May 30, 2012

This is going to be a doubly wired edition of wired Wednesday since I didn’t send out any wired related e-mails at all last week.

So here we go, things people are talking about:

1)      Ken shared with me some of the more interesting/applicable 2011 Edublog Award winners:

Two Swift-style online collaboration platforms for teachers (one of which I think people already of heard of): http://www.edmodo.com & http://edu.glogster.com

 Free - Engage the class using any device: http://www.socrative.com

“Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Our apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops.”

 One more social engagement site. I chose this site because it requires no account to log in – it’s like a Swift discussion board but visually adjustable: http://www.wallwisher.com

No login required and privacy optional!

Create a ‘wall’ on ‘wallwisher’ for student or group reactions to a topical questions (comments as well as links to images / videos are allowed)

2)      There is a survey out there regarding Smartboard usage during the class. If you haven’t taken it – then please please please do so – it is quick, painless, and will be valuable information going forward. http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22FMGFWLQVV

 

Finally, before I close it out and find out why Outlook auto changed my font color to blue, lately as students have been working on final projects and what not we have had a couple of “learning the hard way incidents” that can only be avoided through educating the students. Many students e-mail papers and what not they are working on to themselves, and then when they go to open it in Internet Explorer, they don’t actually save it to the computer, they just open the file from the e-mail. So no matter how much work is done, and no matter how many times the students click save, they are working on a file that is stored at that moment in the TEMP folder, a folder whose name lends itself to not containing contents for too long.

Long story short, if possible when working in the lab, or on a laptop cart, or in the library, or where-ever, please remind your students to SAVE the file they e-mailed themselves – say to their personal drive – and open it from there. A few students have had a hard lesson to learn, and on the IT side there isn’t much we can do about it.

Thanks and as always if anything is on fire, please e-mail nwsit@northwestschool.org with any issues.

Peter Woodburn