Poll Everywhere

I learned a few cool tricks in this class, and I was wondering what the rest of you found useful.  My poll is very basic and allows anyone who wants to weigh in on what was the most useful of the tools we learned about.  I suppose I should email to people so I actually get a response.  :)  Share your thoughts and they will pop up as a word cloud.  Fun!

Google Forms

That was sort of fun, although maybe it just seemed fun because it is pouring out and I am on spring break.  Perspective is everything.

This should be the spreadsheet published to the web.  The survey itself can be enjoyed here or in the embedded version above.

As for all the ways to share,  I did not take advantage of the "collaborate" feature because my co-workers are on spring break and would be alarmed to find me looking for their help on something, however, it is another cool and useful way to "share" your survey or test.  This would be great for a grade level that is looking to develop common assessments or send out a common survey. Instead, I simply emailed the link to the survey to some friends and myself to take, which would probably be the best way to disseminate to parents.  For students, it might be better to provide the link, although I am having a hard time imagining how to do this with first graders....  Either way, you do need to uncheck some of the preferred SU settings at the top to create a truly public document.

My survey is something I can actually use, so forgive me for not asking questions that result in numbers. It is aimed at my students' parents. DreamBox is a new online math (game-based) tool that we are piloting at my school, and knowing more about how students are using it at home will be beneficial.  I am also curious about the parents' feelings and how involved they are in their child's use.  I am sure that if we use the tool next year, I will have additional questions, or even very different ones.

I have to say, this was a very easy tool to use.  Using each type of question was a little trickier because you really need to have a certain kind of question to use a certain type of format, but I managed to twist the things I wanted to know into shapes that fit each question type.  Maybe that was the fun part.  The other part that was theoretically fun, but actually harder to accomplish, was to make certain answers take you to different questions (or different pages of the survey.)  I thought it might happen automatically, but alas no.  I finally managed it when I made each of those questions the end of the "page" which forced the user to submit the answer.

I think Google Forms lends itself to standards 2 and 3.  It enables teachers to design digital age assessments that gather data that can easily be evaluated in a spreadsheet.  I love that the data is automatically entered into this format by the respondents.  It makes it so much more likely that the data will end up in a format that is usable.  Google Forms also allows teachers to easily collaborate on the development of these types of tests or questionnaires.  I can use my survey to find out from parents how effective a classroom tool is when released for use at home.

Jeopardy

My Jeopardy Template

 I found this to be a very easy tool to use. When I first made it, I was not sure what it would look like once "published" so I made a quick version and then checked it out. It was quite simple to go back and add punctuation etc. using the password. The only concern I have is the Jeopardy style; I am not at all sure that first graders are developmentally ready to think of the question when given the answer. I did use that built in format, but of course in the classroom I would take the answer in any format.

Prezi

WOW.  That was quite an undertaking. I admit had I had some fun, but making this took several more hours than I really had time for. PowerPoint is also time-consuming if you care about your end-product, but it is also more straightforward.  Of course, I have used PowerPoint before so that may be coloring how I see its ease of use compare to this.  Frankly, once I got used to it, Prezi's interface was decent and included some very cool tools.  Zooming around is also new and different, but for my lesson I am not sure it added value. It certainly made planning tricker!  I will share what I made with my first grade team and see if they think it is useful.  Here is my Prezi on Plants (SOL 1.4).  See below for embedded copy.

Standards addressed:  standard 1 - this was creative and is certainly a different and unique of presenting this material.  If students were old enough to use this took they would have a lot of fun with it I imagine. Standard 2 could also be relevant here, depending on your subject matter, Prezi could be a very valuable way of presenting information.  For my purposes it was not needed, but as the tutorials showed, for some topics the zooming could actually enhance understanding.  And, as always, standard 3 requires that teachers push themselves to stay abreast of new technological tools.  This was not easy for me, but that is not a reason to not give something new a try.

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Prezi possibly?

Well...  that seemed a little too simple.  So I imagine I did it all wrong.  Let me paste the link in and get it live to see where we stand.  This is my Presume.  And here is a Jing shot.

It appears I did it correctly.  I left most of my experience "blank" because I have a job and don't want to alarm my principal. :)  I love what I am doing now and have no thoughts of moving on, however, making the action-jackson Prezi resume was fun.  The only real challenge was related to the fact that I do not have a Facebook account so I was unable to click on the templates provided and get them to work.  I had to go to Prezi, sign up for the free account, and search templates.  I went with the only resume template that was offered, but it was fine.

iste standards: I think this is a good example of standard 3, modeling digital age work and learning, and standard 1, inspire student learning and creativity.  Although this was a resume, I believe we have another assignment upcoming that will require us to use Prezi in the classroom.  This is a unique tool and one that will capture the imagination of my students once I master how to choreograph the "slides."  It should be embraced and utilized by teachers to liven up presentations, and older students could have a lot of fun using it themselves.  This was a good practice exercise to play with the interface and see how to add, delete, modify things.  It is certainly a creative way to present material.

Powerful PowerPoints

I rather enjoyed this assignment, especially since it resulted in something I can actually use in my classroom. Mapping is a topic that I have been dreading teaching; it should be something fun to teach first graders, but somehow last year it was torture.  I think we were supposed to cover it earlier in the year, but the rest of my team and I opted to push it to the fourth quarter because no one was really feeling the love.  I will use this PowerPoint to introduce it and I am actually looking forward to doing that next week.  It covers that main SOL points required and I may make another one to flesh out the unit.

I noticed that my link downloaded a copy of my presentation, but other people's links opened it in DropBox, so I am trying this link as well to see if it opens in DropBox.

I have made PowerPoints before and must confess that I often fell victim to the bullet-ization that General McMaster derided in the article.  It seemed that if bullets were built in, I should use them.  If I could make them float, flash, flicker, etc. then I should do so.  And I did.  Never again.  That's not to say this PowerPoint is perfect, but I did make sure the pictures did the talking and the text was kept to a minimum.  I took some things out that I may add back in after trying it live, but I think most of those were just reminders to me that the slide could be used for discussion.  As I get used to the presentation, I will probably be able to remember that on my own.  I went back to the Thirst example several times and it was definitely test driven, so I certainly don't feel that text is something that needs to be eliminated entirely.  That would not have been as powerful without the words and pictures working together.

Placing something in the public folder of DropBox was completely new to me.  I have used DropBox for years at home to enable me to bounce between laptops and desktops with ease.  I just started using it for work this year when my thumb drive died.  I did not even know there was a Public folder.  Very handy for sharing.

iste standards: I think this assignment goes along well with standard 2 -design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments.  This is certainly something that can be easily shared with a class, but also it can be shared with parents.  I have a student out of the country right now and his parents do not want him to fall behind.  I could easily post a link to this on my school web page so that they could stay in touch with what we are doing in the classroom.  I think standard 5 is also addressed because I plan to share this PowerPoint with my team members.  We are all constantly on the lookout for tools to use to introduce or deepen understanding of content.  I am sure some of them would be able to easily incorporate this into their introduction to mapping.

Google Docs - resume I can live with

So, I published a resume an hour ago which I really did not like the layout of.  It looked fine in my drive - lined up nicely etc. but when I viewed it on the web it was not the same.

You can see that nothing is really centered and my name is doing it's own thing entirely.
I don't know why, but that certainly is not the way I want to publish my resume.  I tried to fix it, but since the doc in the drive looked right, it was hard to determine how to fix the web version.

I made another one.  I guess the lesson here for me is the templates are not perfect, in the long run it might be easier and less of a hassle to simply create my own documents.  This is the new resume I published.  Much nicer.

Is there a technology standard for determination and perseverance?