Leveraging the power of technology to transform teaching and learning
ThingLink is working hard to pack teacher accounts full of useful features for building and managing the ThingLink Classroom. I am excited to be guest blogging here in February and March to demonstrate great ways to use the new features. Let’s start from the beginning by taking a look at how teachers can create a ThingLink Classroom and add students.
>Read more on the ThingLink Blog
Google Docs is truly one of my favorite tools for teaching and learning because of the features it offers to support research, writing and collaboration in the 24/7 classroom. Here are some things to try with Google Docs as you make plans to use a little more tech and embrace change this school year.
“Today’s young people are using a range of digital tools to compose and create in new and exciting ways. It is a game-changing moment for teachers of writing. The very notion of what it means to write is shifting, and educators are faced with adapting their teaching practices to integrate new technologies while redefining writing and learning for the 21st century.”
Google Docs provide teachers with a great starting point for helping students develop 21st century writing skills because they are collaborative, available 24/7, and stored in the cloud. The tool is well-suited for facilitating digital writing workshops that combine peer editing with cooperative grouping and small group fine-tuned writing instruction. Here are some of the powerful writing features:
Sharing and Commenting
Sharing and commenting options provide students with opportunities to receive immediate feedback on their writing from teachers and peers in the 24/7 classroom. Student can write, edit, revise, collaborate and share one copy of a live document, providing them with the resources and opportunities to significantly improve their writing. Students can collaborate in real time, creating opportunities for virtual mini-conferences. Of course, students are more likely to revisit their work if they know someone else will be commenting on it and they are more likely to edit their writing if they have the opportunity to publish it for an audience.
Integrated Writing & Reference Tools
Revision History
Google Presentation is a great tool for helping students construct knowledge about a topic as they create. Here is an interactive tutorial designed to demonstrate how to use some of the handy built in features.
. 
If you are interested in learning more about the features in Google Docs Presentation, you might want to check out my recent post on GettingSmart.com.
Google Presentation for Collaborative Learning
//cdn.thinglink.me/jse/embed.js
I am excited to share a ThingLink Teacher Toolkit of Resources.
The toolkit is designed to provide teachers and students with all the resources needed to use ThingLink as an efficient and effective tool for teaching and learning.
I used ThingLink to create an interactive graphic for Thanksgiving.
Feel free to use it, embed it into your own site, and use the comments section of the blog to send me links you feel would be great additions to the graphic.
Nominations for 2012 Edublog Awards are open.
The purpose of the Edublog Awards is to
“promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media.”
The nomination process supports the goal of the contest because it requires nominations via a blog post with a follow up link to that post submitted to Edublogs. What a great way to share, discover and credit the folks whose work inspires us and contributes to our own success!
Individual Blog – The Innovative Educator
In addition to the obvious ways to use the new integrated research tool, it can also be useful for checking for plagiarism. Just copy and paste a few sentences of text from a document directly into the search box of the research pane and the search will lead directly back to any article from which text has been plagiarized. I like to teach students how to do their own plagiarism check before turning in their work to help them understand the importance of creating original work.
If you’re looking for innovative ways to use free and user friendly digital tools to help students acquire vocabulary, please check out my session, Digital Tools for Differentiating Vocabulary Instruction at the K12OnlineConference. While you’re there you are sure to discover more terrific 20 minute sessions, available for viewing at your convenience.
——-
TeachEm is a free and user friendly digital tool that allows users to capture YouTube content, organize it, and add time stamped flashcards to guide the learning. It’s simple, smart and efficient which makes it a good tool for busy teachers interested in implementing a Flipped Classroom instructional model.
Teachers can sign up for a free account with an email address and create a school. The school is not meant to be the school that employs you, it is supposed to be “The School of You”. Once you’ve created your school, you can create classes of organized YouTube videos fairly easily.
To create a class just copy and paste links from your own collection of pre-selected YouTube videos or use the built in search feature to find and preview videos without leaving the TeachEm site. Add timestamped flashcards to associate text with specific parts of a video. Create public classes to share with the world, or create private classes that can even include videos that are not publicly available on YouTube. The TeachEm site hosts a very nice set of TeachEm FAQs, created with their own tool, to help users learn to use it.
When students participate in a TeachEm class they simply click on a flashcard and the timestamped video will jump to the associated spot. They can flip the flashcards for more information or to get the answers to questions. As they watch the videos and respond to the prompts on the flashcards, they can also type their own SmartNotes.
The set of Flashcards and SmartNotes can be emailed as live links which open to specific parts of the videos when clicked. Although I didn’t find any features for embedding a class, you could copy and paste the set of live links into your own online learning platform or website for quick and easy student access.
Uses in the Classroom:
Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners 