"Into the Outdoors" Series for Science

A friend of mine forwarded me this site, and I thought that I'd share. Especially as a South Dakota country girl, I love it when we can integrate some "home grown" topics into our science curriculum. Into the Outdoors is a collection of videos and supplemental materials that teaches everything from Farm Science to Biology. Check out this video about Soybean Farming:




To me, seeing the the John Deeres out is common place in my morning drive, but to many non-farm kids, tractors are foreign machinery. I think it is incredibly important to learn about where our food comes from and how important agriculture is to our economy in America and this site seems to have a few good items to help that pursuit. There are also some great learning tools associated with the beef industry as well.

I hope you get a chance to check it out and use it in your classroom!

Making and Embedding a Google Form

Tomorrow I also get to work with the middle school and high school students to do a couple of different projects. We are going to combine Google Forms, Running a Script (flubaroo) and also embedding on a website! It's going to be a good day!

Basic Elementary Site from a Template

Tomorrow I get to present to the Elementary Staff at our school about a Basic Google site for parent/teacher/student communication enhancement! I'm really excited and wanted to share the presentation with you!

 

YouTube is More Than a Place to Watch Videos

Well, as you know, the experiment with YouTube has been working well... So, YES, it's pushing the limits and we may have trouble if everybody is doing this at once, but it's something I have to share! 

There are some great options in YouTube that we haven't been able to use in the past that are too good not to harness for classroom use. 

1) YouTube Webcam Recording

This will allow the signed in Google User (Google bought YouTube a couple years ago) to record easily from their webcam. Go to this link and click on record (you have to agree to the permissions first on both the Chromebook or your teacher computer). 

When complete, click "upload" and for any video or student projects, you can have them set it to private or unlisted if you'd like. The user sets the privacy. Unlisted is a public video, but it doesn't appear in search results and private is available only to the user. You can only do videos up to 15 minutes at a time. 

2) YouTube Slideshows

This will allow the user to create a slideshow of photos. It is something you could also assign students to easily do within Google Slides (under Google Drive), but this is set up more like iMovie. 

3) YouTube Editor

This will allow you to edit videos that you have recorded or taken. Again, this takes up bandwidth, so it is probably something we will need to communicate about if we are all doing this as a semester project, but if we have the capability, we need to try. 

The other on this page is about Google Hangouts, which are currently blocked, but will have a place in the future. 

I am excited about sharing this opportunity, especially for short videos that you may want students to create. That being said, it is pushing our bandwidth boundaries, but I'm sure some famous athlete once said that we need to push our boundaries to know our limits- right?! So, give me some feedback if you'd like to use some of next Friday's PD time to go through some of this YouTube fun or if you just want me to come help you individually try something out.

Remembering that you or your students will be able to embed these videos on your website, blog or presentation to make your assignments even more interactive, if you choose. Also, think about the possibilities for flipping your classroom curriculum! 

Soft Skills to Pay the Bills

When teaching workforce skills, we often forget some of what are called the "soft skills". The U.S. Department of Labor has created a learning module with videos and additional text to support teaching these soft skills in your curriculum for a "workability" type of class.

The US DOL categorizes soft skills as: 

1. Communication
2. Enthusiasm and Attitude
3. Teamwork
4. Networking
5. Problem Solving and Critical Thinking
6. Professionalism 

And, for each of the soft skills, there is a pdf with information and a video that corresponds. 

The Disability Employment Policy Office has put this out, but I could see it being very beneficial to any teen or young adult looking for career opportunities. 

Auto Reloader For Chrome Broswer

During in-service on Friday, I had a great question and now I great answer! As a district, we are using Hapara to more easily manage our Google Drive and Chromebooks. A great "add-on" feature of this is the ability to see a screenshot of the current screen on our students' Chromebooks. Unfortunately, Hapara doesn't refresh this automatically and, as teachers, we all know that students can get off task in a blink of an eye, so it's important to see the students' computer screens at any given time.

Here is the answer: "I've got an Extension for That!" 

Auto-reloader is an extension that you can set to automatically reload a page at set intervals. If you do this every two or three minutes, you will surely be able to refresh what you see on your Hapara monitoring screen in a timely-enough fashion and not feel like you are clicking crazy waiting for it to reload.

I hope this helps and, thanks Cindy, for the question and now solution!

Google Sites for Beginners Presentation

Here is "The Basic Site" Presentation for our PD tomorrow morning. We will be working on creating basic sites with some basic embedding and link creation from our District Teacher Template.

Hapara List for Launch!

Here is the link to the Google Doc as well.

Our school district is using Hapara Dashboard to organize our Google Accounts and Chromebooks more easily. Here is the document from our first training. It was good to have this to go with as we were starting out our training and, so far, Hapara is going well. We all want MORE than it does, (instant updates on Chromebook screens, interactive chatting and remote control of Chrome desktops, multiple smart copy location choices, etc.) but what it is supposed to do has been working well.