Reading Breaks for Young Students

Children love to be read to, but sometimes teachers want to mix it up and give their voices a rest!

These three sites offer videos of books being read aloud, some by famous people:

1. Read to Me - http://www.readtomelv.com/current-books/

2. Storytime Online - http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/transitional.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.storylineonline.net%2F

3. StoryTime Station - http://themesh.tv/storytime-station/

Flippity.net - Make Flashcards or Quiz game from a Google Sheet

Flippity.net is a free website that lets you use Google Sheets to make either flashcards or a quiz game.

Visit the website and make a copy of the template for the activity you want. Change the content to your content. Publish to the web and share the link. Here's how it works:

Flash Cards

Quiz Game

Hour of Code

Everywhere you look, computers are there. But how does the computer know what to do? Computers speak their own language called code. Many schools teach computer science or computer programming to their students. My daughter is actually taking Pre-AP Computer Science as her foreign language in high school. To bring awareness to this growing need for students to know computer code, Code.org is asking schools to host Hour of Code activities during Computer Science Education Week December 8-14.

You don't need to know code to host an event. Get tons of help at http://hourofcode.com

Staying Safe in the Digital World

Tech Tuesday Hiatus

It's hard to believe we are almost half way through the 2014-15 school year!

Tech Tuesday has been rocking along this semester with some great sessions. With Thanksgiving and Christmas Breaks coming soon and all of the holiday activities scheduled in between, Tech Tuesday is taking a break for the month of December.

Sessions will continue in January and focus on a new task each month. The first focus will be Curation tools like Symbaloo and Livebinders.

Check the Tech Tuesday link on the right side of the blog for more information and to register.

Plickers - Student Response App

Here is a great tool for student response that is as easy as the students holding up a card and the teacher scanning the group with his or her phone. Really simple tool to use. 

Go to www.plickers.com. Create a free account. Add your class. Add your students to the right classes. Create questions and assign those questions to the correct classes. Then print the cards and hand them to your students. Using your mobile device, download the app and sign in with your account. Use your mobile device to scan the cards for student answers. See?!? Super simple!!

Here is what it looks like from the device app:

Texas STAR Chart

Every year all teachers in Texas are required to complete the Texas STAR Chart. This survey asks teachers to respond to questions about their use of technology in the classroom, the training they get for technology, the support of their campus and administrators and the infrastructure of the district's network. This data is used by campus and district staff for planning in the area of technology initiative and integration.

Many teachers see the STAR Chart as an annual task and are happy to get it off their "to do" list, but what they may not realize is how important their answers are. Not only does the data get reported to TEA each year, district tech teams use teachers' answers for planning PD, tech plans, instructional goals and equipment purchases.

This presentation includes the STAR Chart questions with a summary of what Target Tech for each of those questions means: