Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

This summer I was testing out the full version of Loom and made a video that tested out their limited online drawing tools and capability to create a link inside of a presentation. The general idea is that I could share the video with students, prior to our first online meeting, and post to my Google Classroom for reference. I definitely liked that you could embed the link to the presentation on the video, using their "Call to Action" button , but felt like, unless you explicitly told viewers to hover over the video (like I did at the end of the video above), viewers could easily miss that feature. I also found the online drawing tool to have a delay. That could have been an internet buffering issue on my end so I would need to retest that. Please note the drawing tools option is only available on the desktop app version - not the Chrome extension. The biggest problem with the desktop app versus the chrome extension is that the desktop app requires a download...

Video Link -  https://bit.ly/2YygqEK I was recently asked what the best program is to record a read aloud. This got me thinking about one of my favorite read aloud follows on YouTube, Glenn Malcolm. He does  read alouds for his grandson  and posts them to YouTube. I like how his face is on the screen during the read aloud in a moveable "dot". The only program I know that can do a circle webcam like that is Loom. Luckily Loom is offering their full account  FREE (forever) to educators . I recorded the  read aloud b elow to test the program. I used a children's book that I found online in one of four places I have access to online children's books: - Hoopla Digital (offered through our local library) - cloudLibrary eBooks (offered through our local library) - Sora (our district's online library for students) -  Epic  (library website that is free for teachers to use in the classroom) dagd I could have snapped pictures of each pa...

It is summer and I like to read. I will normally gravitate to a book in the fiction category specifically urban paranormal fiction. My favorites include Patrica Briggs, Helen Harper, and Lisa Edmonds'...her Alice Worth series is excellent. Typically I will also read YA paranormal fiction. I recently just finished  The Intuitives which was a fun fast read and one I would enthusiastically recommend to students. Luckily for me a few years ago my husband purchased a gift subscription to Kindle Unlimited for Mother's Day (they run a deal each year) and he renews it every May which has saved me (and subsequently him...😉) a ton of money buying books. I do try and utilize the public library whenever possible but I really LOVE my Kindle and the gratification of instantly downloading a book. Each summer I try to add at least one nonfiction book into the mix. Sometimes they are education related and sometimes they are just for fun. This year I picked up "The Edupreneur'...

Original Board Posted on Twitter 2019 Last year I ran across this summer PD choice board on Twitter . As someone who likes goals and lists it immediately appealed to me as a way of keeping motivated over the summer. The original file was posted on Laura Cahill's blog and I made a copy and modified it for my set of circumstances. It was fun checking things off the board throughout the summer. My Modified 2019 Summer PD Choice Board I had filed the idea away to share with our teachers this year (2020) and modified it again with our Beaufort County School District teachers in mind. The week we went out on break I posted it to our district's EdTech Facebook Page (a closed group we started with our district teachers as a place to share EdTech ideas and ask questions). Revised Board for BCSD Teachers 2020 Like Ms. Cahill writes in her blog "The idea is that whatever your situation, there is something you can do this summer that will re-energize you and re...

I love the idea of stop motion animation but not the headache of it. It is something I have always wanted to try in the classroom but when I started thinking about all the "stuff" it requires - props, lighting, storage space, a fixed camera, software, oddles of time...I pretty much said: I follow an art teacher (Tricia Fuglestad) on Twitter who does an excellent job blending art and technology together and she did a recent post on stop motion .  This got me thinking about a "Flipbook with Google Slides" session I took at a conference last summer with Abby Schiferl where I created a vocabulary animation for science .  I decided to use digital tools to try and re-create some of Tricia's samples. They were super easy to make. I did find one of the best and most helpful blog post  from Matt Miller regarding formatting tips for animating with Google Slides, which helped greatly, I made the "cheat sheet" below from it....

I was tagged on a "Doodle Your View" challenge on Twitter the other day. The idea is that you take a picture during the day and then you add drawings on top of the photo to go with it and then post to Twitter with #doodleyourview .   People were getting super creative with their submissions. Here are a few of the posts: https://bit.ly/3dEMIDT https://bit.ly/374Ct9o https://bit.ly/374TvnR I was tagged by art teacher Tricia Fuglestad who had an animated element in her view . That inspired me to see if I could animate my doodle and I opted to draw a tablet bag and animated it to drop into the collection box beneath it (see first image/GIF).  It was super fun to make and I combined several FREE programs to do it (they all do require logging into a Google Account though): - Canvas to create my doodle overlay - Google Slides to create the illusion of movement between slides - Tall Tweets to animate my slideshow into a finished GIF I made a six minute video overview of the pr...

Last year I co-taught with a media specialist working to integrate technology into her related arts rotation. We choose a different tool for each of the upper grade levels (3-5). For third we decided to use Google Drawings. The inspiration for this project came from a picture in a tweet , It made me immediate think of a persuasive writing project that one of the teacher's was doing with her class that we could easily piggy back on. I really liked the comic book style picture and reached out, via Twitter, to Todd Nesloney and Tony Vincent (who made the original tweet) and found that Tony used an expensive app called Prisma to get the effect.  We decided to use the free app PicsArt and one of their filters. It wasn't as clean as the picture we used as inspiration but the kids liked the graphic style of  them. If you use the app you can find the filter under "effects" and then "artistic" and then "comic" (or you could try "car...