Layering in ActivInspire

Layering ... Press Play

Getting Started With Wixie Projects

Modifying An Activity



Assigning An Activity

Lino: Sticky and Photo Sharing for You

Take a note right away wherever you are Access lino from your home, office, or even on the road and post a sticky note online whenever you need!

Reminders on your special days or deadlines Set due dates on your stickes, and you will receive an Email reminder on the morning of the due date.

Free layout of your pictures and videos You can arrange your pictures and videos as you like and share them with your friends.

Share your ideas with your group members By creating a group, lino becomes an ideal tool to share your ideas with your friends and colleagues. Share your ideas with your group members By creating a group, lino becomes an ideal tool to share your ideas with your friends and colleagues.

Use stickes to share files among friends and colleagus Attach your files to stickies, and share them with your friends and colleagues at home and office

Use from smartphones Take notes, post pictures and videos. Zoom in and out at will by pinch gesture.

What is Wixie?

Click Here to Watch the Video

Turn Out the Lights

The entire page will be fading to dark, so you can watch the video as if you were in the cinema.

With one click on the lamp button, the page will be fading to dark. And automatic focus to the video. Click again, the page will return back as normal.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bfbmjmiodbnnpllbbbfblcplfjjepjdn

Voki

Most of you have probably heard of Voki, but I thought I would throw up a post to try to stir up some interest in it.  This is a great alternative presentation and assessment tool.  Students can choose a character and record their voice or type the information in a text field for the character to communicate to the viewer.


http://voki.com/

Made a Wixie Launcher

I made a Wixie launcher.  I will attach it this post.  Feel free to download and use.

Download Here

Organizing Your Google Drive

The following is a screencast from Anson Alexander.  He can show you how to organize your google docs.  One thing that I have noticed happens in our district is shared documents disappear when people drag them into their collections.  Here is a good general rule of thumb, if you need to have a personal copy of a document that has been shared with you, make a copy of it and drag the COPY into your collections.  We have had some issue with shared documents disappearing at workshops because folks drag documents shared with them into their personal collections.  When they do this, the file has disappeared in the past.  Not sure if this is resolved or resolvable, but best not do it just to be safe.

Google Sites for Beginners

Let me start off by saying that this screencast is a bit of a rager, but it is solid.  The screencast will take you through step by step show you how to create a basic google site.  Remember I am only an email away ... rhanrahan@kcsd96.org ... If you have a question or something is not clear, I am happy to screencast your issue for you personally.

Planetarium

Extending a learning target for 3rd grade.  This sky map can be uses as a good inquiry based resource for students to explore stars and our solar system.


Explore the stars and planets!
Planetarium shows you over 1,500 stars - that's every star up to magnitude "+5". These stars are the brightest in the night sky, the ones you can see with your own naked eye on a good dark night away from city lights.
HOW TO USE:
Click and move your mouse to look around the sky. Click again to stop. Point at a star or planet to reveal its name, its constellation, its brightness (magnitude) and how far away it is in light years (LY) or astronomical units (AU). Also listed is the star or planet's Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec) values - handy if you have a telescope!

http://bit.ly/Mobsl2

Sticky Notes in Chrome Browser

This solution will crash proof your sticky notes.  Mac's have stickies, but what if the hard drive fails?  Where are all your sticky note?  Put them on the cloud!

Tired of Post-It notes all over your desk? Have you got stickies cluttering your monitor? Clean it up by keeping them in your browser!

Sticky Notes is a Chrome app that locally stores all your notes in a single tab. It auto saves on every letter, so you don't have to worry about losing something because your computer crashed and you didn't click
Save - it's already done for you!

You can change the color of your notes, change the text color, font, and size, and edit the title, in addition to the notes themselves. You can also change the display: select free-floating or sortable grid view.

Creating a Google Chrome "App"

This might be the craziest way to create a hyperlink you have ever seen, but here it is... fair warning this is for the nerds... big time!

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Using Wixie

I highly recommend watching this 4 minute video from Tech4Learning.  Our students are definitely capable of doing this.  We can easily address learning targets using this 21st Century tool.  Let's do it Country Meadows.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences

3rd Grade Planet Keynote Sample

This is a celebration of third grade's keynotes. 3rd grade teachers and students conducted planetary research projects. They utilized keynote as their presentation piece. 3rd grade students worked in pairs saving their work to the server. Mr. Southwell's and Ms. Stanton's class even utilized Keynote on the iPads. Keynotes from the iPads were sunk with iCloud and bought down to MacBooks for voice input. Nice work everybody.

Google Docs integrate with Edmodo

This one comes compliments of our Technology Manager Mike Swanson!  Listen up Edmodo users.  This is actually a fantastic solution to a problem that one of the 5th grade teachers at Country Meadows was experiencing.  She was pushing out reading responses to her students on Edmodo and they were not finishing in the Edmodo response space in the allotted time.  There were sometimes not hitting submit.  There was not a clear way for her to get an complete response unless the student wrote uninterrupted all in one sitting.  Our solution at the time was to create a running google doc for all her students.  Although that will still work, this is a fantastic addition to that classroom management piece.  You will know when your student has completed their response because you can teach them to link and turn in the google doc on Edmodo.  The students compose a google doc with the assignment as the prompt and simply copy the link into Edmodo assignment window.  Below is a video of EXACTLY how a student can complete this.

With our students becoming more and more familiar with google docs this additional step will make your life a bit easier.  Thanks Mike.

Preview Pane Gmail

Google announced a Labs effort to enable an email preview pane on Thursday, adding a capability that has been in Microsoft Outlook and other Webmail programs for some time.

Users can go into the Gmail Labs tab under Gmail and enable the option.  Below is a screencast on how to enable preview pane. 

Importing Pixie templates to Wixie

I was just tinkering with Wixie and figured out that you can import a Pixie project into Wixie.  How to do it is in the following screencast.  Your resource library just grew larger!

Show Me Interactive Whiteboard

This app is fantastic.  If you want to see if a student understands a concept, use this app.

This app will essentially record voice and the screen (like a screencast).  You as the teacher can go back and look at a student's thought process.  What a fantastic intervention tool.  Sometimes we just see the answers and not how a student arrived at the solution.  For math I see some fantastic uses!

Also use it as an alternative presentation tool.  Have students display their understanding, by asking them to "show me!"  I am sure that my teachers can find other fantastic uses.  All for the low, low price of free. Coming to the Country Meadows iPad's next week.

Teacher's Assistant Pro

For those of you that have an iPhone or iPad for your personal use Teacher's Assistant Pro is a great tool for you to track and monitor classroom learner characteristics.  Check out the video to learn more about this app. How many times have you forgot to record a student's behavior?  This app is easy to pop open and quickly record the qualities for better reference later.  See patterns and have data to relay to mom, dad, and administrators.  Students will be more responsive to when you log their behavior.  Have productive conversations with your students with visual data regarding their behavior.

Timez Attack

Timez Attack

This tool is complements of Ed Koday at Ivy Hall.  This is a fantastic game that I should be finished setting up for installation next week.  The available facts are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  This fun math game will give your students a pre-test and post-test with trackable proficiency scoring.  The data is stored on the cloud so your students can log into any system and continue their practice.  You as the teacher can access data through a password provided by me.  I am looking forward to rolling it out in the iLab next week.  Please email me rhanrahan@kcsd96.org if you are interested.

CFA Shared Collection on Google Docs

CFA Shared Collection on Google Docs

The video above will show you how to share the CFA's that you have created for T2.  Please watch the video, upload and or share your CFAs.

ActivVote Training February 2012 @ Willow Grove

Embedded vs. Quick Poll

This screencast will show you how to embed a question, activate that question for answering by your students, and how to perform a quick poll.  If you have any questions please post a comment with your email address and I will contact you back.

Registering ActivVotes & Using ActivVotes

Kindergarten and Primary Teachers, this one is for you ...

This video will guide you through how to register ActivVote with ActivInspire.  ActivVotes are essentially the same thing as an ActivExpression, save many additional features.  The ActivVotes are only capable of responses A-F.  You can still accumulate data and perform formative assessments with them.  However you have to limit your responses to multiple choice.  This devices are great for primary and EC students.

The use of ActivVotes is similar to ActivExpressions.  I am attaching the flipchart that I use to teach with, for your own reference.

You must download this file and open it with ActivInspire.  Refer to the picture below after you click hyperlink below.

ActivVote Flipchart

ActivInspire Custom Profiles

ActivInspire custom profiles... what are you talking about?  If you are familiar with the different profiles that come prepackaged with ActiveInspire you will know what I mean.  Some examples include "At The Board", "Authoring", and "Math".  You can select these profiles so that you get custom tools on the tool bar and certain marquee features.

At one of the recent COT training sessions about containers I was asked if there was a way to remove all the marquee features so the students do not mess around with the shapes and objects at the board.  Well this blog post is for you!

The following video shows you how to remove all the marquee features so that your students can't manipulate the shapes or objects in your flip chart.  If you have had students resizing shapes instead of focusing on the activity this option will help your students stay focused and remove the temptation to play with the objects so they focus on the activity.

Podcasting Mr. Zak's Class

Mr. Zak's 4th Grade Bilingual class is doing podcasting!  Students are creating digital expository compositions.  Podcasting is easy using Garageband on a mac.  Our district has other tools that can be used to do the same thing.  Wixie is a great alternative to Garageband.  Wixie is an internet application that will run on any computer or device that supports flash.  Here is a cool example from Mr. Zak's student.

Graphing Planets

3rd Grade is graphing!  There is a terrific website that kids and adults can use to display their data.  The website is located @ http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx

This site is very straight forward and can be manipulated with very little effort and instruction on the teacher's part.  I am attaching a great example from our third grade students.  The students researched planetary information.  Students were charged with finding the number of moons each planet has, the distance from the sun, the rotation of each planent, the orbit, temperatures and the number of rings they have. The following example is one regarding the moons of our planets.

Saving at Country Meadows Elementary

This video will show students how to save their files when using programs such as Pages, Keynote, Garageband, and Comic Life.  You also can save pictures, music, and video to the server for access at a later time.

Wixie Intro @ CM

Wixie Intro:  The following is a link to a video for Country Meadows Elementary School.  This link will show students and teachers the basic functions of Wixie.

Wixie

Country Meadows has acquired access for grades 1-3 to Wixie

With Wixie, students can use paint tools, text options, clipare, and voice recording to showcase their content knowledge.

• Create original work that demonstrates their comprehension of the curriculum
• Illustrate to explain abstract concepts
• Create graphs and models to represent data
• Write digital stories
• Create non-linguistic representations to complement writing
• Anytime/anywhere mentality



Integrate into the core curriculum


Wixie comes with hundreds of curriculum activities. Teachers can also create customized content for their classes and distribute it to students in seconds.


You can access this tool at: https://kildeer.wixie.com/


Students can login anywhere in the world using their credentials.  All that is required is flash.

Creating Digital Stories

There are several different ways to create digital stories.  Which ever way you decide works best, it is well worth learning this skill.  Creating podcasts, iMovies, and keynote presentations are three ways to accomplish the creation of a digital story.  The media that is created can be used from alternative assessments to guided reading for your students.  Either way the benefits can be instructional and student centered.

The following is an example of a digital story for instructional purposes.  Students can circulate through a center and acquire this content knowledge or it can be used as a guided reading station.

The following is a podcast that was created by a student.  This is an alternative story telling method that integrates 21st century technology.