Sharing Tips and Tricks of Using Technology in the Classroom Part 2

[Carrie Albin]

In your courses you have been asked to share your tips and tricks of using technology in the classroom. 

[Shana Michelle Wiese]

As a middle school English teacher, I was thrilled to learn a bit about Citation Machine to hold students accountable for their writing.  Plagarism is a difficult concept to teach, especially at this level, and showing students how easily it can be detected will (at least in theory) prompt them to be more mindful of their use of others' ideas.

[Scott Hudson]

I will check this out because my district is pushing writing across the curriculum, and I am a math teacher who had never assigned a writing assignment.  I agree that showing student how they can be detected will be useful.  Is this free to use?

[Terri Jordan]

I use Citation Machine all the time.  What a great time saver!  I can't imagine having to help all of my kids do citations without it.

[David Hocker]

I need to check that out too.  I have been doing writing assignments for my PE classes, and have only relied on my own intuition and google/wikipedia searches to detect plagiarism.   This sounds like a much more efficient way to do things.

[Scott Hudson]

I learned about starting my own blog on blogger.com.  It wasn't all that difficult to set up and to add posts with verbal thoughts and information and visuals, as well.  I can envision this as a useful way for me to provide assignments to student who missed school as well as tips for students to complete assignments.

[Tammy Maginity]

Do you still think you will use the blog with your students?

[Scott Hudson]

I'm deciding whether or not I want to use blogger.com or use Moostock.  I may use Moostock since it is linked to the district webpage, and I since I have an account up and running I've entered a couple of assignments and video links.  I like the fact that there is a "messenger" piece on Moostock, as well .  What do you think?

[Kelly Taunt]

After receiving training on SMART technologies, I was overwhelmed with how I was going to use it this amazing piece of equipment in my classroom.  Using the website: http://exchange.smarttech.com/search.html?m=01, has helped a great deal.  Teachers share and allow you to download their lessons they have created using their SMART technologies.  Not only is this is a huge time saver, but many are aligned right to State benchmarks.

[Tammy Maginity]

That's great that you get to use a smartboard!

[Terri Jordan]

I have learned how to use RSS feeds and create an iGoogle page.  This is great because I can get relevant, current articles daily without having to search the internet for hours.  I can even use this articles for, "Current Event" Friday activities.  If you haven't tried this, I recommend it! 

[Tammy Maginity]

I am glad you have found it useful!

[David Hocker]

I teach a computer class.  It is difficult to test whether or not students really learned how to use a program that I've been trying to teach them to use.  So for an assessment, I take screen dumps of an application that we have been learning in class and paste them into a program like publisher.  Then I add text boxes (with multiple choice options A, B, C and D) and arrows that point to different places on the screen. 

 

I highlight all of those objects, and save that as one picture.  Next I use that picture as the background in a powerpoint presentation.  Finally, I use that slideshow as a visual aid for any question that needs one.

 

Here's a sample of one slide.  This slide would go along with a question like, "If you want to resize a picture in publisher, where would you first click? A, B, C or D"