Do parents and students want to receive your blog posts in their mailbox? Can do!

Having a blog is a great way to store information or share information. But it sure is a hassle if you have to go and FIND the blog you want to follow. Wouldn't it be great if you could get those blog updates in your mailbox instead of having to hunt them down?

Well now there is!

Google has created a gadget version of their feedburner subscription system! Parents and/or students can now register to have your blog posts sent directly to their email mailbox!

Here's a video tutorial to get help you get this added to your blog:

Using iTunes with multiple devices

Another tip from Lisa Christensen--this one shares how to use iTunes on multiple devices.

Click here to learn more!

Wiki for educators using iPads in classrooms

From Lisa Christensen at Lowell, here's a wiki I came across that is geared to educators using ipads in classrooms:

Click here to check out the wiki

Professional Learning Networks on Twitter: Now in BSD!

What is a PLN?
Do you sometimes find that you wish you had more brains to bounce things off of? As a recent arrival at a very small school where I'm the only person teaching what I'm teaching, I find myself missing the collaboration expertise of my middle school science colleagues and my mentors from the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership (NCOSP). But there is a way to tap into that kind of collaboration and expertise from all over the country and the world: create a professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter (recently opened up to teacher accounts on the BSD network).

A PLN is a collection of people whom you follow and who follow you. You can ask them questions; share professional development articles, videos, resources, practices; you can ask for their advice or offer some of your own. A PLN lets you access the minds of way more people than just yourself.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a short message micro-blogging service. Your messages are limited to 120 characters, which really makes you think about how you'll type something! But everything that anyone types is viewable by everybody else.

Twitter can be imagined like a single large room and everyone is chatting about all sorts of things -- this is playfully referred to the Twitterverse (similar to the idea of the blogosphere). Twitter listens to all of these conversations and displays to you the things spoken by people you know, trust, or learn from (these are people you "follow"). Many people also label their conversations with tags preceded by a pound symbol (like #scichat, #edchat, or #edtech) that describe the conversation. You can tell twitter to display to you these labeled conversations even if they include people you don't follow. So there's no such thing as a truly private conversation in the Twitterverse, and therein lies its power.

So how do you get started with twitter?
First of all, be prepared to feel a little overwhelmed at first. There is so much going on all the time in the Twitterverse, that you have to give yourself permission to explore and get your bearings.

But many many teachers have made this journey before us, so here is some help to get you started: Blogger and education technologist David Wees shared with me his page of eight screencasts to help you get started on Twitter [link].

Okay, I'm in... but who can I "follow"?
There are so many people you could follow and so many PLN's you could listen to. Here are a few starters:

• You are welcome to follow me: @bjmacnevin (I've got to get a friendlier picture up there). Likewise, there are many other Bellingham teachers and employees on Twitter. Anyone with a twitter account can add your Twitternames as comment to this post so we can all find each other out there!
• The #edchat conversation is a general conversation about education issues. Conversations are going on all the time and you can find some more people to follow there.
• The #scichat conversation is dedicated to science education.
• The #mathchat conversation is about... well... math education.
• The #edtech conversation is about technology in the educational setting.
• The #cpchat conversation is about connected principals! These people have found a way to make one of the most isolating jobs in public education more connected and collegial. They also have a wonderful website that's chock full of resources at connectedprincipals.com.

Want to remove the Blogger navbar from your blog?

If you're blogging through Google's Blogger service (and let's face it: it's free, so a lot of people are) you have probably noticed the ubiquitous navbar at the top of the page that includes some nice navigation and search tools, but which also includes the distracting and sometimes disturbing NEXT BLOG button.

"Next Blog" takes you to some random blog on the site and sometimes you don't want to be the launch point for your students or parents to be sent to silly topics and/or discussions.

So -- and this is a great pedagogical discussion for another arena -- as a teacher, do you want the navbar? If you are teaching your students to be self-reliant responsible digital citizens, then you welcome this link to randomness. But if your aren't focussed on that, then here's all you have to do to remove it:

1. Go to blogger.com and on the dashboard for the blog you want to change, select the DESIGN tab.
2. Select EDIT HTML.
3. Find the line that reads </b:skin>. Just before this line, paste-in this chunk of css code:
   #navbar-iframe {
   height:0px;
   visibility:hidden;
   display:none
   }
4. Select SAVE TEMPLATE.

That should be it. I have never experienced a problem with this solution, but the potential is there that it may conflict with the template you have chosen for your blog.

From what I've read, this does not explicitly violate your blogger terms of service and it may save you from the embarrassment of explaining to a colleague, a parent, a student, or a potential employer about why they jumped from your classroom blog or online resume to the "LOL Catz got Mohawks" blog.

Cheers!

Self-Paced Training on Classroom Technology

Here's a great resource shared by Janet Woodworth from Shuksan Middle School:

Our local rep from CIM Technologies, Rachael Holmdahl, maintains a website with user tips on their top products --Mobi Pad, Mimio & CPS Student Response System Clickers

Click here to see her site which is designed for classroom teachers.

GeoGebra lets you create interactive embeddable applets

GeoGebra is a FREE, powerful, open source, java-based, geometry and mathematics tool. One of the difficulties in teaching geometry and graphing is that students often get the impression that the graphs and figures are static instead of being instances in time. GeoGebra lets students do geometrical constructions and graphs and then play with them. It is similar in many ways to Geometer's Sketchpad for computers or to Calibri Jr on the TI graphing calculators. GeoGebra goes farther and lets you EMBED the creations. Très cool!

To try and put this in use this year, I created an offshoot google site [link] from my homepage [link] wherein I could embed some of the experiments (I call them toys so that kids aren't afraid of breaking them). I have had trouble sometimes getting them to open in Internet Explorer, but on Firefox or Google Chrome they run perfectly.

An embedded interactive GeoGebra worksheet.

Try one out! The picture here is of a concept that is in the 5th grade standards: the area of a triangle. Click on the picture's caption to go there and play with the toy! One rule the 5th graders had to know: the triangle's movable point had to be touching the top of the rectangle.

Simple online quiz maker: ThatQuiz.org

Home Screen for ThatQuiz.org

ThatQuiz.org is a FREE, really clean, distraction-free place for you to offer simple online quizzes to your students. The website lets you use ad hoc quizzes stored on their system but also lets you create and store class lists so that your students' progress is stored and followed. The class database lets you view progress for each student easily.

It's great for things like math timings and basic recall quizzes, but it also has built-in measurement tools.

The super simple interface is almost totally distraction-free and lets kids focus on the task at home.

Paperless monitoring notes

Here's a Tech Tip from Dawn Christiana at Alderwood Elementary:

I have come across a wonderful app for my iPhone or the iPad.  It is important to monitor students' progress and to maintain records of the conferences you have with kids, but all the paper can be a challenge.  A Seattle teacher has been working with Lucy Calkins and wanted a more organized way to keep his monitoring notes so he designe the app called:  confer.  It is great!

Click here for app (note you need an iPhone, iPod touch, or an iPad). The app costs $9.99

I found a free version called confer lite. Click here to link to it.