Looking for a way to add an expert voice to your classroom this year? Skype in Education is a great place to start. From taking virtual field trips to connecting directly with authors, Skype in Education has you covered: Skype in the Classroom has a repository of lesson arranged by subject and age covering every content area. Find a lesson here: https://education.skype.com/lessons In addition, you can search for another teacher across the United States to engage and collaborate with on classroom projects: https://education.skype.com/users   The post Add Skype to your classroom this year! appeared first on NCCE's Tech-Savvy Teacher Blog.

Dr. Heidi Rogers, NCCE’s fearless leader and a long-time advocate for meaningful integration of technology in classrooms, was recently featured on Anthony Salcito’s blog and website, Daily Edventures.  Salcito is the Vice President of Education at Microsoft and a long-time friend of NCCE. You can view the full video below, or go to the blog post here. We agree wholeheartedly with Heidi: teachers ARE change agents and we join her in saluting tech-savvy teachers everywhere! The post NCCE’s Dr. Heidi Rogers Speaks to Microsoft’s Anthony Salcito appeared first on NCCE's Tech-Savvy Teacher Blog.

NCCE is thrilled to announce that bestselling author Cheryl Strayed will the closing speaker at NCCE’s 2016 conference in Seattle! Details for registration will be out soon! See you in Seattle in February! The post Cheryl Strayed is #NCCE2016’s closing keynote! appeared first on NCCE's Tech-Savvy Teacher Blog.

I have been spending time with the recently released Wonderbox for iOS. I have been impressed with the depth and content the app provides children. Wonderbox is completely free and promotes itself for all ages but in reality elementary age children will find this app most appealing. WonderBox: Explore & Learn Science, Geography, Music, and Design My daughters (10 and 7) have enjoyed exploring and creating within the app. During the initial setup, you are prompted to enter and adult email so students can send questions or creations to a parent or teacher. All content and design was in collaboration with educators and that collaboration shows in the apps content depth while appropriately chunking information. In the classroom, this app will work best in a one to one environment as it’s support for multiple logins is limited and would quickly become cumbersome in a class set that is shared throughout the school. Give it a look and let us know you thoughts in the comments section below…   The post Inspire Curiosity and Creative Thinking with Wonderbox appeared first on NCCE's Tech-Savvy Teacher Blog.

Welcome to the Elearning Laboratory website, I am Phil Mayor and this is the beginning of my blog on elearning.  I started the Elearning Laboratory over two years ago and we pride ourself on developing  innovative and imaginative learning experiences.  We also believe that design is very important and should be modern and groundbreaking, hence our strap line.   "Where design matters"   The aim of our blog is to share tip and tricks, demo files, shortcuts for Articulate products and examples of our work, essentially we will let you know where we find our inspiration from. Why another blog on elearning? I want to show you what it is that makes us tick and how you can work with us or how we may be able to help you achieve your goals.  You may already be a client,  a prospective client or have found your way here from the Articulate community. Who am I? I am Phil Mayor the Creative Director for the Elearning Laboratory and one of the Articulate communities Most Valued Professionals, often known as Superheroes.  I build elearning and love doing it. Find out where I steal my tricks from! Over the course of this blog I plan to show you where I find my inspiration from, how I build my courses, the aim is to show you where I steal my tricks from.  I also plan share lots of example files and resources with you that demonstrate what I am talking about.  There is a fine line that differentiates good elearning from great elearning, I will hopefully help you to cross that line. Tell me what you want to learn! I want to encourage you to comment on my blog posts, if you would like to get in touch with us please visit the "Contact us" page on this site.  If there is any thing you would like to see on this blog let me know. Thank you for being with me from the beginning and I hope you enjoy the ride! The post In the beginning… appeared first on The Elearning Laboratory.

Well, my students discussed, brainstormed, and came up with some great ideas for how to make a difference.One girl, the resident genius, suggested what I think is the best idea. She wants to make a website for gratitude. People will be able to go to the website and type in a message of gratitude to someone. The web form will then email that message to the recipient. I think it is a great idea. Hopefully, it will work.The next idea was to do something with Freerice.com. After talking about it, we decided we would try to have the library full all day with shifts of students trying to raise rice for the United Nations. I think it will work really well, but we might not have enough time.The last idea is one that I came up with, but it will still help. I gave the kids the idea, but they have done most of the work so far. They are making a SWAT team wiki. It will be a place that students can go to for information and tutoring. It is a big project, also. We will be working on this all year. I am very excited about it. I did blogs with my students last year, and I think this will be a good thing to do.

Be sure to hit the SWAT team wiki link above to see how the class is doing. The temporary site for the "website for gratitude" is here. It was designed by my students, and I will let them take the reins on it. Also, here is a neat little video about blogs. It is so well done and very creative. I love how it doesn't use any screenshots or visit any webpages to teach about blogs. So cool!

I mentioned this website earlier and wanted to mention it again. My class has gone to great lengths to set the day aside to help raise rice for the United Nations. They wrote a proposal to the administration, they planned out a schedule, made permission slips to teachers, and passes back from the library. I am so proud of how hard they worked. So, a lot of students will be filtering into the library to go to Freerice.com and see how much rice we can to donate to the United Nations. The totals for the past few days are in the image below.If you have a chance, please spend a couple minutes there and pad our stats. ;)My students would really appreciate your help.In other news. The SWAT team wiki is up and running. It looks great. The students have done almost all of that all by themselves. They are doing a remarkable job! Stay posted for the website for gratitude if we can ever figure out how to get the form to work.

First of all, thanks to all of you who told me how much rice you donated on your own yesterday. At school, we had students down in the computer lab all day in 15-minute shifts. There were 37 computers going full steam all day. We raised just over 750,000 grains of rice for freerice.com. We had a great time and we thank everyone who participated. There was almost 50,000 donated by people not at our school. All in all, it was a lot of fun.

UPDATE: Second video of another teacher added.For our Sub for Santa drive the students at my school set a goal to raise more than $11,000! I volunteered my legs for waxing if they met that goal. They did! Here is the video. Enjoy, I did. It didn't hurt that bad, but I had to play it up for the students to enjoy it more. There is no audio, but I hope my face tells the story. Pictures here.