To Tweet or Not To Tweet-For Teachers

I hear so many people say "What's the big deal about Twitter?" I personally have grown to love Twitter in the past year and a half.  I like to think of Twitter as professional development on the fly. It's a great way to develop a professional learning community or PLC.  Like Facebook, there are some tweets that really don't benefit my teaching but if you follow the right people you will be amazed and the resources and ideas they will share.  Below is a short video that explains why Teachers should use Twitter.

What about students? How can students use Twitter for learning? Teachers can create accounts to send out messages about homework, picture day, etc.  Teachers can also send out a question for students to answer based on the content that is being taught in class.  Twitter can be used an a bellringer activity as well. Students can also connect with other students in other states or countries to share their learning. 

PBL and BYOD

It's not hard to tell that educators love our acronyms!  This summer I have spent the last six weeks working with some very innovative teachers in an online professional development course on project based learning (PBL).  It got me to thinking on how will what I've learned about PBL go along with our BYOD initiative.  My thoughts...they should play very nicely together.   So what resources are useful when doing a major project and students are using their own devices?  Here are some suggestions:

1. Evernote-See the previous blog post for more information on this wonderful tool!

2. Wikis-What purpose does a wiki have in project based learning? Here are a couple of different ways to use a wiki.  It 
can be a place for team members to collaborate and share their research and links.  It can also be used as part of the final project by having students create a wiki of their own to present their learning.

3. Edmodo-Edmodo is a social networking site created especially for education.  Again this would be a great resource for team members to collaborate and communicate to one another during class and outside of class.  This site also provides teachers with a way to share instructions, assignments, and resources to all their groups.


If you have other sites that will be helpful, please feel free to share!

Got Paper?

In a BYOD teaching and learning environment, how do I have students submit and store their work?  That's a question that I've been giving a great deal of thought to this week as I have been working on updating the curriculum maps for my school district.  One of my goals for this next school year is to go paperless.  Tonight I was given a tool that I feel is going to be very useful in helping me achieve this goal. It's called Evernote .  As a HUGE Alabama fan, I have to say that I love the elephant on their logo!  It's not just a great logo that makes Evernote awesome!  Evernote is a great note taking app.  The beauty of Evernote is that it's available for all formats including iPads, cell phones, and Android tablets.  It allows users to not only to create notebooks and create notes, but to capture a picture, webpage, etc.  It also allows these "notes" to be shared.  It also dates and time stamps each entry which means it has the great possibility of becoming an electronic portfolio.  I can't wait to try all of this out with my students in August!

Lions, Tigers, and Files! Oh My!

One of the biggest hurdles with one-to-one laptop or BYOD initiatives to overcome is storing student work.  Fortunately there are several options for this hurdle.  Here are some of my favorites:

1. Dropbox (www.dropbox.com): Dropbox gives users 2 GB of storage space for free.  Dropbox allows users to setup shared folders as well.  Dropbox also provides a small software piece that allows easy syncing from your computer to the web.

2. Box.net (www.box.net) Box.net give users 5GB of storage space for free. It also allows user to share folders and files fairly easy.  However files must be uploaded through the website.  Users can also drag files to the box.net page for easy upload.

3. Google Drive(http://drive.google.com Google Drive is a new service offered by Google that gives users 5GB of free space. It also works nicely with Google Docs as well as other files. Along with these sites there are sites such as Edmodo and Moodle that also allow students to upload completed work! So when the files are piling up, try a web based version of a thumb drive.

Let's Get It Started!

My dream finally came true about two weeks ago.  In the past two weeks my school system launched a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiative. I know that many parents and teachers are very hesitant about this initiative due to lack of understanding of a variety of devices that students could use.  That's why I created this blog. To share ideas, tips, and resources to make the transition into this type of teaching and learning easier. To me there are more benefits to this type of learning situation than problems.  It's our chance to really teach our students what it means to be a responsible digital citizen.