Great YouTube Channels for Educators

While YouTube is great for wasting lots of hours laughing away at things like "dog on a motorcycle" and "The Annoying Orange", it also has numerous educational benefits that can help enhance your curriculum and further your students' learning! There are several YouTube "channels" (YouTube websites that have specific content) that are very educational. Here is our top 5

1) The Smithsonian Channel - Its not just for visiting in Washington DC any longer! Check out this wide array of videos that cover everything from history to science to art and culture.

2) National Geographic - Will the gazelle ever outrun the leopard? Find that out here along with thousands of other videos about history, psychology, science, art, and sociology.

3) Vancouver Poetry Slam - Some of the best slam poets share their passion with the world. Not sure what slam poetry is? Check it out!

4) Mr. Robb's Math Videos - Excellent math videos for just about all levels of Math - taught by none other than Mr. Robb himself!

5) TedTalks - Thought provoking talks, scenarios and demonstrations on just about any subject from the world's greatest speakers. Inspire students (or yourself!) by watching and listening to these talks.

September 17th: TodaysMeet Follow-up

As promised, we'll answer a few of the questions about TodaysMeet in today's post. WhoKnows asked if there was a way to keep a meeting room private. Unlike Edmodo or a wiki, TodaysMeet is completely public. In situations where a large variety of people are listening, collaborating and learning together, this works exceedingly well. For instance, many participants at technology conferences avidly follow and contribute to back channel conversations. In do so, they learn together, network and help to speaker to gauge effectiveness, without the hassle of user names and passwords. Another post asked how the website supported itself. James Socol is a web programmer and designer who created TodaysMeet. While this product is free, it is also a vehicle for Socol to network and drum up business for his web development business.

If you're thinking of using this in a classroom situation, you need to be aware of the faculty override function, since TodaysMeet is currently blocked for students. Some best practices you may wish to consider are:

• Ask students to use their real names so that you know who is contributing. At least one question went unanswered yesterday because the person who knew the answer, didn't know the person asking it, and so was uncomfortable answering the question publicly.
• Set parameters for the discussion. Consider a rubric for the online meeting place.
• Decide if the speaker would add value to the back channel. In today's case, our guidance and dean's departments were the point people, since they had the answers to our questions.
• Determine if the back channel will enrich or detract from the experience.

On a side note, although I insist that I'm petite, not short, The Long and Petite of Educational Technology just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Thanks to all for taking part. We're having so much fun sharing ideas with you!

August 27th - TodaysMeet

Have you ever wondered what your students would say if they could simultaneously have a conversation with each other about the lesson, activity, or movie that they were experiencing? Do you ever want instant feedback from students with questions or comments about your lesson?


This week's tool will allow you to do just that. It's called TodaysMeet and it is a free backchannel (online chatroom that is opening during a certain time period) website that will allow you to set up a private room for anywhere between 2 hours and one year. You can then share the link with students during lesson and watch as they talk about what they are trying to learn. Even better, the learning curve is nearly non-existent for users and creators.


To further extend the collaborative experience, students and staff that are using Twitter can join in the conversation by ending their tweets with a hashtag (#) that you can assign. This allows students to keep the conversation going when they are away from the classroom, or unable to access a computer but still have Twitter on their cellphones or mobile devices. We'll have more information on using Twitter in a later post.

Recently, several teachers, administrators and support staff from the Technology Team used TodaysMeet during our PBIS at our Opening Day Institute with great success. The conversations that ensued gave everyone participating a better understanding of the PBIS process, while keeping them engaged in the topic. Experts using the back channel were able to clarify understanding immediately.

There are numerous educational uses for this type of application. For more ideas on how to use TodaysMeet, check out the video below. As always, if you have questions, we are just a quick email away! If you have comments or questions for all to view, please add them to the "comments" link below the video!

August 19th - Google Squared

Welcome back from a restful summer! We're back again this year to give you the long and short of educational technology and to bring you the tools and the tricks to help you integrate technology into your classroom.

This week's tool is Google Squared. Our students have all used Google for web searches in the past; Google Squared is a new tool that allows Google to organize search results for you in table form. It's perfect for students' brainstorming activities or organizing concepts or important terms from a unit or the semester.

One of the greatest benefits of this tool is that every department can use it! We tried entering in "Fatty Foods" and got a list of things we should probably avoid (but don't!), we also entered in terms like "British Authors," "Elements," "Math Equations," "Spanish Verbs," "Famous Composer," "Types of Loans," and "World War II" and got a grid with our answers.

Another great component of this tool is that you can add columns with different types of of critera that you want your students to search for (click "Add" on the "add columns" part at the top of the grid). If there is a particular result you do not want simply click on the "X" next to that result and it will be deleted from the grid.

Go ahead, check it out and have some fun with it. If you have any questions we are only a quick email away! See you next week!

Summer Technology Six Pack

Do you keep a rainy day list so that on rainy summer days instead of watching Judge Judy you have a bigger plan? Consider exploring this refreshing six pack of educational technology tools on that rainy summer day when bad TV threatens to suck up your summer.

Delicious: Frustrated that your bookmarks don't follow you or that your students can't save their bookmarks while researching a school project? A social bookmarking tool is the solution. Delicious allows you to save bookmarks to your Delicious account and to add tags to them to help you locate the sites later. You can even view the bookmarks of colleagues or experts in the area that you're researching as long as they have a Delicious account--you'll find that many geeky people, like us, have one (feel free to add us into your network: "ppleviak" and "jasonrjanczak")

Tagxedo: Like Wordle.net, Tagxedo creates word clouds, but unlike Wordle, Tagxedo allows users to save their documents. It also allows users to format the cloud into a picture. For instance, if you were creating a cloud about Che Guevara, you could create it in the shape of his face.

Wallwisher: Wallwisher is a simple collaboration tool that allows you to create a "wall" where students can post 140 character "stickies" on the wall for all to see. It's a dynamic tool that can be used for brainstorming, reaction to a reading, exit slips, feedback, or various other ways. As the creator of a wall, you are also able to moderate what gets posted and what does not. For more ideas on how to use Wallwisher, check out this presentation for ideas. For examples of how your colleagues are using it, check out Nora Bowers' wall or Jason Janczak's wall.

Glogster: Tired of PowerPoint? Done with markers, scissors, and paste? Try Glogster! Glogster is a tool that allows users to create online posters filled with multimedia, links and text. You can create a class glogster, a glogster webquest, or even lecture from a glogster. The best part is that all the glogs are online and can be viewed by and shared with all your students in your class! For more examples and ideas of how to use Glogster in the classroom, click here.

Edmodo: This is a great class management system that allows you to post assignments, send out links, give and collect homework, and send out important alerts to your entire class or just individual students. Edmodo also gives the opportunity to microblog during the semester. While your students will find its design similar to Facebook, Edmodo is designed as a private social network in that students and parents need a special code to have access to your page. Students like the fact that they can they can recieve messages from Edmodo via text alerts if they sign up for it. For more thoughts on Edmodo, please read Jason's blog post on it.

Google Docs: This is a wonderful tool to use collaboratively. If you're working on a summer curriculum team, this is an easy way to work together without traveling beyond your back deck. To begin, you'll need a Google account. Right now, Jason is adding content to this page and I see it pop up as we go. By using Google docs you can avoid sending documents as attachments or saving them to flash drives to transport files.

We hope you enjoy checking out these useful classroom tools this summer. Please leave us comments/feedback below and let us know which of these tools you would want additional training on. Have a great summer and we will see you at the Opening Day institute!

Class Evaluations Made Easy With GoogleForms

If the filters are blocking the video from popping up below, please click this link and it will take you directly to the video.

To see this video in full screen view (and unless you have a microscope, you need to see it in full screen view), click on the lower right hand corner of the video and it will toggle it to full screen view. If you would prefer to just watch in full view as a seperate video, please click on this link and it will bring you to the video's website.

Poll Everywhere Tutorial

A short video on how to use Poll Everywhere.



If you would like to see a larger version of the video click here

If you have any questions, please let us know!

5/7/2010 Professional Development Responses

Thank you for your participation in our survey. The responses listed in the link below. We look forward to helping you reach your educational technology goals.

If you have additional ideas, please add them to the form at any time.

Here are the results of the poll.

Grayslake Central Technology PD Survey