Syllabus made with Piktochart

I just made my syllabus for this year's English 8 class using Piktochart! I'm pretty excited about it. I don't know yet how it will do as a printed version, but it looks great on my class website and I wanted to share it here too.

AASL Best Websites Spotlight: Canva

My website spotlight for today from the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2014 list is Canva. Canva is a design tool for a variety of media. You can design your own posters, flyers, cards, invitations, ads, or digital designs for social media like Twitter and Facebook banners. Canva is free to join, and has many free images, but also has many images that are one dollar each, so you can spend more to get higher quality images. However, I think uploading images is the way to go. While making some designs in Canva, I could easily upload my own pictures to include. There are many background layouts available for the different types of designs, as well as patterned backgrounds and interesting text boxes. It has tutorials and a design challenge when you sign up to help you figure things out, but it is so easy to use that these are really just for fun. I think this website would be great for making flyers for different school events or clubs. There is one design choice for Kindle book covers, so it would be a great tool for making alternate book covers for display in a classroom or library.

Here's the simple Twitter header I made for my Twitter page:

AASL Best Websites Spotlight: Recite This

My website spotlight for today from the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2014 is Recite This. It is a very simple tool for creating a nice display for quotes. All you do is type in the quote, then choose a template, and it creates the page for you. The image of the page can be downloaded, shared on social media, or emailed. It is that easy, and free. I already created a couple for displaying in my classroom. I think this could also be used in a variety of ways in the classroom. Students could write a one sentence description or summary of a concept or reading for quick assessment, which can then be displayed in the classroom. Students could keep their page in their notebook for quick review as well. Another idea would be asking students to find a quote related to a theme, or choose a favorite quote from a book they have read. These would be great for student-created bulletin boards. 

Here's one of the quotes about writing (from Stephen King) I made for my classroom:

AASL Best Websites Spotlight: Kaizena

I'll be sharing some of my favorite finds from the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2014. Today's spotlight is on Kaizena. Kaizena is a way to give feedback on documents. What I love about it is that I can sign in automatically through a Google account. My school has Google accounts for all our school accounts, and I already have students turn in essays through Google Drive. I always make comments on their drafts, so Kaizena will be a great addition to what I'm already doing. Google Drive only allows for text comments, but Kaizena also has options for voice comments and links as well. I am going to try it out for the link comments. If a student has a grammatical or mechanical error that is prevalent throughout their work, I can add a comment with a link to an explanation of the error and how to fix it. With link comments, adding a link to a comment once will save it for future use; every time that comment is made, the same link will automatically be linked to it again. This will be extremely useful as an English teacher, because I often find myself making the same comments time and time again. Kaizena will be a time saver on giving feedback to student papers, and then students can individually check out the link to some sort of tutorial or minilesson on what they need to know to correct their own papers. I don't know how many times I have to explain commas splices and run on sentences each year, so hopefully Kaizena will save me some of the repetition.

Conference Presentation

Below is a sample presentation created for VAASL, where I will be presenting at the Fall Conference. This is not the actual presentation, but a practice run for how I will present. You can see my HaikuDeck slides below, and if you click on the link below the slides, you can also read my sample script with estimated time for each slide. Let me know what you think. Am I almost conference ready?

Conference Proposal - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality has so many possibilities! I have loved playing around with this technology, and thinking about what it could mean for school use.  I didn't know that this type of technology was available for cell phones. I had only thought of it as being more advanced devices like Google Glass. Augmented Reality is taking an image and overlaying it with a video so that your video comes to life on the image you have scanned. Matt Mills' TED Talk explains and demonstrates it wonderfully. Aurasma is an awesome site for creating these video overlays, or "Auras," that can be simply scanned and viewed after others subscribe to your channel.

I am definitely going to be creating some book talks and share them this way. Then students can scan some books in my classroom library and see my book talk about it. I am also going to have students do book talks this way, so that students in other classes can see them too. I really wish our school had devices for students to check out to use this technology. This will have to be a technology day activity, where we have a BYOD day to work on it. Students who are technologically advanced could probably do this at home as a book project to share with their classmates. If we had devices in our library that had this capability, we could have book trailers linked to books in the library (student-created, of course!). It could become such a great tool in the school. 

I also love the idea of having Augmented Bulletin Boards, as mentioned on the Kleinspiration blog. When we have our Talent Showcase at school this year, I am definitely going to incorporate this into our displays! Students can explain their work without having to be hovering over what they have made; they can record a presentation to share. I could do these with my own phone or students could record with our school Flip Video cameras and I could add the Aura through my Aurasma account later.

Displayed here is a QR code to easily subscribe to my Aurasma channel (you must have the Aurasma app to do so).  For those of you in my LIBS 602 class, I overlayed my PowToon video from last week onto our book, Presentation Zen Design, if you want to check out my first created Aura. I also added the video to an image of the rug in my school's library, which has a reading emblem and "GSMS Library" on it. I haven't had the chance to test that one yet, but will try it when I go to the school. I'm excited about this technology and exploring its use at my school.