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Showing posts from May, 2014

Schoology - Inspired by CommonCraft

One of our favorite resources when helping teachers understand technology is CommonCraft , a company that puts out a series of short videos that explain various tech concepts "in plain English". If you're not familiar with their videos and formats, below are a couple of great ones: Online Citizenship Web Search Strategies As part of a subscription, you get access to CommonCraft's cutout library so you can create your own CommonCraft-style videos. We used their cutouts to create a short introduction to Schoology , a learning management system that we recommend our teachers use to house resources and course content for their students. We shared this video in  a course we created to help our teachers learn how to use Schoology with their students. Although the Schoology website has a few videos of their own, the features described in their marketing videos include some of the Enterprise features, which are only available in the paid version of Schoology. At the

Go Paperless!

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Our team was recently called upon to teach members of our district's Learning Services department strategies for integrating technology into their professional development (PD) sessions. Knowing that our district would soon be flooded with Chromebooks to support online testing and that we had people with a variety of skill levels, we developed three versions of a Google training to help people think about ways they could use Google tools in their PD sessions to reduce paper and enhance engagement. Our hope is that if teachers experience the meaningful use of technology in the PD sessions they attend, they will be inspired to transfer some of the tools and strategies into their own teaching. As a companion to these sessions, we developed a Paperless PD QuickGuide for participants to reference as they plan their PD sessions.