Teachers Love SMART Boards is one of my favorite resources for SMART board lessons, links and ideas for use in the classroom. 
Aha! I have been waiting for months for my Google Voice invitation to arrive and I just got it. Is there nothing Google cannot do?
Just this week, I did an interactive whiteboard training session for high school World Language teachers. I did minor in French in college, but since I don't speak Spanish, I needed to beef up the content for this training. So, I invited a particularly spectacular Spanish teacher from a local magnet school to join me. Her name is Melisa and she is extraordinarily inventive in her use of multimedia technologies (including her interactive whiteboard) to make her lessons engaging, authentic and effective.
She introduced me to Gcast. She and her family are native Spanish speakers, but since they are all from different regions of the world, they have different accents (you can't pay for that kind of resource!). In order to take advantage of the opportunity to introduce her students to the spoken word, she uses Gcast to create "answering machine messages" that her students must listen to as a homework assignment. She phones in her podcast (the site says "it's so easy, your grandma can do it" so give it a try) and posts a link to her website. For homework, the students listen to the "message" that she or one of her family members has recorded and fill out a worksheet with several questions related to the message.
The latest example of one of her "messages" is from a make-believe real-estate customer who describes the qualities of a home that she is looking for.
Talk about innovative use! Brava, Melisa!
You Are 36% Nerdy |
 You're a little nerdy, but no one would ever call you a nerd. You sometimes get into nerdy things, but only after they've become a part of mainstream culture. |
I have a gmail account which makes using all sorts of Google tools very easy to integrate into my life, professionally and personally. However, you can open a Google account using your current email address and avoid concerns you may have about opening an additional email account.
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Ahh...I will digress...I remember when I opened my gmail account. It was a very swish thing to do because back then you had to receive an invitation from an existing Google account holder to open one. Very exclusive. You had to have a confirmation code text-messaged to your cellular phone and enter the code to open the account--very Mission Impossible. Who knew if the message would self-destruct? Now, it's so easy anyone can do it!
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GoogleDocs allows users to create word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents online that are compatible with MSOffice and many open-source office suites. It allows you to store, edit, share and collaborate with others to create these documents and you can even IM to the collaborators while you do it! This is an excellent way to facilitate collaborative projects for your students without requiring them to plan face-to-face meetings outside of school.
You can keep track of who is editing the document and when they are doing it (yes! date/time stamps!) and what they are adding to the project. This solves the age-old problem of being able to tell if the workload in a student group is being carried in a balanced way, which is one oft-cited drawback of participating in a group project.
I had the idea of posting times to your students of when you will available via IM to provide real-time feedback to students on their writing or other work. For example, "If you need help with your homework tonight, I will be available online through Google between 5 and 7 pm." Also, students can also ask you questions or you can give answers or feedback when you are online at different times by adding comments to the document in different colors.
One of the best reasons to do this is that there is ONLY ONE, most recent version of each project at any given time. There aren't multiple versions of the file bouncing around to everyone's email address! You don't even have to bring a flash drive with you anywhere to grade anyone's work. It's all online. All the time.
