Merry Christmas everyone!!
I just returned last week from a two day workshop up in Red Deer. It was the first meeting this year for the Alberta Adobe Master Teacher group (AAMT). This year, the group has expanded to 60 participants! More people required a bigger venue to accommodate everyone.
The big emphasis this time around was directed toward the ‘Adobe Youth Voices.’ Until this workshop, I had no idea what this program involved. Anyone can join this venture and the best part is that for teachers, the program comes with lesson plans and exemplars. Basically the program is focused on using the Adobe software as a vehicle for our young students to express themselves on current global issues. You should check out the site. I believe you will be impressed!
Here is link to an infographic which does a nice job of guiding through the process of selecting the ‘best’ Adobe tool for a particular task – http://visual.ly/which-adobe-application-should-i-use
The Palliser virtual school initiative is moving forward. A group of 15 teachers met in November to begin the work of establishing various courses that will be implemented in the upcoming new year (semester two)! At the time of this writing, I don’t know for sure which courses are being worked on, but a few include Social St. 20-2, English 10-1, Math 10 to name a few. Palliser already has a waiting list of students to start using whatever courses it can provide. I’ll update you on the progress of this initiative in the next blog entry.
For those exploring the ‘flipped classroom,’ I ran across these links via my Twitter access:
- Flipped Classroom Certification – http://www.sophia.org/flipped-classroom-certification?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=promoted&utm_content=holidaybreak&utm_campaign=teacherpd
- Flipped classroom boosts exam grades, flips perceptions – http://www.ecampusnews.com/research/flipped-classroom-exam-010/
Searching for Apps? Here is an article from Edudemic outlining the 10 criteria teachers should use to find the best ones – http://www.edudemic.com/effective-education-apps/
If you are like me and you are continually looking for that next ‘piece’ of information or site to help in promoting Digital Citizenship, here are a few links:
- How to make students better online researchers – http://fluency21.com/blog/2013/12/16/how-to-make-students-better-online-researchers/
- Safe search engines for your kids – http://edtechreview.in/index.php/news/news/products-apps-tools/156-trustable-search-engines-for-kids
- How to spot a fake website – http://blog.stopsign.com/how-to-spot-a-fake-website/
- Great tech expectations: What should elementary students be able to do and when? – http://www.edutopia.org/blog/elementary-technology-skills-mary-beth-hertz
- Boolify Project – an educational Boolean web search tool – http://www.boolify.org/index.php
- Boolean searching on the internet – http://internettutorials.net/boolean.asp
- Rockwell Schrock’s Boolean Machine – http://kathyschrock.net/rbs3k/boolean/
- Web search strategies in Plain English – http://www.commoncraft.com/video/web-search-strategies
- Digital Research Tools Wiki (DiRT) – https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage
- Evaluating Online Resources – http://edsitement.neh.gov/reference-shelf/tips-for-better-browsing/evaluating-online-resources
