Safari Montage Live 5

SAFARI Montage® Live-5! is the ideal solution for providing reliable school-to-school or school-to-home education for many applications, including AP classes, distance education for homebound students, professional development for teachers at school or at home, and virtual field trips to remote locations.

Other uses include:

Large meetings - faculty, school board, superintendent address, professional development.

Small meetings - teams, collaborative groups, student led conferences.

One to One meetings - evaluations, peer collaboration, parent teacher conferences.

Instruction - online, blended, virtual trips, expert discussion panels.

Intrigued? Watch this video explaining how the system works!

Have an idea for SML5 use in your classroom? Let me come and help you get started!

Gaggle

Gaggle is a student learning program that Commerce ISD utilizes. It encompasses many blended learning pieces including the following:

• Email: Gaggle Email includes extensive text filtering, inappropriate image detection and human monitoring.
• GaggleTube - Allow safe searching of YouTube videos even when YouTube is blocked by your district filters. All YouTube access is logged, filtered and monitored. Teachers can also upload videos, and saved videos can be shared, embedded and linked in multiple ways.
• Assignment Drop Boxes - Enable teachers to easily create, assign and collect assignments for a truly paperless classroom. Assignment Drop Boxes are integrated with Google Apps and GaggleTube for a full, rich media learning experience.
• Digital Lockers - Provide online file storage with integrated editing of Word documents, spreadsheets, photos and more.   Individual files and folders can be shared with specific students, classes or the entire school or district. All files are filtered for appropriate content and accessible from school or at home.
• Discussion Boards - Support curriculum and extend learning with ongoing classroom discussions. Teachers can create discussion boards restricted to specified students and classes.
• Social Wall - Provides profile-based connections with sharing, similar to the most popular social networking experiences.

Plus, there's an app for that!

The latest addition is the integration of Google Docs. Students can use their Gaggle login to log into Google Drive where they have access to all of the Google Apps for Education. Google Drive is a wonderful resource for students to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Their work auto-saves and is web based for access across any device and even offline editing. 

The good news is that EVERY STUDENT and TEACHER already have a Gaggle account! All logins follow this 

Username: firstname.lastname@cisdtigers.org

Password: network login

Happy Gaggling!

Heather

Quick Key Turns Your iPhone Into a Scanner

Quick Key is a new and free iOS app that turns your iPhone into a bubble sheet scanner. Thanks to Richard Byrne at iPad Apps for School for posting about this app!

Quick Key has two parts to it that when combined make it very easy for you to quickly grade multiple choice and true/false quizzes. Here’s the basics of how it works; create your quiz on the Quick Key website then print and distribute a bubble sheet. After your students have completed the bubble sheet you simply scan the sheets with your iPhone (it works on iPads too, but the resolution is grainy) and the grading is done for you. From the app you can send grades to the classes that you have created on the Quick Key website. If you enter students’ email addresses in your class rosters on Quick Key, you can have grades emailed to students.

I can see this being used to grade homework, bell ringers or exit slips in a secondary classroom! Check it out in action in this YouTube video:

The Pencil

I found this sticker last week from the AC Williams Scholastic Book Fair. 

It was the final straw that told me that I needed to share some things that I came across this week in regards to the school supply staple...the pencil.

As we all struggle to integrate technology into our classrooms, we have to remember that the students that sit before us are not us. They don't learn like we learned. Kasey Bell, our Region 10 Digital Fluency facilitator, said it best when she said, "Technology is the pencil of our time." How true are those words!

I want to share this video about pencils...actually technology in the classroom. This is an Xtranormal video made from a Twitter conversation about the use of technology in the classroom...except they replace the word "technology" with "pencils". It's funny, don't get me wrong! However, it makes me think about how far technology has come since I was in school and how we, as educators, need to adapt and change some things to meet students where they are! Okay, I'll step off my soapbox...enjoy the video!

Easy Grading with Flubaroo

Flubaroo is a free tool designed by a classroom teacher that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank assignments using Google Forms. More than just a grading tool, Flubaroo also computes average assignment scores, average score per question, and flags low-scoring questions. It can even show you a grade distribution graph. You can email the students their grades and, if you want, an answer key. Flubaroo will also allow you to send individualized feedback to each student.

You can use your CISD Gmail account to use Flubaroo. Detailed steps for getting started with Flubaroo are provided here. A user's guide with more information is also available.

Keeping your students on 1 app

Apple has introduced Guided Access in iOS 6. It keeps your device in a single app and allows you to control which features are available.

Locking a mobile device into a single app has been a request of parents and educators for some time. Using Guided Access to limit an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to one app can be handy when you want a child to remain on task and focused. It is also nice for youngsters who might accidentally click the Home button.

To start Guided Access: 

1. Launch the Settings App.
2. Go to General and choose Accessibility.
3. Turn Guided Access On.
4. Set a passcode.
5. Launch the app you want lock the device into.
6. Triple-click the Home button.
7. You can choose to disable touch or motion in addition to disabling the Home and volume buttons.
8. Tap the Start button.

Thanks to Primary Possibilities for the image

To exit the app, triple-click the Home button and enter the Guided Access passcode.

iOS 6 is now available as a free upgrade for iPad 2, iPad 3rd generation, iPod touch 4th generation, and iPhone 3GS and newer.

Flipped Classrooms

In the secondary classrooms within Commerce ISD, we are using our technology to shift the focus from teachers being the lecturer to becoming a facilitator of learning. This includes using the resources available to flip our classrooms. The "flipped classroom" is a buzz word that is gaining focus in the ed tech world and it can sound scary to the novice tech teacher. I created this Prezi to help introduce the concept to our teachers and clarify any misconceptions. I hope that it intrigued our teachers to try the model!