I.E.T.C.: Week of November 26, 2012

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This week I attended the Illinois Education and Technology Conference in Springfield, IL.  This is a fantastic conference for all teachers, not just technology teachers.  There were record numbers this year.  For more information on the conference and the individual sessions be sure to click on the link above and visit the conference ning.

These are some of the sites that stood out for me:

Mike's Technology Closet (http://mikestechnologycloset.com)

Mike did a session titled "50 in 50".  We had a quick glance at 50 different websites in 50 minutes.  While I knew of most of these resources (not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing) there were a few that I had forgotten about that I felt it might be worth taking another look.  Here they are:

http://www.xtranormal.com/  Xtranormal allows you to make mini-virtual movies simply by typing in text.  The free version is somewhat limited.  There is an educator's account for $10 a month but I would try the service out via the free version to see if it fits your needs.  Mike kicked off his presentation with a virtual teacher introducing him via xtranormal.  It was a great opener!

http://www.pearltrees.com/ Pearltrees is another example of a social bookmarking tool.  Its visually attractive and allows you to search other users Pearltrees as well.

http://todaysmeet.com/  TodaysMeet continues to be a great backchannel service.  They are growing in popularity- it is no longer an option to keep a room open for a year.  The longest time now is one month!  Here's a great example of using TodaysMeet.  On Saturday after I came back from I.E.T.C. I attended ICE's Flipped Classroom Workshop.  Jon Bergman opened the backchannel during his keynote.   I'm thinking of using this during my graduate class' Webquest presentations!

http://storybird.com/ Storybird is such a great site to get students writing and creating.  This site, which is geared for younger students allows them to create books using artwork already provided for them.  Sign up for a free account or let your students read through the stories already in place.

http://www.scrible.com/  Still in beta, Scrible is a site that allows you to highlight and add sticky notes to webpages.  This is appealing because many times we want to point out specific parts of a webpage for our students but they become distracted by everything else on the page.  Consider checking out this site.

http://youcanbook.me/  Similar to Doodle, YouCanBook.Me allows you to have multiple users book multiple appointments.  Mike said his school is considering using this site to help the teachers set up parent/teacher conferences.  The site integrates Google Calendars.


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