Diigo

I love the idea of Diigo.  Yes! This is what I need to personally use when I come across ideas of my classroom.  Before I would find a website or a great idea somewhere and I would just bookmark it for later.  But sometimes later never comes or I would have the site, but not know what it was that I loved about  it.  So with Diigo, I can put sticky notes on the page and so much more.

In my classroom, or in other teacher's classrooms, as I will be the person giving the teachers resources,  I would use this in the student's research projects.  What sites did you go to, were they helpful, what did you take away from it?  Then, I would have the students either share with the teacher via Diigo, (still need to look how to do this) or I would as least have them take screen shots of their notes on their sites and send it to their teacher.  The teacher can skim them to make sure the students are on the right track.

I see this tool as being very helpful for the type of organized person that I am.  I have sticky notes and lists everywhere, so to be able to do this digitally now as I stumble onto different things would be great.

Tools and Apps and Sites Oh My!

Honesty, what I have taken away from this course are all of the ideas and tools that have been presented to us or have been there for us to use.  I am demo-ing ShowMe, Educreations, ScreenChomp and Doceri with one of my classes.  I have shown VoiceThread to one of our Language Arts teachers, as well as Bubbl.us.

Having ideas is more than half of the battle.  We all know our content and we all have lessons that we really like and others we know could be better.  So having the knowledge of what is out there to help us improve our lessons, assignments, projects, and assessments is so vital to creating a balanced blended learning environment.

Since my roll is changing next year from teacher to technology integration specialist, I have also shared the SAMR model.  I felt this was a good way to pace ourselves as we immerse into a 1 to 1 environment next year.  There are some teachers who are excited and there are others who would rather do anything but have to change to a digital curriculum. I have tried to ease their concerns with the gradual ascension of the model.  Explaining how we can start with substitution, but that we don't want to stay there we have evolve ourselves to the transformation stages.

The hardest idea for me to implement will be the authentic assessments.  It requires a great deal of time.  For it to work correctly, students have to take ownership of their learning.  It is out of my comfort zone, so I don't know how I will push my teachers to do something I would not want to do.

Doceri

Doceri is the greatest tool that I have found.  (I wish I had more time to use it)

Doceri is an app, but it also has a desktop version that works along side the app. I have only used the app, but I shared my fine with a High School Math teacher now she creates all her lessons on it. She says it has been great for creating the figures needed when teaching geometry.

Doceri allows you to create videos, slides and insert pictures as needed.

I used it to create videos of worked out math examples for my students to access when they need them. I created them in Doceri, exported them to dropbox, then uploaded them to my Weebly website.  This way the students can get to them any time they need.