If I can assist you with any of your instructional technology needs, please click on date below to sign-up for an available and convenient time for you!

I look forward to meeting with you to collaborate and integrate technology efficiently and effectively into your classroom.

Unless I am out of district or there is a conflicting need, my regular campus visits are as follows, starting the week of September 6, 2021:

Each week that I am at your campus I send out an email with a few of my favorite things that I have come across. Sometimes they are blog posts, engaging websites, or super cool tools we found. I will add each of those little snippets here so you can easily reference them when you need them. Check back often for updates!

Who remembers Reading Rainbow? My favorite part of the show was when LeVar Burton would read aloud his favorite children's books aloud while the images of the book were shown. Storyline Online is a free website that does just that but your favorite actors and actress are the ones reading the books. Who wouldn't love hearing Betty White read aloud Harry, the Dirty Dog?

Storyline Online features apps for Android, iOS, and Chrome browser. The stories and app are free and will remain so.

Check it out today!!

Audible is offering their read aloud stories for completely free the entire time schools are closed. All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet.

The stories are organized in a variety of categories, such as the following:

Littlest Learners
Elementary
Tween
Teen
Literary Classics
Fold and Fairy Tales for All

Epic! is the leading digital library for kids 12 & under and they are offering FREE teacher accounts for students to have remote access through June 30th.

With Epic! your students can instantly access 40,000 of the best books, learning videos, quizzes and more!

They have the following categories to choose from:

Popular
5 & Under
Ages 6-8
Ages 9-12
Award Winners
Nonfiction
Spanish
Videos

Bring storybook to life with Vooks, a kid-safe, ad-free streaming library of read-aloud animated storybooks.

As a thank you to all teachers, Vooks is offering a FREE FIRST YEAR exclusively to all school teachers.

Vooks bring children's books to life with animated illustrations, read-a-long text and narrated story. It has a variety of titles that students have loved hearing.

Some of Vooks most popular titles:

They All Saw a Cat
Where Are You?
Colors on the Farm

Storynory has a variet of stories and tales in video, audio, and text format. They are accessible via the iOS or Android App store.

Students can read the story on the screen while listening to the audio recording, enhancing their reading and listening skills.

"Storynory has been giving free audio stories to the world since November 2005. We are a podcast and a website with audio streaming. All content is free."

Loyal Books offers thousands of classic and popular audio and eBooks for FREE!

They include books in the following languages: Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and many more.

Loyal Books includes these children's classics:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Swiss Family Robinson
Aesop's Fables
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Peter Pan

Sight word assessment + Google Forms = Winning

Do you have having tons of papers after assessing your students' knowledge of their sight words? Now you can digitally assess your students using Google Forms. You can now assess your students each 9 weeks or as often as needed and all the dad will be on one Google Sheet for easy evaluation of the data. I created a form for all the kinder sight words and a form for the color and numbers as well. The sight words are broken down into 9 weeks so you can test only what you need when you need it. Check out the links below and feel free to use them if you would like:

Sight Word Form

Sample quiz:

This link is to my quiz so you can see it as it would look when you give it, it is only for you to play with not to give to students, because you will not have access to the data collected.

Sample Form

Editable quiz:

This link will force a copy of your to do what you want with it and for you to use in your classroom. It will create a Google Sheet that will collect your data.

Copy of Editable Form

Color and Number Form

Sample quiz:

This link is to my quiz so you can see it as it would look when you give it, it is only for you to play with not to give to students, because you will not have access to the data collected.

Sample Form

Editable quiz:

This link will force a copy of your to do what you want with it and for you to use in your classroom. It will create a Google Sheet that will collect your data.

Copy of Editable Form

What is Earth Day?

April 22, 2019 is Earth Day. To learn more about Earth Day and what you can do to help this movement click on the following link: www.earthday.org

Earth Day Resources for Your Classroom

Do you want to celebrate Earth Day in your classroom? Check out the blog below to find picture books, videos, lesson plans, activities, and projects to teach us the importance of Earth Day.

Foster a Love For Reading

With this app you will engage the entire class with a multi-sensory reading experience that connects with a variety of learning styles. You will bring your books to life! Novel Effect turns you into a master storyteller. Invisible technology follows along, as you bring the story to life and set your student or child’s imagination free. Custom composed music and sounds treat each story with care, to honor the spirit and tone of every cherished book. Smart voice recognition stays in sync with your reading style. There are hundreds of compatible books for kids of all ages with more added each week!

Unleash Student Creativity

Book creator is a simple tool for creating awesome digital books. Create your own teaching resources or have you students take the reins.

Combine text, images, audio, and video to create:

Interactive stories
Digital portfolios
Research journals
Poetry books
Science reports
Instruction manuals
About me books
Comic adventures

What is WriteReader?

WriteReader is a unique digital learning platform where children can learn to read by writing and publishing small digital books. With WriteReader your students takes pictures of family, friends, things or situation and write about them in their actual level of written language. A teacher then "translates" the child's text to conventional writing. Students can also tell their story by adding audio to the books.

Who doesn't love a good emoji? We use them to express ourselves in text and social media, now you can create your very own emoji to use in your presentations or to decorate your bulletin boards.

Click on the link below:

Emoji Builder

You can now add your Bitmoji to your presentations, email, or any other digital application you may use. Check out this Bitmoji Extension in the google store.

If you haven’t checked out Google Classroom, now is the time to do it! It is such a great tool to use in your classroom and with more and more chromebooks added each year it is something we can all start using. I even have some Kinder teachers using Google Classroom this year at another campus.

Check out the latest blog post from Casey Bell about the latest updates with Google Classroom:

5 Things to Know About the New Google Classroom

This summer I read a great book called Google Apps for Littles. It has so many great lessons and ideas to use with Pre K- 1^st grade students. We often think that the little ones aren’t capable of using technology like 3^rd and 4^th graders, but they can! We just have to believe they can. Check out Cristine Pinto’s blog:

It’s full of ideas and lessons to use right now in your classroom, and the best part is she has created all the templates for you and they are FREE!! J

My favorite template I found on her site was for login cards. Check it out:

Pure GENIUS! I have modified the template to fit our district logins in you would like to use it:

DISD Template

Have you heard the latest news about Discovery education?? We have made logging in for students and teachers much easier with a single sign on solution! Now when you go to the Symbaloo page and click on Discover Education it will open up and ask you to login with you Google Apps account. No more having to remember yet another password! Many of you have used Discovery Education for years and know all about streaming the award-winning digital content, but did you also know there other features as well like powerful profession development, digital textbooks, virtual fieldtrips, web-math, and so much more! Don’t miss out on all the amazing tools and resources that Discovery Education has to offer.

Check out the list below for a brief description of some of the tools and resources available for both students & teachers: ▲
Webmath - Webmath is a math-help web site that generates answers to specific math questions and problems, as entered by a user, at any particular moment. The math answers are generated and displayed real-time, at the moment a web user types in their math problem and clicks "solve." In addition to the answers, Webmath also shows the student how to arrive at the answer.
Virtual Field Trips - Take your students beyond the classroom walls and into some of the world's most iconic locations for rich and immersive learning experiences — no permission slips required. Tour the National Archives, see how an egg farm works, explore NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, or hear from the President of the United States. Discovery Education Virtual Field Trips are fun, educational, and free! Check out some of our featured and upcoming Virtual Field Trips below or browse the full archive by category. For a complete list of Virtual Field Trips coming up, check out the Discovery Education Events Calendar.
Discovery Now - Discovery Now is your destination for educational content and classroom resources from the Discovery family of channels that inspire curiosity and engage students in learning. Bring animal cams into the class from Animal Planet, reinforce the importance of biodiversity from Discovery Channel, or ignite a passion for science in partnership with Science Channel. Discovery Now offers a range of programs and resources to complement your classroom instruction.
Puzzle Maker - Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists.
Assessment Builder - Learn more about Technology Enhanced Items (TEI) Create a Technology-Enhanced Assessment (TEA) from an item library that offers a variety of interactive item types.
Board Builder - Create a fun, engaging, digital project with any content using board builder.
Assignment Builder - Build and store assignments for your students that use Discovery Education curriculum content.
Writing Prompt Builder - Give students writing practice with these images that include composition prompts.
Professional Development - Find ways to bring digital resources into your classroom!

ePortfolios and Google Sites:

One of my very favorite blogs (Shake Up Learning) recently did a post about using Google Sites to create an ePorfolio. An ePortfolio or Learning Portfolio can be a powerful tool for students to demonstrate mastery, show growth overtime, and create dynamic learning experience for students that go beyond one and done, and each beyond the walls of the classroom to continue reading Casey Bell's blog post click on the link below:

How to Create Powerful ePortfolios with Google Sites

Check out this pod cast on ePortfolios:

Engaging Learners with Video:

I came across this blog a few weeks ago and found one of my new favorite tools... ClassHook!

Using video in the classroom isn't a new idea. When we were kids we remember the when that big TV was rolled into our classroom, or when the film strip projector was powered on and the lights went out. Today many teachers use Youtube in their classroom, but finding relevant and safe content can take some time. With classhook you can search video clips from your favorite tv shows and movies that tie to standards and show an examples or what you are teaching. For instance you may be discussing similes in your ELA class and search Classhook for simile clips and come across this perfect example from the movie Shrek:

For more information on using video in your classroom to engage learners check out the following blog post:

Engaging Learners with Video

Tech It Out! – Tap Lights! (This one is low tech, but effective!) -Claudia Valastro

Tap lights are a simple, but wonderful tool for homes. So why not use them in your classroom?

Here are just a few of the creative ways teachers are utilizing tap lights with their classes.

Noise Level: ▲

Creating the various stages of appropriate noise level with tap lights is a great way to visually remind your students of what is expected at that moment in your class. Different activities may require different levels and the use of lights with your class lets them know where they should be.

Restrooms: ▲

Whether or not your class uses a hall pass when students need to go to the restroom, this use of tap lights not only lets the rest of the class know someone is out, it will help remind you, the teacher, as well.

Questions in the Classroom: ▲

Students have a light they can tap when they have a question during non-talking activity.

Have a set of tap lights to use for review games when you don't want to review digitally. Each team gets a light and pushes it when they have the answer.

Teacher Use: ▲

Use a tap light that reminds students that you are working with a small group and not to interrupt until the light is off.

There are likely many more uses in the classroom.

Some methods require words taped or painted on the lights, others have the instructions next to them, and some only need to click on or off. It just depends on how you want to use them. Sometimes simple is really effective.

Thanks to @miss6thmath and @fridyereading for sharing.

In education we love to beg, borrow, and steal. Below are some of my favorite educators to follow on social media and their blogs. They all have fantastic ideas you can use in your classroom today!

August 2021

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December 2020

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December 2019

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December 2018

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November 2017

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