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Stupeflix Website Stupeflix lets you mix photos, video and music to create stunning videos in seconds. Save all your videos and remix them as needed. What do you think of Stupeflix?

Tinymap Website Tinymap lets you easily create and share maps. Add any of twelve different icons to the map. You get a URL address to paste once you name and save your map. What do you think of Tinymap?

Summarize Website Summarize automatically creates a summary from your text entered either directly or from the address of a webpage. The most common words are also listed. What do you think of Summarize?

ArmoredPenguin Website ArmoredPenguin contains a number of resources that you can use to make puzzles of various types such as word search, crossword, word match, word scramble, logic, maths, illusions and more. What do you think of ArmoredPenguin?

Kraken Website Kraken lets you losslessly optimize your PNG and JPEG files striping metadata with image quality intact. Upload files or use the drag and drop interface. What do you think of Kraken?

WinUSB Maker Website WinUSB Maker is a tool to make dynamically any Removable Device/External HDD bootable with Windows Setup. For Windows Vista and later. What do you think of WinUSB Maker?

The world is changing in exponential ways due to technology. Education is not an exception. Consumers are turning into producers. Kindergarteners are turning into authors with a worldwide audience. Middle Schoolers are emerging as critical thinkers and authentic problem solvers. High Schoolers are applying to colleges with real world work as part of their portfolios. Teachers become self-directed and connected worldwide for their professional development. This exciting evolution does not leave Business Managers or the school’s support staff behind, as they are an integral part of all constituents’ needs. I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Felix Jacomino at the AASSA’s Business Managers’ Conference in Miami. The area of schools as storytellers and documenters of institutional memory is fascinating to me. We explored the role of social media and networking as the amplification of telling the story, both in geographic reach, but also as engaging stakeholders to tell and spread a school’s story. Below you will find the documentation of our work over two days: Attendees experienced many opportunities to be exposed to and explore technology in action. They learned about innovative ways to become more efficient and organized, be part of the 21st century branding of their school and how to become a connected, networked employee with a clear awareness of "behind-the-scenes" logistics. The essential questions that guided the work over two days were: What does it mean to be educated? What year are we preparing our students for? How do we use technology to amplify organization? How do we use technology to transform a task? How do we connect with the right people? How to manage what others say about your brand? How can you visually represent your school? The day was organized into the following sections: Why should you care? Why does it matter? SAMR Model (Education/Business) Organization: Infrastructure Networking: Social Media Branding: Consumers vs Producers: Telling the Story Branding- Infographics & Presentation Design - Visualization Participants had ample opportunity for hands-on work. As a group, it was decided to collectively dig deeper into thinking about The Competitive Advantage in the World of International Schools. The first thing that was established to work from was a Today’s Meet room. The room was to serve as a space to easily share links to resources and forms, as well as questions or requests by the audience to the presenters. AASSA - Transcript - TodaysMeet To see the power of collaborative, synchronous and visible crowdsourcing, attendees also logged into a Google Document and within minutes brainstormed 1 Thing Every Business Manager Should Know as well as 1 Thing to Share about "Competitive Advantage in the World of International Schools ". Using the comment feature, participants asked clarifying questions or their own thoughts to contributions of others. GoogleDocs- Collaborative-Synchronous from langwitches on Vimeo. Participants also collaboratively created a Google Slide Presentation. As a group or individual they added one slide with a quote, tip or recommendation with the collective wisdom thread in mind. At the same time it gave them another opportunity to experience collaboration and crowdsourcing in action. These slides were later then used to create more visually appealing slides that could be used to further be disseminated via Social Media. As a group, we created, edited and filled out a Google Form to crowdsource answers to the "Hottest Questions For Business Managers at International Schools" to demonstrate a powerful tool to quickly survey a crowd, as well as being able to share and amplify the "crowd" and solicit contributions asynchronously worldwide to learn with and from each others expertise and experiences. Another demonstration of brainstorming or "think tanking"as a group was demonstrated with traditional Post-It notes. Participants shared their thoughts by using a visible thinking routing "I used to think about competitive advantage as (orange stickies) … Now I think as competitive advantage…" (green stickies). Felix, captured their thoughts by taking a picture of the stickies in the iPad app Post-It.     Now, I think the Competitive Advantage is the continued learning, continued development Sharing, collaborating, creating, network of people aiming for the same good. Being able to redefine education to face the challenges of the 22nd century. Collaboration between schools. Exchange of Knowledge. We are not only competitors, we are collaborators in education But now I think: -Product knowledge -Target Audience -Communicate it Constant Learning Culture: Reinventing ourselves   One theme over the two days together was to show the power of visuals and the necessity of content creation as part of a marketing and branding strategy for International schools. With apps like Word Swag , PicCollage or Moldiv, it becomes fairly simple and easily embeddable into a workflow to create visually appealing messages that are easily shared on social media channels.   Silvia looked at different social media platforms and emphasized the necessity to SHARE our schools’ stories and to connect with our stakeholders through the platform of their choice. The shift to go beyond sending out marketing materials to showcase the school’s accomplishments, mission and vision, takes us to the ability to share our message through stories and a variety of platforms to engage our stakeholders in order for them to contribute by letting them tell and re-share our stories. Felix demonstrated how one can create in a few simple steps a music video or slideshow with images of an event by using Animoto. Using tools, such as Piktochart or Canva, can support the ones among us who are not graphic designers.   How well does your school tell their story? Have you established a social media presence that goes beyond pushing out content in order to connect with and engage your stakeholders? Who are the lead storytellers in your school? Interested in exploring the answers to these questions? You might be interested in attended AASSA’s Social Media Institute, led by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano. For now, here is the slide deck of the presentation. AASSA Business Managers  Presenters Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano is a Third Culture Kid (TCK). Born in Germany, raised in Argentina, having lived shortly in Brazil, now is planted in the United States. Her multicultural upbringing fueled her passion for languages, travel, global awareness and global competencies. Silvia holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish with a Minor in International Studies and a Masters in Education with an emphasis in Instructional Technology. She has worked as a World Language teacher, Technology Integration Facilitator, 21st Century Learning Specialist, Social Media Coordinator, Professional Developer and Educational Consultant. Her passions include globally connected learning, technology integration, 21st Century skills and literacies, as well as digital storytelling. Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano is available for national and international conference presentations, consultations, and teacher training sessions. She is able to work with you and present in English, Spanish and German. Silvia is known in the international bloggersphere under the name of "Langwitches". To learn about her work, subscribe to the Langwitches Blog and follow her on Twitter. She is a Curriculum21 faculty member, author of the book "Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators", one of the co-authors of Mastering Digital Literacy & Mastering Global Literacy, Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer and the founder of the Around the World with 80 Schools project. Felix Jacomino Felix is currently the Director of Technology at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Day School in Coconut Grove, Florida and he is the host of Miami Device, a learning event presented by St. Stephen’s. He leads a team of three amazing Technology Integration Specialists and works with the best Head of School and administration team anyone could hope for. St. Stephen’s has gained much attention in the Educational Technology world due to hard work by the technology team, enthusiastic teachers, supportive administration, and excellent professional development. This success is measured by the most important component of any school initiative - the students! Learners at St. Stephen’s are excited about daily life at school and are authentically engaged by their enthusiastic and inspiring teachers.

As a reader of my blog, you have followed my journey into exploring Sketchnoting  since April 2014. I have come a long way by studying and learning from other sketchnoters: their techniques, their tools, their thinking process, their signature people, objects and metaphors. If have gone from asking myself  WHAT can you Sketchnote? to Sketchnoting as a Form of… WHAT can you Sketchnote? Sketchnoting as a Form of...Click To Tweet Sketchnoting as a FORM OF reflection,notetaking,visual thinking,content creation, mind mapping,…Click To Tweet I am experimenting with a variety of goals, as I am sketchnoting, wanting to be aware of how I react to each form in terms of my thinking process and learning involved. Reflection : "We don’t learn from experiences, we learn from reflecting on the experience" John Dewey Note Taking: How can we summarize main ideas visually? Visual Thinking: How can we make thinking visual and visible to others? Content Creation: How can we take concepts and content, in order to be able to share visually to appeal to a larger audience Memory Aid: Doodling triggers memory after the event has passed. Visual beat text when it comes to remembering Process Ideation: Documenting the formation of concepts and ideas Storytelling: Conveying of events through images and text Mind Mapping: Brainstorming and organizing of ideas, thoughts and connections I am specifically intrigued by sketchnoting as a FORM OF REFLECTION. As Visible Thinking Routines (by Project Zero) have proven to be very helpful in making thinking visible, I prepared an easy to follow routine to reflect when sketchnoting. Disclaimer: this is not meant to be a one- size- fits- all reflection routine,  just one of many ways one can take advantage of sketchnoting to support a reflection process. Sketchnoting as a FORM OF REFLECTION.Click To Tweet Topic What do I know? What have I learned? How can I apply what I learned? How do I summarize in a Headline what I learned? Keywords Brainstorm keywords about the topic Objects & People How can I make my thinking visible? How can I represent an idea? Connections How does what I learned connect to what I (or others) already knew or will do Actions What conclusions will I draw? What are my goals? Another routine is  Peter Pappas‘ Taxonomy of Reflection Remember What did I do, hear, watch, learn? Understand What was important about it? Apply Where could I use this again? Analyze Do I see any patterns? Evaluate How well did I do? Create What should I do next? This past week, I had the opportunity to facilitate a session about Sketchnoting for Reflection at the end of the 3 day ASCD Camp Connect21 conference in Washington, DC. It was the perfect moment to help participants become aware of their thinking and learning process as they reflected via sketchnotes of their learning experience at the conference. Next stop? How do we bring Sketchnoting for Reflection to our students as yet another tool in their toolbox. Below find a few samples of the reflection results: Examples of Sketchnoting as a FORM OF REFLECTIONClick To Tweet

Note taking is a big topic among educators. How do we teach it to our students? What are the best methods? Is digital note taking worse than taking your notes on a piece of paper? Note taking is a big topic among educators. How do we teach it to students? What are the best…Click To Tweet I am a big advocate to "if I want to teach it, I have to experience it". Below, you will find my documentation of note taking methods I have used (at conferences) over the years (2003-2015). From solitary notes on paper to digital sketchnotes shared on Twitter and this blog. The evolution of my notes seems worthy to document, since I am excited of what is to come next. It also gave me a chance to look at: the level of substitution, in terms of analog going digital (no functional change) the level of transformation, in terms of amplification, shareability, hyperlinked writing, usage of different areas of the brain, etc. Taking notes at a conference, looked like the one I took at a World Language conference around the year 2003. See the photo below. This was years before I started blogging and tweeting. Then my blog came around and I started to share my notes a well as blog live during sessions, see below the example from 2008 and notice the lack of any hyperlinks beyond to the presenter’s website and a book recommendation on Amazon. Not far behind came my note taking via my own Twitter Feed (also 2008). Notice the lack of the use of a hashtag to string other tweets together. ( Hashtags were introduced to Twitter in July 2009) I have documented my note taking style at conferences through time: Documenting Presentations- Blog and Twitter Style (2009) Twittering at a Conference (2010) A Visual Reflection of a New Kind of Conference (2012) Note- Taking Learnflow of a Conference Workshop (2014) In April of 2014, I started experimenting with Sketchnoting. I am wrapping my mind around, not necessarily WHAT to sketchnote, but around the benefits of sketchnoting AS *something* . I looked at sketchnoting as a form of reflection and know am looking at Sketchnoting as a tool for Note Taking. The three examples below are my notes from the keynotes at ASCD Camp Connect21 from this past week. Other sketchnoting examples from different conferences: BLC 2015, Making Learning Visible, Miami Device 2014, GIN Conference, AASSA- Educators’ Conference 2015. I have noticed the following as part of the process of sketchnoting as note taking: doodling/sketching my notes makes me remember the content better and longer the act of "coloring" (filling in block letters or objects) gives me time to think deeper and longer about the meaning. choosing colors adds another dimension of organization, hierarchy and connectivity between concepts and ideas. the act of thinking about the visual representation of a point or concept adds depth to understanding that point or concept. choosing strategic arrows and connectors help make sense of an overall message and " how is this related to a bigger picture?" As part of the process of sketchnoting as note taking: doodling/sketching my notes makes me…Click To Tweet I believe there is room for all kinds of note taking methods for ourselves and for our students. We (teachers & students)  just need to have several methods in our toolbox and experiment with the ones, we might not have had exposure to in order to be aware of potential benefits. How has your note taking evolution looked like? How has your note taking evolution looked like?Click To Tweet

I was lucky to have shared my childhood bedroom for a few years with my grandmother, when she had come to live with us after an illness. At bedtime, she would tell me stories of her parents and three brothers and growing up in East Prussia, fleeing to the West after WW2 and the things that occupied her mind. I was hooked on storytelling. The fascination grew when technology became available and opened up possibilities that were just not possible before. I would give anything to have been able to record my grandmother’s stories and have shared them with my own children years later. Humans are natural storytellers. It has been THE FORM of passing on knowledge from generation to generation. Storytelling existed in some shape or form in all civilizations across time. In the 21st century, which we have the luck to live in, Digital Storytelling, has opened up new horizons, inconceivable without the use of technology. Storytelling is evolving, as humans are adapting, experimenting and innovating with the use of ever changing technology, the growth of human networks and our ability to imagine new paths. Maybe as part of a natural process, we tend to stick first to the familiar and "substitute" our task (see Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model). Substitution is not enough to explore and experience the potential of digital storytelling. Over the years, I have seen in classrooms and created myself many stories, that are: merely substitutions to what I could/have done/told in analog ways created in isolation, without any connections to a larger concept, idea or community created only to be read by a teacher for a grade, without the possibilities of ever reaching a larger audience for feedback or being able to take its place as a puzzle piece of a larger picture/story It is NOT about the tools… it is about the skills Digital Storytelling is NOT about the Tools, but about the SkillsClick To Tweet Digital storytelling is not about how to use VoiceThread or iMovie. It is not about the ability to create an MP3 recording and adding it to an XML file, so people can subscribe to our podcast channel. Digital storytelling is about different types of skills we are developing in the process, such as: writing, speaking, communication skills oral fluency information literacy visual literacy media literacy language skills auditory skills drama Skills presentation skills listening skills publishing skills Examples: Using a blog to tell learning journey/story over time. (use categories or archive to show growth over time) 6 Word Memoirs Google LitTrips Flat Stanley Podcast Visualize Poetry Around the World It is NOT about creating media… it is about creating meaning Digital Storytelling is NOT about creating media, but about creating meaningClick To Tweet Smartphones and other mobile devices have made the ease of filming, recording or taking images easy, available anytime & anywhere as well as relatively economical compared to earlier times. The amount of media that is being created and uploaded per minute is exponentially growing and mind blowing. Although there is value in contributing your perspective to a larger pool, the emphasis of the stories we share through different media is about creating meaning and about making that meaning visible to others, not about the act of creating the media itself. Examples: Christopher Columbus creates 21st Century Explorers   Listening, Comprehension Podcast It is NOT only about telling a story… it is about contributing and collaborating with others Digital Storytelling is NOT only about telling a story, it is about contributing and collaborating…Click To Tweet Digital storytelling is not only about telling the story, but tapping into the potential of being a contributing perspective, example, unique experience to a much larger story. The question grows from "How can I tell my story?" to "How does my story fit in and add value to the stories of others?". How do we create a much larger story comprised of individual stories? Example: Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things (Thank you to Alan Levine for the project link) "Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things is an ongoing prototype developed and run by the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab that explores new forms and functions of story. Designed to be an open R&D space that experiments with shifts in authorship and ownership of stories, the massive collaboration also uses a detective narrative to examine the policy and ethical issues surrounding the Internet of Things. The goal of Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things is to build a massive connected crime scene consisting of smart storytelling objects." Twitter Storytelling Learning how to create "Snippet Stories",use simultaneous narrators and fractured storyline, co-telling by using #hashtags, sharing with your network and adding value to other people’s learning Collaborative Storybook: Florida Explorers It is NOT about telling an isolated story… it is about sharing and connecting experiences and perspectives to a community Digital Storytelling is NOT about telling an isolated story... it is about sharing & connecting…Click To Tweet It is a powerful realization that we all have something valuable to share with others. Digital storytelling takes that isolated story, living in our thoughts, potentially shared with people we know or meet face to face and connects it with a much larger community. Examples: 7Billion Others In 2003, after The Earth seen from the Sky, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with Sybille d’Orgeval and Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire, launched the 7 billion Others project. 6,000 interviews were filmed in 84 countries by about twenty directors who went in search of the Others. From a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes: What have you learnt from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you? Looking For Stories (Thank you to Alan Levine for the project link) "Looking for Stories" is an online documentary web serie where Joan Planas (filmmaker) document stories from people and places around the world using video, photography and articles. We don’t judge the stories. We show them respectfully just as they are, trying to gain a better understanding of the world we live in. Extend Learning Digital Storytelling is NOT only about the transfer of knowledge... it is about the amplification…Click To Tweet While the transfer of knowledge has always been a primary reason for storytelling, the importance of the amplification, the reach of our voices is what makes digital storytelling transformational Through social media, our potential connections, collaboration and dissemination paths can reach exponential levels. The reach of our voices is about the amount of people our stories are capable of touching. We have moved from an audience of one or a few in a face to face environment to a global audience through synchronous and asynchronous tools. Even young children (with the help of parents or teachers) can find their voice and be heard! Traditional limitations of age, physical handicaps, financial limitations preventing traveling or a lack of social network connections in the physical world, don’t have to limit someone’s voice any longer. Examples: Kristallnacht- Night of the Broken Glass: By taking a story written down by my grandfather: translating it into English adding a visual dimension with images an auditory layer by adding my voice and music publishing it to a digital platform and strategically sharing it publicly, I was able to amplify my grandfather’s story/experience and voice past his lifetime.   It is NOT about substituting analog stories… it is about transforming stories #DigitalStorytelling is NOT about substituting analog stories... it is about transforming stories Click To Tweet Taking an analog story, which is written in text form on a physical piece of paper, told with printed visual material or with a voice to someone sitting in the same room as the storyteller and digitizing it with the help of tech tools does not take advantage of the full potential of digital storytelling. If we are truly looking to transform what stories are and can be in the digital world, we need to look beyond recording a story from a piece of paper or animating our photos from a field trip into a music video. We could dip into the world of transmedia storytelling and look how audience participation, seamless movement between different media can propel a story forward, engage the audience on multiple layers and change the storytelling process altogether. Examples: Inanimate Alice (Transmedia Storytelling) Inanimate Alice is an interactive multimodal fiction, a born-digital novel relating the experiences of Alice and her imaginary digital friend, Brad. The series is written and directed by Kate Pullinger and developed by digital artists Chris Joseph and Andrew Campbell from an original idea by series producer Ian Harper. Episode 1 was released in late 2005. There have been five consecutive episodes created to date with a sixth in production, from a planned story arc embracing a total of 10 episodes spanning Alice’s life from age 8 through to her mid-twenties. The viewer experiences a combination of text, sound and imagery and interacts with the story at key points. Digital storytelling is NOT just a story told/created/published on a digital platform. What are your experiences and examples in creating new forms of storytelling with digital tools?

© 2010 Ambernectar 13, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio My colleague and co-author Katie Hull Sypnieski and I have completed 80,000 words of the sequel to our last book, the very popular ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide, and only have 20,000 more to go by September 1st! Though it’s been exceedingly painful to write, as all books are, doing it has definitely made both of us better teachers for our students this fall. I think other educators are also going to find it very helpful, and wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes even more popular than our first book. It will be published by Jossey-Bass, and you can look for it next spring….

Substitute the word "students" for "employees" and "teachers" for "bosses" and the Harvard Business Review article titled Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic than Toughness offers a pretty decent guide to positive classroom management. Here’s an excerpt: I’m adding it to The Best Posts On Classroom Management and to The Best Posts About Trust & Education

I have written a lot about the concept of "flow" and try to apply it in my classroom. You can see an excerpt from my book chapter about it, Help Your Students Get Into the Learning Flow, as well as check out The Best Resources For Learning About "Flow." I recently read a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his then eleven-year-old son where, though he doesn’t use the word "flow," he definitely understands its importance. Here’s an excerpt:

Here are new additions to The Best Resources For International Mother Language Day: To Resurrect A Vanishing Language, Try YouTube and Indiegogo is from NPR. This language is based only on whistles is from The Week.

Here’s a great video that Jim Bentley shared on Twitter. It’s from the 1940’s and is titled "Progressive Education" and is from the 1940’s:

The BBC’s "Skillwise" site has a great collection of English games that would be accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners. I’m adding the link to The Best Beginner, Intermediate & Advanced English Language Learner Sites, and am a bit surprised it isn’t already there.

New York experience shows Common Core tests can come at a cost for underprivileged students is the headline of a new Hechinger Report article, and I sure hope a lot of California policy-makers read it. Here’s an excerpt: Pass that exam will soon be required in order to graduate from high school in New York. As state legislators discuss a replacement for the now-defunct California High School Exit Exam (see The Best Posts & Articles About Why High School Exit Exams Might Not Be A Good Idea), which has included mentions of putting test requirements in place that sound suspiciously like New York’s, let’s keep this new data very, very visible…..

StoryCorps, ABS News, NPR and a ton of other groups today announced "The Great Thanksgiving Listen" where they’re inviting high school students to interview a "grandparent or an elder" with the StoryCorps great smartphone app (see Boy Oh Boy, Christmas Has Come Early For Teachers With The New StoryCorps Mobile App!). You can get more information about the project from StoryCorps, including a "toolkit" for teachers.

© 2009 skedonk, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio As regular readers know, in addition to teaching various classes to English Language Learners and to mainstream ninth-graders, I teach the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge course. I also regularly share TOK resources here on the blog, and I think it’s pretty popular among TOK teachers around the world. In addition, I accumulate links to articles and resources on the Delicious bookmarking site, and now have over 2,000 categorized into the all the TOK "Ways of Knowing" and "Areas of Knowledge." You can find most of them here. However, for some weird reason, not quite all of the "tags" are visible at that link. Here are direct links to the WOK and AOK resources not listed in the above link: Logic and Reason (They’re separate, but all related. I think I first started using the logic tag and later switched to reason) Indigenous Knowledge Systems Imagination Intuition (though most are still in the Emotion category) Human Sciences

This is a great short video from Google about Google Translate. The most translated words are: "How are you?" "Thank you." "I love you." It’s also a little scary to know they receive all that data from the app. I’m adding this post to The Best Sites For Learning About Google Translate & Other Forms Of Machine Translation.