Here is one of the tools that can be added to your favorite lists. SimpleMeet.me is a web tool that you can create a chat room and use it as a backchannel in the classroom with so many people at the same time. Good news, you don’t need to sign up to use the tool. First, get the number for your chat room and immediately create your room to chat. You can invite people via their mails or give them the number and they can join the chat from the website. There is no limit in the number of participants. Then, start writing and chating with the rest of your group. You can also upload documents or pictures to share with others. How to use this tool in class: Use this tool as a backchanell in class. While you or some students are presenting, let them ask you questions so that you can answer them at the end of the lesson. Give your students a topic and ask them to chat about this topic using this tool. You can hold a debate using this tool. Students can write their feedback or their reflections about lesson/ presentation/ activity or a story that they have read. This can be a good to break the ice in class! Image Source:ShutterStock

This is just a quick late night post to share a video about how to sign up on Skype as an educator in order to find other educators to collaborate with. Very cool! I am going to turn over a new blogging leaf after my long period of silence How to create a profile and find a teacher from Skype in the classroom on Vimeo.

I love picture collage makers but I think Loupe Collage is the best one so far as it includes three different applications in one website. What you do with this site is pretty simple. Choose your pictures from your desktop or Facebook or any other social media website. Then, choose a shape that you want to see your pictures. If you like, you can write a text or draw a picture; and the text will be in the shape or the word that you have written. You can also change the background color, shuffle the pictures, add more photos or add a border. Then, you can save it as a picture and use it wherever you like. You can also choose to draw a live card with your pictures and drawing a picture or text. The website will animate it itself. You can also try Waldo which is a picture hunt game. You have to find a picture among a picture collage. How to use it in class: Students can complete a picture collage essay. Students can find the relation between the pictures and the shape that they use. Students can create a drawing card for special days such as Xmas, Mother’s Day .. Students can create posters using this tool on any topic. Students can create book covers.   Share class pictures with parents using this tool. Image Source: ShutterStock

I am currently working with a group of eight teachers to work through a teacher inquiry process where they identify a curriculum need for their students and then match this to an ICT tool that can help them address this need.  Teachers have been sharing the curriculum focus with me over the last week and I have been helping them to identify possible ways of working with ICT that they will implement in Term Three. I deliberately set out to work with teachers who might be a little lacking in confidence and I am finding it interesting to see what they are deciding to focus on. One teacher wants to concentrate on improving the students’ general knowledge. I found this to be a little challenging to my own beliefs about teaching and learning in a digital age. Should we still be trying to build up ‘general knowledge’ at a time when students can find out almost any fact they want by doing a Google search? How could I approach this subject in order to make the teacher feel her ideas were valued while still keeping the focus on effective pedagogy? Was I right to think that general knowledge was now not as important? Do my own feelings partly stem from the fact I can never remember names, dates or locations so I am truly terrible in a quiz night team? So I did what I normally do - I started to search around the net using Google. In this way, I stumbled across an article titled ‘Is Google killing general knowledge’ I enjoyed the article and thought that it did a pretty good job arguing the point that we do still need to have a basic level of knowledge to be effective learners. Here is a quote from that article: IS GOOGLE KILLING GENERAL KNOWLEDGE? | More Intelligent Life via kwout This article still makes the case for knowing facts while also recognising that the internet is a game changer as it allows people to continue to build their knowledge over their lifetime by being able to tap into the great collective knowledge. So I was feeling a little more comfortable with the importance of facts but still not sure about teaching them in isolation. As a compromise, I came up with an activity that would help to develop information literacy skills while students learn ‘general knowledge’. Here is how I described it to the teacher: A group of students could have a category each week to research (eg Famous monuments of the world) and they have to write 10 questions that you put into a form tool for the rest of the class to answer (which they can also do by researching). The students writing the questions have to show that the facts they are using are valid using the ‘3 sources rule’. Then the next group can have a turn. To prepare for this, you could do some work with your class on knowing how to check the information you find on the net is valid. I have links and useful videos about doing this with students on my wiki. At the top of the page, there are searching tips including some videos from Google. Here is an example of a Google Form that they could use to put in the questions for the other students to answer (I ran out of energy after four questions but you get the idea). So, have I sold my principles down the river in order to work in with what a teacher wants to do or is this type of activity valid? I would love your thoughts.

GIFExploder Website GIFExploder lets you explode your animated gif images into seperate images. View the results and download each image seperately. What do you think of GIFExploder?

Videos are one of the most important mediums in language teaching and here is a nice and a useful tool that we can use with videos in the classroom. ReelSurfer lets you crop videos and share from anywhere. Get your account and simply copy/paste your web link. Then, click on the buttons below the video to set a start and stop to the videos. You can also edit the times by clicking on the "edit times" below the buttons. When you are done, preview and share it with others. The best part is that you can get the videos from different video sharing websites. There is also a bookmarklet button where you can drag it to your bookmarks and click it to clip any video and share.  Here are a few ideas to use this tool: Crop your video and don’t show the ending. Ask students to brainstorm and come up with ideas. Crop your videos into different parts, let students watch them all and ask them to put the videos in order. Crop the beginning of your video and ask students to predict what has happened at the beginning.  or simply use to get your students watch the right part of the video you want them to see or split videos into shorter clips.  Image source: ShutterStock

I have just read a fasinating article about an experienced surgeon working at the top of his field that was looking for a way to continue learning and improving in his profession. He had a ‘aha moment’ when an unexpected tennis lesson made improvements to the speed of his serve despite having felt that his serve was the best part of his game. He goes on to look at whether other professionals make use of coaches once they are seen to be performing at a high level and talks to concert violinists, opera singers, and school teachers before asking a retired surgeon that he respects to be his own coach in the operating theatre. The results speak for themselves! Some of the interesting quotes from this article in relation to the coaching programme that he observes in a school district are: Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests. I also found it interesting that there was a lot of resistance to coaching by some teachers in the district where coaches are made available to them. All teachers in their first two years are required to accept a coach, but the program also offers coaching to any teacher who wants it. Not everyone has. Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching. Others hate the idea of being observed in the classroom, or fear that using a coach makes them look incompetent, or are convinced, despite assurances, that the coaches are reporting their evaluations to the principal. And some are skeptical that the school’s particular coaches would be of any use. The feeling of being ‘exposed’ while teaching is something that we have all experienced while being observed. As the article says, not everyone is a good coach so half the challenge I guess is finding that person that you are comfortable with and then being open to changing your practice. I know that when I was working as a facilitator for a cluster, I was in the role of a coach but not all the teachers that I was working with had ‘bought in’ to the process and the level of contact I had with each individual teacher was not really enough to be an effective coach. I also had trouble getting into a lot of teachers’ classrooms with teachers more comfortable to work with me while released from their class. This was probably to do with the fact that it takes time to build up the trust required to be that ‘critical friend’ and many felt a little threatened by the process. Having read this article, it becomes even clearer that this was not an effective way of working with many of the teachers that were in that cluster. Teaching online as I do at the moment, anyone can ‘drop in’ to my Adobe lessons but the timing isn’t always that great. I’ve taken to filming some of my lessons using screencast software on my computer so that these can be shared with people at a later date to get their feedback. I find this far less threatening than having someone in there during the session itself (which is something I am trying to work on!). So do we have enough opportunities for quality coaching in our profession? Have you had someone that has been a ‘coach’ that you’ve been able to work with successfully to make changes to your practice beyond those first few years in the job? There is a big movement towards teachers being involved in a continual round of upskilling through the teacher inquiry process but how many teachers get to do this with the input of a trusted and respected coach to help them through the process? Another thought - thinking around this also ties in with the e-learning framework which talks about teachers being mentored at the ‘Enabling’ and ‘Empowering’ levels of ‘Sustaining a professional e-learning community’. So what do we see this mentoring looking like?

Read It Later Website Read it Later lets you save videos, articles or pretty much anything you find interesting to your 'Read It Later' queue. When you’re ready, view saved content on any of your devices. What do you think of Read It Later?

If you are looking for new ways to create slideshows and share visual content, here comes a new website, BrickFlow.  BrickFlow is a building-blocks type of application that will enhance the way we share our online content and stories.  When you get your account, search for pictures, videos, links or online content by writing hash tags or keywords. Then, drag and drop each picture/video/online content wherever you want on your blank page and piece them together like blocks. You can remix your flow and rearrange your story whenever you like. You can also get your content from your different social media accounts such as Instragram, Facebook etc. When you are happy with your flow, just share it with your friends.  This new tool is sure to be one of the new ways of creating digital stories! Here are a few ideas to use this tool in education: Students can create picture gallery with their pictures from their summer holidays. Students create their own flows describing themselves. Gather all digital content that your students have created together on BrickFlow. Students can create their digital stories on any topic using this tool. Ask students to present their projects using this tool. Create your own slides using this tool. Sure to impact the way you are presenting! Image Source: ShutterStock

My first tip is how to use Flubaroo to mark the results collected from students through a Google Form. The video below gives you an overview of how you can use it. I’ve followed the step-by-step instructions on how to use Flubaroo from their site and it worked really well and in record time!  I can see this saving me HOURS of work. My second Google Form idea came from an older post on the Google Docs blog showing how you can use Google Forms to create a ‘Choose your own adventure’ story. This would be quite a novel way for students to build their own pick a path stories. Here are a couple of examples of this in action: The lily pad The woods The final useful idea is using Google Forms to collect information which can be used to create individual letters (mail merge). This would be really useful if you are using Google Forms for administrative purposes. Have you stumbled over any good Google Form tips recently or have you tried some of the above already?