I was sorting through some files and found notes I had taken back in April of 1999 at a conference at Penn State focusing on “Exploring Learning Technologies.” One session I attended was on “The effects of incorporating concept mapping into computer assisted instruction.” What caught my attention within my own notes was a line or two about how to score a student generated concept map. The suggestion for scoring is posted below: Identifying concepts [...]

I have been working with a colleague to collect data on student reading performance. We successfully uploaded the Excel spreadsheet to Google Docs and shared the form with Reading Assistants for data entry. After an initial training session and some one-on-one work with the assistants, everything is working well. Once the data is entered, the Google Spreadsheet is downloaded, opened with Excel and merged with a Word document that is printed and sent home to [...]

I have been helping educators manage their own classroom blogs for a few years now. Most of them use the software to post announcements, assignments, reminders, etc. But a few are now engaging students in public responses to their blog posts, and a few more are exploring ways to engage students in writing the blog. In case you are in a similar situation, this resource might help you decide how to run a group-authored blog: [...]

In a recent post, I demonstrated how to use PowerPoint to create images for use in a blog. Here is another way that you can use the “save as…” image function to create classroom posters. A colleague recently learned that a local Costco would print a poster size product for about half the price of the typical office business stores like OfficeMax and Staples. The first time she tried to upload an image file created [...]

Looking for another way to use a wiki? How about having the students take class notes? I came across the concept from this post: The Salt-Box » Wikified class notes In the post, the author outlines the first attempt at having college students enter class notes on a wiki and then provides the criteria for the second version: Creating a 75-100 word statement of the main idea or unifying theme of the class.  (For a [...]

Have you seen these things? If you haven’t yet, you will. The image on the left is an example of an emerging technology called a “QR” code. QR stands for “quick response” and can be thought of as  a bar code on steroids.     Want to learn more? Then watch this video from cnet.com   Okay, so what does this have to do with Teachers, Technology, and Transforming classrooms? Well, the answer is in [...]

Looking for another URL shortener? Well, Google has one – goo.gl! This service initially debuted in December of 2009. As one would expect, for logged users there are URL tracking features such as history, traffic sources, referrers, visitor profiles for countries, browsers, and platforms. I just created one for this blog: http://goo.gl/vuhwe Feel free to click the link, even though you know where it will take you. I am interested in looking at the tracking [...]

A colleague wanted to make a PowerPoint presentation available on her blog site for students to view. I told her that we could post the presentation as a .pps (PowerPoint Show) file on the site for students to download. But I reminded her that we never really know if the end user (the students) has the software capable of viewing at home. To post something that might not be usable would be frustrating. That led [...]

“I want students to mark up grammatically incorrect sentences on my interactive white board. What’s the easiest way to do that?” My answer was “PowerPoint.” When you use Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to display presentations, or in this case sentences, you can annotate right on the slide. This option appealed to me because we did not have to launch the board’s software to annotate on the slide. We could accomplish the same task within just [...]

In my opinion, one of the strengths of Firefox as a web browser is the number of  add-ons that can be installed to make the browsing experience more effective and efficient. I am a fan of anything that makes my life easier, so I have explored, installed and tested a lot of add-ons and discovered many that I like. I share them with colleagues when I can but was looking for an easier way to [...]