Global Student Voice Film Festival
Seeing Screen Time Differently
Common Sense Media: Parenting Tips Videos
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InsertLearning
10 Creative Risks to Take With Students This Year
NuseumED
Yesterday, my colleague Lisa Dodson and I had the opportunity to work with Secondary Teachers to give their presentations a makeover. Lisa has 24 years experience as a Graphic Designer, so I was grateful to have her expertise to draw from.
Below is our presentation. The notes will help make sense of the largely visual approach we used - an approach backed up by experts Garr Reynolds (of Presentation Zen acclaim) and Nancy Duarte (author of Slideology). If you click on the Gear icon (next to the full screen button), you can see the presentation together with the speaker notes, which might help you understand the content of the presentation more easily. Ten Creative Alternatives to Showing Movies Before the Break
Google Santa Tracker
12 Days of Twitter
GoNoodle
What's Going On In This Graph?
What's Going On In This Picture?
Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones. Perhaps you have never had a hard drive crash or your laptop die on you. If this is the case, trust me, you’re on borrowed time! Prevention is better than the cure, so read on for suggestions on how to safeguard your laptop. Mac LaptopsApple makes backing up your laptop a breeze with the inbuilt software Time Machine. There are a couple of options that work with Time Machine, depending on need:
PC LaptopsBecause of the wide variety of PC laptops, it’s difficult to make tailored recommendations. External hard drives work here also, but you will need to specifically decide which folders to back up, and copy those over to the hard drive individually. All LaptopsAnother solution is to use an Online Backup Service. PC magazine has a review of online backup services published in August 2017. I would probably recommend Carbonite as the most reasonably priced option, however SOS Online Backup is a more expensive alternative. PhotosPhotos for me deserve a special mention, because of the memories we attach to them. Backing up our laptop as a whole is important, however, backing up photos needs to be considered independently. We want to return to our photos, be able to look through them, print them, or maybe make them into books. Either way, we want ready access, and we don’t want the process of saving them to be a total palaver. Google Photos By far the best option that I can see is to use Google Photos. It allows you to upload or sync unlimited photos (at a slightly reduced file size). Alternatively, if you want full size files, you will need to pay a bit more, but really, the compressed size is more than adequate. This article explains all the ins and outs really comprehensively. What’s great about Google Photos is the incredible search functionality. Want to find photos of children writing? Search “Writing”! It’s that simple. Flickr A free Flickr account has 1 Terabyte of free storage for images and videos. You can auto-upload photos from your laptop or phone, so you will not have to worry about backing individual ones up. That said, you probably only want to back up your best photos, not all of them. The search function isn’t as advanced as the Google Photos app, but you can tag and describe your pictures if you so wish. I hope this helps make your backing up process slightly less painful. If you have any other suggestions, I would love to hear about them in the comments.
Happy holidays! Storybird
Setting Free the Untold Stories in Education
Seesaw Printables
Holidays are a great opportunity to get organised - sort out all of those jobs that have been piling up around you. We hope that top of your list is sorting out your iPad. If it’s not, it should be! We have some students at school who are running out of storage on their iPad, meaning they sometimes have difficulty completing the learning tasks teachers have planned. Many aren’t running the latest operating system, meaning functionality of some apps is limited, or indeed, not working at all. 1. Manage your StorageGo to General > iPad Storage. Follow the tutorial below to view your storage usage. There you will find tips on reducing your storage. Typically, the native Photos app will take up the most space, as it is housing all of your photos and videos. Why not delete unused apps? Perhaps you learn that a game is taking up a lot of valuable storage space - time to delete it? 2. Organise your PhotosOften, we take several photos of the same thing, and choose the best one to use in a project or to share. Getting students into the habit of deleting the photos that aren’t as good, is an important skill to teach them. An easy way to do this is to Favourite ♥ the best photos (using the heart function underneath), then go to camera roll where you can select all the photos that don’t have hearts on them, and delete them. Don’t forget to delete photos/videos in the Recently Deleted folder. 3. Back up your Best PhotosOnce you have gotten rid of sub-par photos, it’s time to make sure your best photos are stored somewhere safely. There are a number of options for you, but here are a couple of my favourites: Google Photos Google Photos allows you to upload or sync unlimited photos (at a slightly reduced file size). What’s great about this is that you can search them really easily. Want to find photos of children writing? Search “Writing”! It’s that simple. Google Photos is the most straight-forward way of backing up your photos in the cloud. Flickr A free Flickr account has 1 Terabyte of free storage for images and videos. You can auto-upload photos from your iPad camera roll, so you will not have to worry about backing individual ones up. That said, you want to back up your best photos, not all of them. The search function isn’t as advanced as the Google Photos app, but you can tag and describe your pictures if you so wish. 5. Update Your Apps
My dear friend and literacy mentor Kristin Ziemke renewed my love for Padlet when she showed how it could be used to share what books students were reading. We decided to kick-start a collaborative project with our Grade 4 students - creating a Padlet with our current reading books, and inviting participation from other classes around the world via Twitter.
Students and teachers from Singapore, Shanghai, and Switzerland joined in, and it was wonderful to see the comments and questions add to our initial offerings. We will cycle back in again so our students can respond and add their own comments as well.
My daughter Scarlett helped produce some tutorials about how to add to our Padlet from either a computer or an iPad, to make it easier for those new to the tool to use it.
As a PYP school, we don’t want to just pay lip service to International Mindedness, but to work hard to understand and connect with people from different backgrounds and geographical locations. This Padlet helps to share a love of reading and show our students the similarities that exist between children of different cultural backgrounds.
This type of project isn’t possible without the open-mindedness of the teachers involved. Thank you to Melissa, Julie, Stephanie, Kim and Olivia for helping spread a love of literacy and giving your students an opportunity to connect with us. When teachers share their students’ learning on platforms such as Twitter, we can all benefit. There is no more powerful motivator than an authentic audience. If you would like to continue the journey, contact the Grade 4s at their class Twitter account: @GWASGrade4 Hour of Code
Project Rockit
Sketchnoting for Teaching and Learning
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