Collaboration With Google Drive; Part One

The final session I have to report on from the 2014 GAFE summit will be on a session entitled Collaboration with Google Drive,  by Andrea Jones of Franklin Middle School in Fairfax County. This report may take me several postings.

As the title suggests,  this session dealt with practical tips and understandings helpful in using the sharing capacities of Google Drive.  After reviewing my session notes, I am left wishing I had done so before we set up the lesson plan folders.  I’ll try to use what Andrea said, as well as what I learned from my own mistakes efforts, to come up some suggestions which may be helpful to you.  Some of this information was also covered in Melissa’s entry “The Ultimate Workflow.”

The first thing I learned from this session, was rather tangential to the session itself, but, very useful nevertheless. It was in regard to the website Goo.gl  This site is the “Google URL Shortener”.  Have you ever had one of those long web addresses that would just be too complicated to try and give to all your students?  One solution (there are others) is to go to goo.gl and enter the long address, then click on “shorten” and Google will give you a shorter (though case sensitive) address that will be much easier to have your students type in to their browsers.  In addition, if you have a Google account, or establish one with goo.gl, you can have goo.gl do analytic analysis of the page for which you pasted in the address.  That is, it will keep track of how many clicks that page gets, what countries, browsers, and operating systems they came from, as well as what search engines may have referred the user to the site. Similarly, TinyURL.com allows you to shorten a URL giving it a custom name such as TinyURL.com/historyworksheet.

We haven't yet started in on the main subject of this review, however I think I'll quit here and plan to get to it in part two--after Christmas break. Speaking of which, have a very Merry Christmas and a relaxing winter break.

Gearing Up With Google Sites

This session was presented by Matt Faquay an ITRT from Chesterfield County Public Schools.  

Matt’s workshop was aimed at teachers who have Google accounts and might be considering using Google Sites as a vehicle to create webpages for their classes.  Here is the site he used for the presentation.  Perhaps after reading this post, you, like Amanda Mitchell, the librarian at NHS, will consider creating web pages using Google Sites.

Ponder, if you will, the four basic templates Google Sites provides:

• Start Page - intended to be the home page
• File Cabinet - can be used as an index to downloadable documents, presentations and other files you may want your students to access
• Announcements - could be used as a place to post homework assignments
• Lists - useful for group assignments. By default this template has columns for tasks to be done, open issues, and current status - but these can be added to or modified.

When editing a Google Site teachers can take documents, presentations, etc., created in Google Drive and embed or insert them right into a the web page. Images are easy to add by uploading a picture, or by linking to an image on another page.  Additionally, Google offers plenty of "gadgets" (widgets) which can be added - weather, calendars, clocks, news, games and more.  With a little customization a Google presentation can become an rolling slide show on your webpage.  

Here is a suggestion to consider; a start page can be set up that only the teacher can edit.  There can be a navigation bar on the start page from which viewers can go to individual pages edited by students.  As with shared documents in Google Drive, pages can be set up with different levels of access.  Deleting a page, for example,  would be something only the page owner could do, a collaborator could change it, and a viewer can only look at it.  Pages do not necessarily need to be viewable by the general public..  

Templates and Themes are available to help in making the pages look professional.  A couple of interesting scripts were mentioned in the workshop.  One, PageMeister, creates pages for every student in your room  A second, Google Analytics, keeps track of everyone who visits your site, where they visited from, how long they spent on your page, and your bounce rate (did they leave your site or click around within it).

Here is a site, at Google Sites, on how to use Google Sites.  From one of the subpages on the link I just gave you, here are examples of how others have used Google Sites:

Teacher examples:

• The Tech Download by Selena Ward
• Mrs. Mary Fran Lynch, Alta Vista, Room 12
• Ms. Schroeder's Classroom
• World History @ West Hills
• 2009 Washington DC Trip
• Boby Systems Survivor
• Christine's Circuit Board

Student examples:

• Report on a state
• Senior service project
• Soundtrack of Jean Valjean's Life
• ePortfolios using Google Apps
• Student electronic portfolio

School examples:

• Google-ize your staff development
• Tech Tip Tuesday
• Van Meter Library VOICE Site

Design examples:

• Pimp My Site: Customizing Google Sites, by Jonathan Wylie
• Google Sites: More Than You Think, by Chad Griffiths

After a bit of digging, I just discovered how to add the icon for “Sites” to my icon drop down list.  This is the first time I remember knowing that you could customize this window.  You can just drag around the icons that are there and put them where you want them--or you can add other icons from the “even more” section, if you wish.

Improving Student Writing with Google Drive

This session from the VA GAFE Summit was presented by Melissa Powell, a 6th grade reading teacher and Katie Plunkett, an ITRT - both from Charlottesville City Schools (CCS). CCS began using Google in October of 2013, so this was still fairly new to the presenters. Students were given basic training, such as how to log in, creating documents and sharing (view, comment, edit rights). After a short period of time it was obvious the students needed more training, such as formatting and how to organize their Drive.
Melissa wanted to move student writing to Google Drive for a number of reasons - get rid of the stacks of paper journals, ease of drafting and rewriting, convenience of commenting; and most of all, to give students a wider audience for their work.
Students were taught  how to give quality feedback and to comment properly. This process was modeled using a fake document. The teachers used a simple technique called TAG:

• Tell something you liked
• Ask a question
• Give a compliment

As both teachers and students became comfortable with the process the projects grew in length and rigor. Some of the projects included:

• Spooky story starters - a way for students to begin collaborative writing (example - notice teacher comments for the students on the right side).
• Personal narratives (example)
• Using Google Draw to create simple layouts to demonstrate text features of non-fiction (example)
• Poetry writing

Looking back over the transition to use of Google Drive the teachers had the following reflections:

• Start at the beginning of the year
• Student writing increased because the students liked using Google Drive
• Composition and expression improved
• Mechanics are improving more slowly
• Drive allows for more efficient, quality feedback and comments
• The need for more structure in the form of checklists and notes sheets (hard copies)
• No carrying notebooks and papers home to grade
• The need for more front end organization - organizing teachers' Drives to handle all the student work being shared - set up folders, color code, mini-lessons to show the students computer skills needed.
• Use Google Sites to create student portfolios

Inbox Zero

This is a review of “Find Extra Hours in Your Week: Calendar and Gmail Tricks to Save You Time” by Jennie Magiera.  

Due to the nature of the conference, Jennie’s information was all directed at users of Google Calendars and Gmail.  My remarks today will be confined to her suggestions related to Gmail.  Next year, as you know, ACPS teachers will be migrating to Gmail.  

Jennie urged us to keep the number of emails in our inboxes to zero.  All of the tips below are not only suggested as a way of saving time, but as a way of keeping a tidy inbox.

For example, Jennie suggested the use of keyboard shortcuts.  I did not know, for example, that by entering the letter “c” the box pops up where you can compose a new Email. Although I did go to “settings” and turn them on, I have not started using any of these shortcuts yet, I was just reminded of them when I begin reviewing the material for this post. There are around seventy of these shortcuts, so I’m sure I’ll never learn them all. I've just installed a chrome app known as KeyRocket which is designed to teach keyboard shortcuts. When you do a particular action, a small box pops up and tells you what shortcut you might have used. Having done that, perhaps I’ll start learning some of these shortcuts. I don’t believe I’ll ever achieve the 200-300 finger actions per minute required to become an expert gamer, however, over time, keyboard shortcuts may indeed save me some time.

Here are some other Gmail tips Jennie offered:

• Have mail from all of your email addresses forwarded to your personal Gmail account (you can still send outgoing emails using the return address and signature line from your other accounts)
• Use filters to search through your emails--even archived mail
• Use “labels” (tags) for sorting purposes--you can give an email multiple labels and get it out of your inbox at the same time
• Use filters to send automatic, canned responses to selected emails
• Use templates to speed in responding to emails
• Color code emails
• “Unsend” an email (if you act quickly enough)
• Use the Boomerang App to have unopened emails sent back to you
• Use Boomerang to have selected emails returned to you after a set time period
• Schedule the sending of outgoing mail
• Use a “vacation responder” to send canned responses while you are getting away from it all
• Transfer emails to a “todo” list which integrates with Google Calendars

I don’t know about you, but I appreciate all of these time-saving tips as well as the encouragement to keep the size of my inbox down--things which don’t come naturally to me.  I hope I have wetted your appetite for one of the first changes you will notice next year--Gmail

The Art Project

Jim Sill, a former television and movie producer, presented a session on the Google Art Project.  If you have some time after the SOLs and before the end of the year, you may with to create a lesson based on the Google Art Project which is part of a larger effort by Google known as the Google Cultural Institute.

You have probably heard that Google is digitizing books which are out of copyright, and putting them on the internet.  You are also familiar with Google Earth.  Okay, so the Google Art Project kind of combines these ideas for works of art.  The Google Art project, as of this writing, works with 345 museums throughout the world and contains 63,684 works by 8,574 artist, which various users (such as us) have arranged into 26,518 galleries.  At some of these museums the user can go to a ground level view (as with Google Earth) and use the mouse to walk around the museum.  Some of the works of art are featured in extremely high resolution--like ten billion little pixels.  

I especially like the different filters you can use when searching through this volume of material.  A user can search by artists, by collection, by medium (oil, pen and ink, bronze, etc.) by the event that inspired the artwork, by the date it was created, by media type (video, photo, etc.), or by place.  In addition, a user can search the galleries created by other users--for example one might search using “math” as a filter.  In this case the result may be a collection of pictures accompanied by questions on the prominent angles in the picture.  The person who compiled the gallery may also have embedded links, or perhaps even a video on various artworks in the gallery.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the technical aspects of how to use the art project.  Rather, let me just state that as far as “how to use” it, you could certainly use it in teaching art, or math (see above), or history--(search by material and date and the students will immediately be able to see when the bronze age was), or literature (analyze the relationship between the artwork of a period on the literature produced in that period), or science (I find a photo of a solar eclipse taken in 1889--the user included an embedded map showing the exact location where the photo was taken.)  I even found a gallery named “Bias Awareness and Bullying Prevention.”  

I’ve tried to keep this post short and interesting, so that you have the curiosity and time to go to the Google Art Project and check it out for yourself.  Click on Mr. Sill, if you wish to check out all of the resources he made available in relation to this session.  Finally, if you visit the Google Cultural Institute, you might also want to check out the World Monuments and Historic Moments which are there along with the Art Project.

The Ultimate Workflow

As most readers have gathered by now, Larry and I went to the Virginia Google Apps for Education Summit in Charlotttesville, VA in early March. Larry has been posting about some of the things he picked up and now it is my turn.
The first session I attended was The Ultimate Workflow presented by Ken Shelton, a Google Certified teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator from Los Angeles. The topic was using Google Docs to maximize productivity and he was full of tips and tricks. When we migrate to use of GAFE in the 2014-15 school year, these will come in handy! Remember, workflow = productivity.

• Color code your folders within your Drive to visually identify the content of the folder. Documents are automatically created in whatever folder you have open.
• Name your documents immediately!! (There is no "File - Save" option in Google as documents are automaticaly saved every 3-7 seconds depending on your network integrity.)
• When using Drive with your students have a naming convention and use it. "Section First Last Project" (or something similar) - such as "2 John Doe Recycling Project". The individual pieces of the name are searchable within your drive.
• Right click on any word in a document and select define for definition or research to automatically search Google for information The research pane allows you to preview the web page, insert a link and also cite the page without leaving the document. Can use arrow at top of research pane to change the style of citation between MLA, APA and Chicago. Can also use that arrow to change the license filter. Can toggle between definition and research pane. If you highlight footnote number along with anything you want to move it will automatically renumber footnotes. Under the research pane you can change the source of searching from everything (web), images, scholar, quotes, dictionary, personal, tables.
• Use of the comment feature in Docs allows for timely, meaningful feedback. They are dated and time stamped. Comments will automatically disappear when marked by a user as resolved - you can elect to receive an email when this occurs so you know when your students have resolved an issue.
• Notifications - set at “all” so you have a record of everything that went on in the document.
• Share documents from folders so anything in the folder defaults to the parent permission of the folder. You must manually change a document in the folder you do not want shared (or put it in a different folder.
• You can use Revision History to see who is doing the work in a collaborative document. The revision history shows who did what, such as deleting crucial parts of document. Once in revision history pane you can see detailed revisions.
• In your Drive, going back to “Recent” and “List view” shows the items that have been modified most recently - can see if a student is not working and should be.  Naming protocols are very useful here.
• When sharing documents keep in mind the various permission levels. "Can view" allows users to view the document but make no changes or comments. "Can comment" allows users to comment on the document. This is useful for peer review as well as teacher grading. "Can edit" gives users complete rights to make changes to the document, as well as comment. Students need to be very familiar with these levels.

Building a Google Earth Tour the Easier Way

In my last post I introduced Google Earth Tours and stated that in a future posting I would give you information on how to build a Google Earth Tour the "Easy Way"--as explained by Tim Stahmer.  I'm going to change that a bit.  I used "Maps Engine Lite" and a spread sheet to create a KML file, as Mr. Stahmer suggested and found that it was indeed pretty easy.  However, I then tried "Tour Builder with Google"  and found it to be easier yet.

Although it is the "beta" version and is labelled an "experiment," I found that Tour Builder worked very smoothly, was self explanatory and intuitive to the point where I really find it unnecessary to explain it in any great detail here.  I'll just give you a brief overview and link to a sample I made which pertains to the Geography SOL on the monuments of Latin America .

To build your own tour simply follow this link and sign in with your Google account.  Of course, if you don't have a Google account you'll have to create one (remember that next year you will have a Google account through ACPS).  After logging in, you might want to click on either "View a Tour" to see a sample--or perhaps you'd rather click on "gallery" and choose a sample to view from a list of Tours.

Eventually, you'll want to click on "create a tour" and start building your own.  After naming your tour and naming yourself as the author you are then sent to an introduction page.  There you'll want to describe what your tour will be about, perhaps you'll want to add a photo to this cover page.  These tasks are so easily accomplished that there is no need for me to describe them.

The next step is to add the locations you want on your tour.  You simply click  on "add location" and begin to type in a name...with all of the locations on my sample tour,  it automatically completed the location before I finished it.  I tried my location--"Modest Town, Virginia" and it handled that just fine.  In a window on the right I flew there in just seconds and viewed clear satellite images of all my neighbors' houses.  You can adjust this view using controls which appear when you run your mouse over the image.  When you get things adjusted to a view you like, you can lock that view in so that it is what the student sees as they take the tour--although they will be able to pause the tour and experiment with the controls.  For example, by moving the little statue type figure on to the image, they can see what the "ground level" view looks like for that location.  By going under "advanced options" and clicking on "show historical imagery" one can even add a slide bar allowing the viewer to see satellite images from earlier years (the earliest I found was 1931).  This could be really useful in a lot of ways.  For example for a science teacher who wants to teach about the changing shoreline.

It is easy to add up to 25 copyright free images (per location) from Wikipedia or other sources.  It is easy to add links to articles about the location.  It is easy to add videos --however, it is not so easy to add a video that actually works with our filters.

After you click on "done editing" a "share" button appears which gives you a web address which you pass on to those to whom you wish to grant access to your tour.  The address is long and complicated--so it would be best to either shorten it, or post a link to a site students can just click on (I'd be happy to work with you on that). A simple URL shortener is http://goo.gl/ - simply paste the long URL into the box on this site, click "Shorten URL" and a shortened URL is automatically created.  Portaportal is one good site for sharing bookmarks.

In summary, Google Tour Builder is user friendly and an extremely useful tool.  I would think a geography teacher would want to make tours taking the students to the sol listed monuments on each region of the world.  I;m not sure I can come up with any immediate applications for math teachers, but I can think of them for almost every other subject area.  I can also see engaging students by having them build their own tours.

Google Earth Tours

This post, like my other recent posts, is based on a session from the Virginia Google Apps for Education Summit held the weekend of March 8-9, 2014.  This particular post is a commentary on a session by Tim Stahmer, from Fairfax County Public Schools.  The title of his session was Building Google Earth Tours the Easy Way. But, before we can get to that information, you have to be familiar with Google Tours. A Google Earth Tour is a presentation which plays in Google Earth. That is, the viewer "flies" around from one spot to another--either self guided, or by allowing it to play by itself. The tour can be paused at any time so the viewer can click on a particular location and view the information in the pop-up box about that location. Information may include a brief description, images, videos, links, etc. The viewer can also zoom in, switch to "street level view" change the angle--you know, all the cool stuff Google Earth is so good at.

I'd suggest that when you finish reading this post you go to Google Lit Trips, find a work of literature you are familiar with, and take a tour.

At the elementary level I clicked on the title Make Way for Ducklings. A webpage appeared in which there was hypertext in the upper right which said “View in Your Browser” - I clicked on it and viewed it in Google Chrome.  When I wanted a tour for A Walk Down Cannery Row I first had to fill out a survey. Then, I was taken to this site, and, from a link in the upper right side of the page, I downloaded a kmz file which, when clicked, opened in Google Earth. If you don't have Google Earth on your computer, you'll need to download it first.  Once it opened, I hovered my mouse over a folder--and a label popped up which said “play”  When I clicked on it, the tour began.  

I’m writing this in the CHS Media Center, and as Mrs. Merritt clicked on Chasing Lincoln’s Killer in Internet Explorer a window popped up allowing her to save or open the file, so the behavior might vary depending on your browser, but you ought to be able to figure it out.

I haven’t been able to find anywhere where Google has a sortable archive of tours--if you are aware of one, please send Larry the link.  However, I wanted to see if I could find a tour based on medieval Europe.  So, I just did an advanced search on medieval Europe and came up with a tour of locations relevant to the crusades.   To do an advanced search for tours at google.com click on "settings" (or the "tools" icon) chose "advanced search", then choose "file type KMZ")

Here are a few sites that have links to various Google Earth Tours:

• Sample Google Earth Tours
• America: A Narrative History

These two sites provide information on using Google Earth, such as lessons and how to use the controls. Both also have a variety of tours:

1. Google Earth for Educators
2. Google Earth Lessons

Next week we'll continue this discussion with information on how to build your own Google Earth Tour.

Re-Charging Classroom Instruction with YouTube Edu and Google Apps

This session was presented by Kim Randall who makes her living doing these types of workshops around the world.  However, while sitting through the session, I thought she was a classroom teacher, because all that she suggested seemed very practical, do-able, and valuable.  Here I'll recap of some of the strategies she suggested and I'll provide you the list of resource links she accompanied them with.  Although you won't be able to use these strategies quite the way she anticipates (because our students won't have Google accounts until next year) with some modifications they could be used this year.

Strategy One- Vocabulary Development - this strategy could be used when teaching or introducing a wide variety of material.  Kim turned the session into a classroom and the session participants into engaged learners.  She first showed us a video on the City of London, a city of 11,000 people which is surrounded by London, a city of 7,000,000 people.  She paused the four minute video repeatedly to allow us to write down seven to ten key words or phrases.  Then she had us put ourselves into groups in which we agreed on a group list of 7-10 key words or phrases, which a group recorder typed these into a Google form.  From the form the terms went into a Google drive spread sheet from which she copied and pasted into Wordle to create a word cloud.

Strategies Two and Three - Using Google Draw Graphic Organizers - If you have a Google account, perhaps you are familiar with Google Drive.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Google Drive, let me give you a brief introduction, as NEXT YEAR you will have an ACPS Google account.  Google Drive is similar to DropBox in that it provides cloud (online) storage.  Additionally, there is an online word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet, etc.  Each of these applications can be used collaboratively--two or more people can edit the document simultaneously.

Among these applications is "Google Draw"--which I had previously disregarded as not all that relevant to the high school classroom.  Well, I was wrong.  Kim Randall had us take what we had learned and collaboratively enter it into a couple of different graphic organizers.  I believe she made these herself, but there are a number of templates available for Venn diagrams and that sort of thing.
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Strategie Four - Three Facts and a Fib. Another activity session participants engaged in was to read through four statements and try to identify the fib.  These predictions were entered into a Google form so that the "class" could immediately see how many class members chose each of the four statements.  We then watched a YouTube EDU video on sea turtles to find out if we were correct.  This seems to be a very useful way of getting students to pay close attention to educational videos.  Of course there are many variations of this activity--for example having students watch a video and then create their own list of three facts and a fib.

Strategy Five - Half  the Story.  With this one, the teacher takes an image and simply crops out half of it. The students then speculate on what the missing part of the image shows.

Strategy Six - Caption It - Show the students an image and have them create a caption for it, thus encouraging them to study and analyze the image.  As a former social studies teacher I can see a lot of applications for this,.

Here is the list of resources Ms. Randall provided for use with these strategies--or some strategy of your own.

• www.youtube.com/education
• www.youtube.com/teachers
• www.youtube.com/schools
• http://www.google.com/edu/
• www.google.com/drive
• www.wordle.net
• www.google.com/images
• www.flickr.com      
• www.pics4learning.com

Motivational Keynote

On the weekend of March 8th and 9th, 2014, Melissa and I attended the Google Apps for Education Summit in Charlottesville, VA.  Saturday's Keynote Address was by Rushton Hurley founder of Next Vista for Learning.  This was intended as an inspirational talk designed to get teachers to try something new.  Here I'm going to repeat an illustration he gave, restate the suggestions he made, and then list a few resources which were given by him or others in the room who were having a "back channel discussion" using TodaysMeet.

Mr. Hurley used circus elephants as an illustration.  When the elephant is young, his leg is chained to a stake.  At first this may be a traumatic experience for the baby elephant as it tries to escape but learns that this effort is useless.  In a few days the elephant learns that if he doesn't struggle, it doesn't hurt.  In a short while the elephant's attempt to escape cease.  Eventually the elephant grows to the point where pulling up the stake or braking the chain would be a simple matter--however, he long ago stopped trying.  Therefore, the chain which is really binding him is in his mind.

This illustration poses the question; "What are your chains?" In other words, what "chains" are in place that prevent you from changing your classroom mechanics.

Mr. Hurley went on to offer seven general suggestions for spicing up ones teaching.  Here they are:

1. Break your chains by shooting for the moon.
2. Use visuals
3. Use what others have done (citing the sources)
4. Collaborate
5. Give your students choices
6. Get feedback so that you can improve
7. Learn something new.

Now to be a bit more concrete and give you something you might be able to immediately use....

The suggestion was made that instead of having all your students take notes  (during a lecture) why not have a "primary" and "secondary" note-taker and let the other students listen intently (the way students do).  The role of the secondary note-taker is to edit the notes taken by the primary note-taker--making sure nothing of importance was left out.  At the end of class display the notes and ask if anything major is missing, then simply share these notes with the whole class.  If you are using Google Drive, that would be the easiest way to accomplish this.  However, at this point, with only a few ACPS teachers using Google Drive, DropBox and DropItTo.me might also be used as well as a host of other sites which any of the ITRTs would be happy to introduce you to. Next year, with ACPS "going Google" using Google Drive/Docs will be possible.

A specific way of implementing suggestion five above, would be to let students make their own assignment.  While in the classroom, for roughly every third assignment Mr. Hurley gave, he would give students the option of making up their own assignments provided they covered the right material and involved as much work as the "default assignment" (the assignment the students would do if they didn't want to create their own.)

In reference to numbers two and three above, he stated his conviction that the students would work harder and produce much higher quality work if they knew they were creating something that would be "published."  If the student knows the teacher is going to look at his/her work s/he makes it "good enough", but if the student knows classmates or a wider audience will see the work s/he makes it "great".  Additionally, when a student makes a video they know they have something to contribute.  Rushton's site, Next Vista for Learning (NextVista) routinely offers student video contests.  This site now hosts a library of over 1200 videos by and for students and teachers.  You'll find NextVista's search box for locating useful videos, or for submitting your own videos, here. NextVista also provides links to many other useful resources here.  

Be sure and leave a comment below if this post brings to mind anything useful you might like to share with others.  Now that you've been motivated and inspired, if you'd like help trying something new please contact your friendly, local ITRT.

Eduwidgets

Eduwidgets is a new site from the VDOE for teachers and students.  In fact it is still in Beta version and in my estimation a lot of work remains to be done on it.  Furthermore, there are many aspects of it which I haven’t yet had time to explore.  Nevertheless, I think I’ll go ahead and review it now, based on what I know, and perhaps write a second post after I've explored it further and they've improved it more.
The general objective of the site is to give teachers and students the ability to create online, interactive content tied to Virginia’s SOLs.  These “widgets” then can be made available to other teachers throughout the state. Likewise, an Accomack teacher can search through and use content created by others. 
This content can be displayed in one of three interactive formats: timelines, graphs, and images.
Here is an example of a timeline I created.  Notice that you can click at the bottom to take a quiz on what you might have learned from the timeline.  I found this timeline fairly easy to create.  However, Eduwidgets does not work equally well in all browsers (you want to stay away from Internet Explorer).  If you follow the link, you’ll go to a timeline which has not yet been “published”, so it doesn't show up in searches, etc.  I have a similar one I submitted for publication perhaps a week ago--and haven’t heard anything back on it--so that seems like a potential problem as well.
You might want to view and perhaps use some of the content which they have available as “exemplars” to get an idea of how the graphs and “interactive images” work.  I also created an Interactive Image, but, I’m not going to put the link to it in, because I think I sort of overloaded the system--wanted it to do more than it could really do smoothly.  The basic idea here is to have the student drag and image or text to the correct location.
Another problem I found with the site is that the instructional videos are blocked by our filtering system.  Given that they are hosted by Vimeo, I would think they will be blocked by the vast majority of districts throughout the state.   I can’t understand why the VDOE didn't foresee this difficulty.
The vision seems to be for teachers to set up and manage student accounts and for students to do research and create content themselves.  The creations can be interactive timelines, graphs, or interactive images--some of them remind me of some of the Gizmos with which the science and math teachers are familiar.  You can sort through Widgets which are examples from the VDOE, or others which have been authored and shared by teachers and students from around the state.  You can search through these by subject, by grade level, or/and by SOL. 
You can sort through and use widgets created by others without an account.  If you register for an account you can make your own--and have your students make their own.  Registration can’t be left to the last minute, however, as you have to confirm your Email address and then wait to be approved.
To summarize, Eduwidgets is a site I’d use if I were still teaching history.  I’d come up with an assignment where they’d have to do some research and present their findings in the form of a widget.  However,  I look forward to the day when all the bugs are worked out and the site is a bit more user friendly.

Google Image Filter

So where does one get ideas for blog posts?  How about from reading other ed/tech blogs?  The following information (even the graphics) are shamelessly lifted from Richard Byrne's blog "Free Technology for Teachers"

From his blog I learned that the tool bar in Google image search has recently been improved.  The particular change which I'm referring to makes it much easier to filter your search by usage rights.  I tried this in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome and it worked the same in each of them. First go to Google.com, and do an image search.  This brings up a bunch of images as well as a toolbar across the top of the page.  Next you pull  down the options under "Search Tools" and select the "Usage Rights" filter.  From there you get choices like: "labelled for reuse", "labelled for commercial reuse", etc.  The only option you would want to stay away from would be the "not filtered by license"--by avoiding that choice you know that you won't be using an image which someone would like to restrict you from using.

The graphics below show the two steps I just described.





When using Chrome you have another useful tool - but it does not work in other browsers. You can search for a "visually similar image" by dragging a picture into the image search bar.  Google will upload your picture and then search for similar images. If that exact image appears on web pages you will get a list of those pages. You will also see images that are similar in nature to the one you uploaded. Keep in mind this is not a perfect tool, but at times it can be useful.

Skype in the Classroom

Recently I had the opportunity to  facilitate a Skype session between Mrs. McAvene’s Spanish Three class and a class of English language learners in Barcelona, Spain.  Although Skype has been utilized by a number of ACPS teachers, this was my first opportunity to use this program in a classroom environment.  This session came about as a result of a digital story telling exchange her class is doing with Ana Guuisande’s  English class in which ACPS students, and their Spanish counterparts are creating videos depicting life in their respective areas.

              While working on this project  we learned that, although there is a six hour difference between us, there is a window of time in which we are both in school and in our respective language classes.  Once we had figured that out, it didn’t take long for someone to come up with the idea of a Skype exchange.  I tested Skype out from a student laptop computer one day while at NHS and found that it indeed worked.  

              So, one Friday morning, as the students were getting settled at the beginning of the school day,  I used an iPad and opened a Skype session with the class in Spain.  We had to reopen it about three times and then stay in the corner of the room where the connection consistently worked.  The students  approached the iPad about three at a time.  We had an interesting time to say the least.  The Spanish students suggested that they try to ask questions in English, and that our students should respond in Spanish.  We quickly agreed to this, and just as quickly seemed to abandon it in practice.  We did note that the students in Spain seemed to be no better with English than our students were with Spanish.  For example, when the class was about to end over in Spain, the students told us they were about at the end of their “journey.” 

              Ana’s students wanted to know if our students were familiar with any Spanish singers, if any of our students were licensed to drive yet, what sports we played, etc.  We also learned that the things the textbook suggest don’t necessarily work:  when they asked about  football, we tried to get clarification by following one of these suggestions—“Do you mean football Americano?”  That question seemed to baffle the Spanish students, but, we eventually straightened it all out.

              Everyone involved seemed to really enjoy this experience and we will probably be trying it again.  One of the lessons I learned from this experience is to use one of the student laptops with a camera, rather than an iPad  (so that by doing so we would then be able to project the image and use speakers so that the whole class could see and hear better.)  I’d also recommend that students prepare questions in advance and rehearse asking them in the language they are learning. 
              As part of this same project, I also worked with Mrs.Brittingham's French class and they also had a Skype session, except theirs was with French learning students living in Spain.  Here is what Mrs. Brittingham had to say following the session: "This project has been a cultural eyeopener for my kids and me as well.  I think it's more about our similarities than our differences.  My group is a multicultural group and we were all involved in the skype portion of the project with communication taking place in English, Spanish, and French...  If I do (this project again), I will be more specific in my guidelines to the students ... in the organization of the Skype project."

              At Nandua's fall athletic banquet they annually induct new members in to their athletic Hall of Fame.  This year one of the athletes who was being honored in this way accepted the award, via Skype, from California.  Mr. Reese, Nandua's athletic director pulled this off on his own.  However, if any of you would like to try a Skype session in one of your classes, and don’t feel confident enough to try it on your own, let your friendly, local ITRT know and we’ll try to be there to help make it happen.