Lunch Bytes

Teaching, Tech and More!

April 25, 2013
by susancampo
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Social Media–Map your tag

The map below allows you to search Flickr, Twitter and Youtube for geo-located social media posts. The tag that is currently mapped is “weather” but you can change the tag by clicking on the gear icon.

The map can be used in any classroom by:

  • looking at what is happening in your school neighbourhood
    • Centre on your location or zoom in to get to your neighbourhood
    • change the tag on all three social media searches to the name of your school or neighbourhood
  • examining how people across the world are discussing a particular news event
    • look on Twitter to find the most common hashtag used for the event
    • change the tag on all three social media searches
  • illustrate the digital citizenship skill of choosing when to turn on the geo-location setting when creating and posting social media.

How else would you use this map?

April 18, 2013
by susancampo
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Do you know about these excellent digital resources in Peel?

Learn360

  • Access from Video Resources chiclet on your MySite
  • Videos for all subjects and grades
  • Short clips (great to activate knowledge or if you are flipping your classroom).
  • Full length feature films (Hollywood and Classic). Click on the link in the middle of the home page to see a list of titles in English and French.
  • Download, favourite or add to a playlist
  • Teacher Resources ready to use in the classroom are available for many videos
  • Students can currently view Learn360 videos through the OERB (see below). 

 

Ontario Education Resource Bank (OERB)

  • Lessons, animated interactive activities and  assessments for all subjects
  • Download for use offline or link to resource in Angel course
  • Check the FAQs of the Peel21st chiclet (Teaching and Learning) for the passwords or ask your ITRT.

 Resources.elearningontario.ca

 For easy access to your course’s resources:

  • Log in and Click SEARCH
  • Choose the Browse by Curriculum tab
  • Choose the grade, subject and strand
  • Click Search by Strand
  • Scroll down to see resources
 For students to find Learn360 videos, do a Simple Search and change the database to Learn360

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peel’s Library eResources

  • An excellent alternative to “googling” for students
  • Access to database search of extensive high-quality resources
  • 65+ databases and services
  • No password required at school
  • Check with your librarian for the home password

www.peelschools.org 

  • click on Students
  • click on Library eResources 

February 27, 2013
by susancampo
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Clarkson SS gets blogging

I am working with some teachers at Clarkson today about starting their own blogs.

El tordillo malo
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Eduardo Amorim via Compfight

Clarkson Chargers!

February 25, 2013
by susancampo
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S’more–beautiful pages instantly

S’more.com is one of the easiest ways to create a simple but beautiful webpage. It was originally designed to create online “flyers” that can be shared on social media like Facebook and Twitter. However, it is also a great tool for education anytime you want the students to integrate text, images, video, maps and audio. Here are some product ideas for teaching and learning:

  • Create a made-up but relevant event for a famous person or landmark
  • Design a poster for anything—National Park, a novel you’re class is reading, the recipes for this week’s menu, how to balance chemical equations, the ultimate workout.
  • C’est quoi votre vacance de rêve?
  • Produce an actual flyer for your pretend company.

Watch this quick video to see how easy it is to make one! http://vimeo.com/29872340

Don’t worry if you get a warning that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Just click the button that says “Continue anyway”.

Other similar sites:

Striking.ly—many designs, not as easy to use and only one free site per account
Storify.com—Create a story with links, images, videos, tweets, and more. (May not work in Internet Explorer 8. Try Chrome or Firefox.)

February 18, 2013
by susancampo
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This is what we are talking about.

After watching Darren Kuropatwa’s #WhileWalking 66  posted by Amy Burvall in Google+, I started thinking about tags as a part of digital literacy. I am not a very good user of tags.  I have been struggling with choosing consistent, clear tags since Delicious switched away from stacks.

“Blogging tips” websites indicate that you should do some research to find the most commonly used terms in your field.  However, finding a list of keywords or tags for Educational Technology through a Google search is an exercise in futility since all sites include the word “tag”. Instead I did a very haphazard, non-academic search of tags people are using on their blogs  to find the most common. Using Tagxedo, I found the top 100 tag words look like this (see below for how this image was made):

Since Tagxedo only uses individual words, the compound word tags are not shown, but this image does give an overview of what we are talking about. As I make my tags in the future, I will endeavour to use these words alone or in combination in addition to my own idiosyncrasies.
Out of curiosity, I fed the ETMOOC blog feed into Wordle and this is the image created. It will be interesting to see what will change as we move into Digital Literacy.
How I made the Tagxedo:
I thought that I would be able to see tags on other people’s blogs. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds since many blogs do not list their tags. Visiting at least 100, I copied the tag lists  from 33 blogs  into a Word document. To choose the blogs, I started with the current postings (on Feb. 17, 2013)  in the ETMOOC blog hub feed. Then I looked through all the blogs from James Dykstra’s  (@mrpuffin) Twitter list of Canadian Educational Folk. I also added a few blogs from people I follow. Once I felt I had enough “data”, I copied the full Word document into Tagxedo. The application automatically choose the most frequently used words.
The blogs I used to make this tag cloud of tag cloud words:
http://sharingourblessings.wordpress.com
http://misslwholebrainteaching.blogspot.ca
http://amysmooc.wordpress.com
http://bigreturns.posterous.com/
http://ewithersict.blogspot.ca/
http://jennyluca.com/
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.ca/
http://shawetmooc.wordpress.com
http://danielschristian.com
http://www.peternewbury.org
http://allmoocs.wordpress.com
http://cinisetfavilla.blogspot.ca
http://juliebalen.weebly.com
http://prairieinspiration.wordpress.com
http://adifference.blogspot.ca/
http://dbarker.edublogs.org/
http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/
http://lifelonglearnerrhonda.wordpress.com/
http://www.newmediaworkshops.com/telblog/
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.ca
http://jamespatrickjensen.com
http://abbtechtuesday.edublogs.org
http://mrsdkrebs.edublogs.org
http://somewherefromhere.edublogs.org
http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks
http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
http://intedanddevelopment.blogspot.ca
http://openphd.blogspot.ca
http://www.kleinspiration.com/
http://krebs.edublogs.org/
http://margaret-powers.com
http://cpbwsk.edublogs.org/
http://makeitinteresting.blogspot.ca/ 

 

 

February 11, 2013
by susancampo
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Soccer finals…making a GIF

As part of Digital Storytelling for #etmooc, we were challenged to make an animated GIF. I’m pretty happy with the result. It shows the action, excitement and effort of the final game of the season.

I struggled with using Gimp. Truth be told, I struggle with all photo editing. The pictures were too big, the scale was different in each picture, there were other players in the frame that flash awkwardly in the animation and it was just ugly when done. Finally, I gave up and went to the iPad. I searched for a highly ranked free photo editor that also made GIFs and settled on Fotorus. Then I dropped the images in Dropbox on my computer and saved them to the camera roll from Dropbox on the iPad. In Fotorus, I cropped all the images so my son was the same size, then used the auto-enhance so the colours were similar. Next I pulled them all into the GIF editor and chose the “matrix” filter.

Making the GIF on the iPad was quite easy, but I was frustrated with getting it off the iPad. The app easily saves to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, but GIFs do not show in the camera roll and the email was empty that I sent myself. Eventually I posted it to Twitter and downloaded it from there onto my computer to be able to post it here. Whew. Workflow on the iPad is crazy sometimes.

February 2, 2013
by susancampo
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Blogging with your students

I have updated my Prezi that I use to introduce teachers to blogging to include teacher and class blogs by subject area. Since I work with secondary school teachers, they often want to see an example in their subject. If you have or know of a great class blog that I should include, please let me know in the comments.