess student learning.

You can read Jay’s post here. I am passing on the challenge to five educators whose ideas I really respect. I hope that Karl Lindgren-Streicher, David Theriault, Alice Chen, Moss Pike, and Jen Roberts will share their lists of 5 Things We Have to Stop Pretending in Education.

Send form and share buttons

Share a Google Form as “View Only”

nancy 2 Comments

Google has changed the way Forms can be shared as “View Only.” Please see this post for current information.

At a recent training, I was asked how to share a Google Form as “View Only” so collaborators could make a copy of the form and adapt it for their own needs without the original form being changed in any way.

Forms are a different kind of Google app. Where other apps have a big blue Share button in the corner, Forms have a Send Form button.

Send form and share buttonsIf you want to share your form with others, you can go to the File menu and choose “Add collaborators.” The problem for some is that your only option is to give people editing access to the form. If you don’t want those with whom you have shared your form to be able to edit it, you need to find another way to give them access.

form sharing settings

Of course, you could send them the link to the live form, but that doesn’t give them the ability to copy the form so they can edit the questions on it. The key is in the warning note Google has added. warning note

For Google, Forms are merely a way to get data into a spreadsheet. If you want to give people view only access to a form so they can make and edit their own copies of it, all you need to do is give them access to the spreadsheet that contains the responses, even if there are no responses yet.

At the top of your form, click the View responses button.

view responses

When the spreadsheet opens, click the blue Share button and add your collaborators, giving them view only access. Instruct them to make their own copy of the spreadsheet.

Once they have opened their copy of your spreadsheet, all they have to do is go to the Form menu and select Edit form. This will give them access to their copy of your original form, which they can edit and change to meet their own needs.

Edit form

Important: If your form responses contain sensitive data, you should not share the response spreadsheet. In this case, I would recommend that you make your own copy of your form. The questions will be the same, but the spreadsheet with the responses will be empty, so you can share it without worrying about revealing information that should be kept private.

The passion infection: #youredustory, week 10

nancy

Prompt: How do you infect students with a passion for learning?

Interesting prompt, this. The first thing that jumped out at me was the verb, “infect.” My computer’s dictionary defines it as follows:

infect |inˈfekt| verb [ with obj. ]

affect (a person, organism, cell, etc.) with a disease-causing organism: there is no evidence that the virus can infect humans.

• contaminate (air, water, etc.) with harmful organisms.

• Computing affect with a virus.

• (of a negative feeling or idea) take hold of or be communicated to (someone): the panic in his voice infected her.

I don’t think I really want to infect my students with anything, but I have to say that while I may disagree with the choice of vocabulary, the prompt poses a valid question. I will rephrase it as How do you inspire a passion for learning in your students?

Here’s the issue. Most students are passionate about learning, but their passions might not match ours. They might be passionate when it comes to music or race cars or deliciously buttery French pastry, when we want them to care about Shakespeare or systems of government or calculus. To help them embrace what we are teaching, we need to make it relevant to them, their lives, and their interests. It is best if we can provide choice in how they acquire and ultimately express their learning so that we can tap into the passions they already have, growing and expanding them to include those subjects about which we are passionate.

In addition, I try to model my own passion for learning. As a media specialist, I love that my job consistently requires me to learn new things. My content, tools, and practices are in a continual state of flux as new technologies emerge to replace old ones and create new possibilities for teachers and students. I make sure my students understand that I am a learner just like they are. If they ask a question I can’t answer, we research it together. If a student can give me the answer, even better. It is empowering to kids when an adult is candid enough to admit that a student knows something she doesn’t. It lets them know that it is okay not to know everything as long as you are willing to learn. As a bonus, it also helps create a stronger teacher-student relationship.

(Still behind in the #youredustory posts, but working hard at catching up)

Crop your images into different shapes

nancy 7 Comments

A colleague asked me today about cropping a square image into a circle using Google Drawing. This process is called “masking,” and it can be done quickly and easily not only in Drawing, but also in Slides. In fact, you are not limited to masking your image with a circle; you can crop it into a number of different shapes. The illustrations below show the process in a drawing, but it works the same for images on slides.

Click on the image you want mask, then click the dropdown arrow next to the crop icon.screenshot

You can choose from any of the four categories of masks. Select a category, then click on the shape you want.

screenshot

The mask is applied to show as much as possible of the original image. You can resize and adjust it by dragging on the blue handles.
screenshot
Resulting image:

circular image

 

To add a frame, adjust the width and color of the line while the image is selected.screenshot

 

You can reset your image and start over with the click of a button.

screenshot

 

Express your creativity by using different shapes to mask your images.

StarburstSunset
quadarrowsunset

Original image used in this post:
Burning Yellow Sunset
By Jessie Eastland (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

New floorplan

The importance of space

nancy 2 Comments

I’m a bit behind on the #youredustory challenge; I should be on week 10, but I am only on week 9. I hope to catch back up again soon.

The way we organize our space influences the way our students learn. For example, are all the desks in rows? That may have been appropriate before, but I don’t think it is the best plan for today’s students, who are expected to work together to build their own learning. When desks are in rows, learners cannot collaborate easily unless they are working in pairs and, even then, it is not a simple task.

What does an ideal learning space looks like? It depends on who is using it. It has to be designed by the learners to meet their needs, and it needs to be flexible. It should be able to change quickly and easily as the needs of the learners change. It might stay the same for a few days, but it might need to change after only a few hours.

As a technology teacher, I am and always have been in a room full of computers. I have been at my current school for three years, and for the first two years the room was set up something like the image below. (I have blocked the exact details out of my memory, but I recreated it for you the best I could using Google Drawing.) All the students faced a wall or the backs of other students who were facing a wall. I have added arrows to show the direction. It didn’t feel collaborative. It didn’t feel inspiring. It wasn’t an exciting place to come into. I know there is open space in the middle, but it wasn’t as big as it appears in my design, and it was never used for collaboration. The set up of the rest of the room just didn’t lend itself to students working together. That doesn’t mean the children didn’t learn much or weren’t engaged and working hard when they came in; they were. It means that most of the work they did was done individually without assistance or input from other students.

 

Old floorplan

 

I wanted to move the furniture, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it since all the computers had to be plugged into the wall and I didn’t want to have cords running across the floor where students would trip. Then I visited another school in my district where they had solved the problem (yet another reason why it is good to connect with other teachers!). I got rid of the teacher desk and spent a couple of days unplugging computers, dragging massively heavy tables around, and plugging everything in again. Afterwards, my room looked more like this.

 

New floorplan

 

The learners are now in pods, and all the computers face the center of the pod. The children are more relaxed and ready to learn than they were before, and they are helping each other much more often. Everyone is near at least three other children they can talk to when they need assistance. The open space and the tables are getting use, too, when the students need more room to collaborate and plan.

If I could magically change things, I would transform all my desktop computers into laptops and tablets, some of the chairs into beanbag chairs, barstools, and sofas (leather or vinyl to prevent the spread of lice), and some of the tables into standing tables. I would have whiteboards and cork boards all around the room, and lots of rugs on the floors. At this point, the learners could define their ideal space, moving and changing the set up of the room to fit their needs at the moment. On some occasions, the ideal space might even be created by opening the door and going outside. I don’t know when or if it will happen, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

Thinglink image of the rainforest

Grab a Thinglink account for your school district

nancy 2 Comments

As a ThingLink Expert Educator, I am pleased to share this guest post from Susan Oxnevad of Thinglink.com. 

Today ThingLink is pleased to announce verified accounts for school districts along with the release of an updated iOS app that is well suited for educational use, making ThingLink EDU better than ever for teaching and learning!

Benefits of Verified District Accounts

A verified organization on ThingLink EDU serves three goals. First, verification is used to establish authenticity of an organization. Once this is done, the organization gets an invitation code that can be used to easily invite staff and students to ThingLink EDU. A verified organization account will be equipped with a dashboard to easily manage teachers, students, and groups. Third, a verified organization account gives schools and districts easy access to all of the ThingLink resources created by teachers and students across the district. These features make it easier than ever for teachers and students to create, share and curate multimedia rich content with ThingLink.

ThingLink iOS app Updated for Educational Use

More great news! The ThingLink iOS app has been updated with education in mind. When browsing for existing ThingLink content, students can only see images created by other teachers and students. Safe-search has been enabled to provide students with age appropriate content when searching for media to annotate images. The updated version of the app now includes student and teacher signup options with invitation codes, making it easy to manage students and engage them on mobile devices like never before.

Explore this slideshow channel of interactive images to learn how ThingLink can be used on a field trip on a mobile device without wireless. Be sure to click the arrow to advance to the next image to see how students can extend the learning at school and at home, using whatever device is handy at the moment.


Link to channel: http://www.thinglink.com/channel/571836343072587778/slideshow

About ThingLink for Education

Over the course of this past year, ThingLink has become one of the the most popular free web tools for educators. The ThingLink app has become the most popular mobile app for creating interactive images in school or on field trips with or without wireless access. There are truly endless possibilities for using ThingLink in education.

Teachers can create media rich visual resources packed with content to engage students in deep learning experiences. Students can create a ThingLink to present knowledge and ideas or to document learning. A shared “Stream” enables students and teachers to collaborate on images beyond the classroom walls. Interactive images can be embedded on websites or shared with the class and accessed by inquisitive students at any time.

Explore this guided, student driven learning project, powered by ThingLink and Google Apps, to view the possibilities that exist for teaching and learning with ThingLink EDU.

Link to image: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/562589070463598594

ThingLink Keeps Getting Better

As an early adopter of ThingLink I immediately fell in love with the tool because of the flexible options for creating rich media images for teaching and learning. I recognized the potential for using ThingLink to create differentiated resources to support all learners and I loved the fact that I could pack a lot of content into one image. At that time, the only icon available for adding tags was one black circle, the only embeddable media I knew of was YouTube, and there were no special features for education. Since then, ThingLink has come a long way.  Over the course of the past year, ThingLink has introduced a full-featured education platform with a designated classroom workspace for teachers and their students. Here are just some of the features:

  • Signup has become simpler with the addition of the Google Appls for Education login
  • Teachers have the ability to create accounts for students without email.
  • District and teacher level management provide teachers with the tools to efficiently manage the ThingLink Classroom.
  • Students and teachers can now create slideshow channels of related interactive images to share work, curate content or maintain interactive learning portfolios.
  • The original black icon is now one of many colorful icons that include several icons designed for education.
  • Teachers with premium accounts have the ability to create their own custom icon sets!
  • The app for iOS and Android makes it easier than ever to use ThingLink on a mobile device, with or without wireless.
  • ThingLink for Video provides teachers and students with the ability to annotate a video and turn it into a personalized, interactive learning tool.

 Learn More About the ThingLink Classroom

Link to image: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/607948622008418304

Request a Verified Status for Your Organization?

ThingLink has the ability to transform teaching and learning, so grab your verified district account, add the updated iOS app and embrace this amazing EDU tool! Send an email to support@thinglink.com

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About the Author

Susan Oxnevad is the ThingLink Education Community Manager, as well as an instructional technology coach in an elementary school district outside of Chicago who is passionate about using technology as a tool for learning. Susan provides professional development for busy teachers via a variety of online and in-person opportunities. Susan blogs about thoughtful ways to incorporate technology as an efficient and effective tool for learning on her own blog, Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners, and on the ThingLink Blog. Email Susan@thinglink.com for resources, ideas and inspiring ways to use ThingLink across all content areas. Follow her on Twitter @soxnevad.

3 children playing school

For the love of lightbulbs

nancy 2 Comments

This week, the prompt for #youredustory is “What was the defining moment you decided to be a teacher?”

Honestly, I think I was born that way. It just took me a long time to figure it out.

3 children playing school
Playing School, 1940 by Harold Reed via Flickr

I remember being in fourth grade when a new girl came into our class. Her name was Karin and she didn’t speak much English. We didn’t have any ELD classes back then (or, if we did, I wasn’t aware of them). Anyway, I was a very good reader and writer, as well as an early finisher, so the teacher asked me to help Karin with her English. We had a few simple books and we would go sit in the cloakroom together. She would read aloud and I would help her when she didn’t know how to pronounce a word or what it meant. Her joy and excitement as her understanding and mastery of English grew was contagious. I was hooked.

As I went through junior high, high school, and even college, I continued helping my classmates when they were struggling. I loved witnessing those “lightbulb moments” when a concept suddenly became clear, but I never really thought about being a teacher. Then I went to Italy on a study abroad program and when my year was up, in a fit of impulsivity, I decided to move there. The only job I could get was in a small private language school, teaching English to businesspeople and high school students. It was wonderful.

When I came back to the U.S., I got married and became a stay-at-home mom. Yes, I was my daughters’ first teacher, but I missed having my own class. When my girls started school, I volunteered in their classrooms so much I am sure their teachers were sick of me, even though they were gracious enough not to say so. I took a job as an instructional assistant in the school district. It was good, but I wanted more. Finally, my own lightbulb came on. I needed to go back to school, get my credential, and become a teacher. So I did. And I still love those lightbulbs.