Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Many years ago I hear of a site called Fiverr which offers services from around the world such as creating logos to website design and voice over talent. I thought it was a very cool concept but had no use for it...until recently. A co-worker and I decided to create an EdTech podcast this school year as another form of communication with teachers at our schools. Currently we have a monthly newsletter and a closed EdTech Facebook group. I jumped on the idea. I have been wanting to podcast and record with students and I was hoping this would give me some hands-on trial and error experience with it. I took a stab a designing a few logos for our show, which we are calling PodCATS (Portable on Demand Curriculum and Technology Show). Here were my first attempts: I sent it to a friend of mine, who also took a stab at it and she came up with this: We really liked her version but we wanted to add headphones on the cat and I drew the concept: She had used clipart to ...

I use my iPhone's Notes app to save everything from book and music recommendations to a password list. Obviously I have my phone password protected but if you need an extra layer of protection with your notes consider adding an additional lock to specific notes. This is great particularly, if you are like me, and hand your phone to your children...who don't need to see that information. It is super easy to do. See the step-by-step flyer I made above. A few items to note: 1. Whatever you set as your password for one note applies to all notes you attach a lock to. 2. Once you unlock one note, you unlock all of them. 3. You have to close out the app or put the phone to sleep before the lock resets.

A couple of years ago our district purchased Kami as part of our push to go paperless. It has quickly grown to one of my most recommended extensions. We are a one-to-one district and we use Google Apps for Education. We hadn't found anything that students could use with PDF's outside of DocHub add on through Google (free limited version). We started playing with the Kami add-on through Google and loved it (also free limited version). We used the 30 day free trial and got the company to extend it so we could do a more in-depth analysis for potential purchase. I was part of the analysis team and it was just what teachers were looking for. Teachers could push Word or PDF documents to students and have them complete and return them on the computer without having to print ANYTHING. The tool bar has: - A dictionary so students can look up unfamiliar words - Text to speech so students can highlight passages and have them read out loud - Speech to text so students can...