Helping out others with technology

Ever thought to yourself "I really wish that I could support my friends/colleagues/parents in using technology", but know that you don't have time to walk them through every detail on how to perform certain tasks (ie. copy & pasting). Well, you're in luck. With Google's Teach Parents Tech, you can now take a very few minutes to send helpful videos to walk them through a wide variety of tasks from changing your screensaver to re-sizing pictures.

Ted Ed - Add Your Voice!

Many teachers already make powerful use of TED Talks as an educational tool in their classrooms. TED's mission is to offer riveting talks, by riveting people, free to the world!  TED started as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. The two annual TED conferences, in bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). 

TED is now in the process of creating TED Ed, which is intended to capture and animate the voices of great educators from around the world.  Visit TED Ed to learn more, see some initial lessons that have been created, and possibly submit a proposal to have your best lessons added and animated for TED Ed. 

Have Your Students Create Websites

Weebly for Education is a great online tool, which you can use to allow your students to create websites about any topic they've been researching.  Much like Bit Strips, Weebly for Education allows teachers to create student accounts and manage permission levels.  Students do not require an email address, and do not have to create their own accounts.

Once you have created student accounts (a 2 minute task for a class of 25) and provided your students with their login information, students can access their account at http://students.weebly.com/.  Here, students can create visually appealing websites in an extremely easy to use, drag and drop interface.  Students can add up to 5 pages on their website (unlimited pages if you upgrade to Weebly Pro), upload pictures and files, embed flash video files, and more!

Have students demonstrate their learning by creating and publishing their own website using Weebly!

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are great ways to keep up to date on information from various sites and sources. They stream information live to your own personally built lists so that we have a collection of updated information on topics that interest ourselves. Commoncraft videos have a great video explaining more on RSS feeds.

The real question is, how do I display this information in a way that could engage my students in discussion or activities? The way to accomplish this is to display these feeds for your students to see, either on your website, or within Moodle. just by copying the RSS feed link. For example, CBC has a great set of feeds, so we copy the one that we want (ie. http://rss.cbc.ca/lineup/topstories.xml)

Websites like www.surfingwaves.com allow us to quickly and easily create widgets to display this information by creating HTML code that we can copy and then paste into our online spaces.

The only down side to using an RSS feed is that you have no control over what content is posted by those sites, so please be cautious and use only reputable sources for your RSS feeds.