Tuesday, April 17, 2012

I'm Impressed

I just watched a short film clip called "Caine's Arcade". This is a testimony to the creativity of our children when they are left to their own devices. I'm going to direct you to "Caine's Arcade" through one of my favorite blogs, CareerTech Testing Center. CareerTech is worth your time to explore but do that after you've spent 11 minutes of your life marveling at Caine's many skills.

http://careertechtesting.blogspot.com/

Caine has the "something" that we try to instill in our students; common sense which leads to productive problem solving.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

"Smackdown"

I just watched a session on EduVision of the 2012 Iowa One-to-One Institute (i11i) called Web 2.0 Smackdown with Dr. Scott McLeod. In this session, participants from the audience had two minutes to share a website that they use either with their students or to make their teaching lives easier. It was so much fun to see all the really great sites, ones that I have never heard of and ones I use, being demonstrated. One demonstrated by Dr. McLeod holds great promise for teachers of ESL students:

www.dotsub.com

This site provides translation of videos with the use of subtitles. You can also add your own videos and translations. This will be great for the ELs who can read in their L1.

If you are not familiar with Eduvision it is worth your time to take a look. It's a fantastic way to share knowledge, opening so many avenues for communication to the masses. Online professional development can be accessed whenever the need arises. Wonderful way to make sure statewide trainings are given with reliability and consistency or to open up conferences for those of us who can only attend an hour here, an hour there. Not to mention, you can session hop without interruption, not that I would ever do such a thing.
 
educateiowa-EduVision

https://educateiowa.eduvision.tv