Terrific Technology Tuesday

I am linking up again! When professionally developing myself blog hunting I stumbled across The Teacher's week linky at Blog Hopping. And guess what Tuesday was, Technology Tip Tuesday, um all I teach is technology so I was uber excited.

I have three little tips, to include, and hopefully not a lot of babbling.

1. Kidblog.org! Have you heard of it? It is amazing! Unexpectedly I ended up doing a four week unit on blogging and social media in my Web Design class last semester, that is how much I loved it. What it allows you to do is set up a class blog, super simple, no layout options or set up time needed. The hardest part is choosing the background since you can't really make changes. Then you can individually enter your students and assign them a password, or mass import if you have an excel list. All of my students had freedom to choose their own user name to keep them private, but you could make it a theme like literary characters.

Each day students logged in and wrote, added pictures and commented on each other's posts. And my post glowing moment, built each other up with so much positive feedback. The beauty of kidblog is that the teacher has to approve every comment, so nothing inappropriate gets posted! Also making all students anonymous, means they don't know whose post they are liking but just passing along those good thoughts. And they are writing!

Oh and did I mention it is free!

Just to prove I wasn't the only one who loved it, in two six weeks we had over 800 posts and comments added to our account!

2. We are super lucky to have gmail built into our students accounts so all students have access to google docs. In google docs you can set up an electronic form, by going through docs, create and form. Your form can ask any types of questions you want, open ended or multiple choice.

Where I see this being beneficial is with math, inferencing graphs and question writing. For example, a student starts a poll about what is the most popular television show and provides four answers, you share the form with all of your students and maybe students in another class. Then you can track percentages and even graph the results. I plan to take it another step further and have students create Infographics with the data they collect.

If you don't have a campus wide gmail, you could always use something like polldaddy or set up a dummy email account.

3. I HEART music! When I stumbled across this pinterest item I knew I would be using it in my classroom. You can set up your computer to automatically play songs during your classroom transition times. My plan is five minutes before the bell rings to have music go off and that signal its time to clean up. Plus, cleaning while you listen to music so much more fun! The link has all of the instructions.

I like love HEART technology, so if you want more information about any of my tips please let me know.

The Babbling Box!