Google Maps for Educators - How to Get Started

This morning I ran a short workshop on Google Maps for educators. As I do for most workshops, I promised to post the how-to slides here. Here are the basic directions to get you started creating placemarks in Google Maps.



By the way, if you're interested in having me run a workshop or give a keynote at your school, please see my work with me page.

Typing Club for Google Chrome & A New Teacher Portal

Typing Club is a popular website offering free online touch typing lessons for students of all ages. Recently, through an email from one the Typing Club founders, I learned that Typing Club is available as a Google Chrome Web App. The Web App functions the same way as the website. As you type you are given instant real-time feedback about your accuracy and speed. Unlike other typing lessons that make you wait until an activity is completed to determine your accuracy or speed, Typing Club recalculates that information with each keystroke.

Applications for Education
Typing Club provides a free portal service for teachers to use to track their students' progress. In addition to use of the standard lessons, the portal service allows teachers to create customized lessons for their students.

Alpha Munchies - A Fun Typing Game

Last week I published a list of 7 Good Resources for Developing Typing Skills. Here's another good resource to add to that list. ABCya's Alpha Munchies is a fun typing game for elementary school students. The game requires students to type letters or words, depending upon the level, to guard their lunches against "Alpha Critters."

Applications for Education
I played Alpha Munchies for a little while and could see how students would get sucked into playing it for a long time. The longer they play it, the better they should get at typing quickly and accurately. If you're going to have students use the game in your classroom, I recommend having them use headphones or turn off the sound as the music might drive you nuts after a while.

Disclosure: ABCya is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers. 

Screen Leap - Instant and Easy Screen Sharing

Screen Leap is a free screen sharing service that I recently learned about through a post by Vicki Davis. To share your screen using Screen Leap just visit the site, click "share your screen," enable the Java applet, and send the sharing code to the person you want to view your screen. The person receiving your invitation code will be able to see your screen when you have Screen Leap activated.

Applications for Education
Screen Leap could be a handy little tool for those times when it is easier to show someone how to do something than it is to tell them how to do it. I'm thinking it could be particularly useful when you're trying to walk someone through setting up an account on a new-to-them web service.

Here are some other screen sharing services you might want to try:
Quick Screen Share
Join.me
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SideVibe Eliminates Premium Plans

Last fall I wrote about SideVibe, a service designed to help you build lesson plans around web content. At the time that I wrote my review, SideVibe was offering a "premium" version for $5.99/ month that allowed teachers and students to converse about the content in closed feedback loops. Last week I received an email informing me that SideVibe is no longer charging for that service.

Embedded below is an overview of SideVibe.


Applications for Education
SideVibe could be a helpful tool when teaching students to evaluate the validity of information found on websites. By using SideVibe you could take a fake website like DHMO.org and build an evaluation lesson around it.

Webpage Screenshot - A Chrome Extension for Capturing Webpages

I've written about a bunch of screen capture tools over the years. Webpage Screenshot is another good one to add to the list. Webpage Screenshot is a Chrome extension that you can use to capture all or part of webpage. You can draw and type on screenshots you make with Webpage Screenshot. One feature of Webpage Screenshot that is quite helpful is the option to capture the entire content of webpage even if it doesn't appear in your current view of the webapge. See it in action in the short demo video that I made and embedded below.



Applications for Education
Whenever I'm introducing a new web-based service to students or colleagues, I find that having annotated screenshots available to them in either digital or printed form is very helpful. Having annotated screenshots available can help you avoid answering the same question ten times and also allows people who are more comfortable to go ahead on their own. The annotated screenshots also provide a nice reference for students and colleagues when they're working on their own without immediate access to an instructor.

Technology Education for Pre-Service Teachers - Guest Post

Like practicing educators, today’s pre-service teachers are faced with the challenge of connecting with 21st century learners. Despite the fact that many of these teaching candidates are proficient with technology for personal use, university teacher education programs must prepare them to integrate technology effectively in their content areas. I am currently teaching Technology in the Classroom to a class of pre-service teachers, mostly seniors in their student teaching semester. The learning goals I have developed for this course are that students will:

• develop and sustain a personal learning network for continual professional growth
• design a website for communicating with students, parents, and other stakeholders
• understand and apply the TPACK framework within their content areas
• identify and reflect on applications of technology tools in classrooms
• create a multimedia presentation to teach integration of a technology tool
• utilize Web 2.0 tools and identify their applications for teaching and learning

It is entirely impossible for me to teach these pre-service teachers everything they need to know about instructional technology in a 1-credit hour course, so one of my major goals for this semester is to assist them in developing their own Personal Learning Networks. Through investing time in establishing a PLN and making connections with other educators, they are creating a process for continuous learning that I envision will have huge pay-offs for them, their future students, their colleagues, and others in their PLNs. For this semester-long PLN assignment, students are required to post at least 3 course-related tweets each week and to interact through Twitter with classmates and others in their PLN. Using Twitter as a learning tool in this course has allowed them to envision the learning possibilities such a tool can offer. The students have already shared a wealth of information and ideas, learning so much from each other and their PLNs. We invite you to join in on our conversations about educational technology using #edu451.

Not only do I want these teaching candidates to establish networks for lifelong learning and continuous improvement, I also want to help them develop a framework that can guide their instructional decisions about technology integration. The TPACK framework, which stands for technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge, provides a model for effective technology integration by encouraging teachers to make purposeful decisions about when and why to use technology and within what context.

Image from http://www.tpack.org

TPACK is based on the need for teachers to use technology to support effective instructional strategies aligned with their content. I want these soon-to-be teachers to understand that using technology in the classroom is not about tools but about teaching and learning. We have spent a great deal of time face-to-face and online discussing the TPACK framework and its implications for them currently as well as in their future classrooms. I asked my students to create a visual representation of their own technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge for their specific discipline and grade level(s). Most students seemed to have a fairly easy time identifying their specific content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge. The difficult task was in describing the overlapping domains of knowledge - pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK) for example. Below you will find a few pieces of my students' TPACK projects representing these overlapping domains. You can see that working with this framework is helping these teaching candidates make purposeful decisions about teaching their content and understand how technology can be leveraged to improve teaching and increase learning. To learn more about TPACK, watch this or go here.

My students were more than willing to share their perspectives on technology integration throughout their teacher education program to date, including coursework and field experiences, and their goals for using technology in their future classrooms.

“There is one publicly available SMART Board in our university. I have never seen it incorporated in a full lesson. Without ever seeing one in action, I set out for my student teaching internship in secondary Spanish. Imagine my surprise when I saw a SMART Board being used in class, and my embarrassment at never having used one. The students used other sorts of technology, such as flip cams, to script, act in and record commercials in Spanish -- projects that would imitate real life teamwork and would be more effective than worksheets or grammar drills. They love it, and are motivated to use it. This should serve as a reminder that students want to learn, and it is up to us to ensure that our lessons retain that enthusiasm, and not kill it with drills and endless worksheets. The future holds a challenge of discerning which technologies will revolutionize and which ones are hype.”

    -Cara Zell, Elementary Education

“Throughout my college career, I really have not used a whole lot of technology in my coursework. Other than preparing presentations via Powerpoint/Prezi, I haven't had a lot of exposure to it in the classroom. As I am now in my student teaching, I am seeing how vital it is to keep adolescents engaged in the learning process. Using laptops, iPads, SMART Boards, Prezi presentations, etc. are just a few items that I will be implementing into my teaching this semester. We need to give students their best shot at succeeding in the 21st century world, and implementing technology into the classroom is just one of the ways to prepare them for the world that is ahead of them.”

-Erin DeBord, Middle Grades Social Studies and English Language Arts

I believe that teacher educators should aim to help teaching candidates establish a process for continuous learning and develop a framework for how technology can influence teaching and learning, and I am attempting to meet those goals through this course. Please share your comments about how teacher education programs and in-service professional development practices can prepare teachers to better meet the needs of today’s learners.

About the Guest Blogger

Jayme Linton currently serves as Director of Teacher Education at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. Previously, she has held positions as Instructional Technology Facilitator, Staff Development Coordinator, and Instructional Coach for Newton-Conover City Schools. Jayme is a doctoral student in the Teacher Education and Development Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is also a SimpleK12 webinar leader and has presented for the Global Education Conference and K-12 Online Conference. Jayme is passionate about technology for teaching and learning and enjoys spending time with her husband and two children. Connect with Jayme on Twitter @jaymelinton and check out her blogs: Tech Tips for Teachers and iPads in School.  

A Last-Minute Valentine's Day Project

In case you forgot, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. If you need a quick way to send for your kids or students to send Valentine's Day greetings to family members, take a look at the Valentine's Day themes offered by Animoto. Have the kids grab a handful of family pictures and put them together with some cute text to form a video greeting that can be emailed to family members.

Applications for Education
Aside from possibly bailing you out for Valentine's Day, I've always liked using Animoto as a way to introduce some basic video creation methods to students and faculty. I often use Animoto at the beginning of my introductory workshops on classroom video projects because it gives first-timers a quick boost of confidence before we delve into more challenging video creation projects.

ThinkB4U - Web Safety Tutorials from Google

Revealed today through their Public Policy Blog ThinkB4U is a new series of web safety videos and tutorials from Google and its partners. Using the "choose your own adventure" aspect of YouTube video editing, ThinkB4U offers interactive videos to educate viewers about things like protecting online reputations, avoiding scams, research and critical thinking, and responsible text messaging.

ThinkB4U is divided into three basic sections; students, parents, and educators. Each section addresses nine different topics related to safe and responsible use of the Internet and cell phones. The sections include short videos about the topics, a short written lesson, and some interactive games on the topics of responsible use of the Internet and of cell phones.

Applications for Education
The Educators' section of ThinkB4U offers lesson plans from Common Sense Media and the National Consumer League. There are lesson plans designed for elementary school, middle school, and high school use.