CECA/CASL 2011 Annual Conference

eNGAGE!Teaching and Learning in a Digital World

October 24, 2011 @ Connecticut Convention Center

Staying on the Cutting Edge:

Keeping up with Emerging Technologies

Joseph Jarvis

Granby Memorial High School

jarvisj@granbyschools.org

www.netvibes.comNetvibes can be used as a very personalized RSS feed aggregator. To set up your won Netvibes page, follow the instructions below.

1.Go to Netvibes.com

2.Click on

3.Click on the button in the “Basic Free” column

4.Since you are going to be using Netvibes to import RSS feeds from blogs (to get started anyway), you can choose to have the website set up a portal for you designed to work best with RSS feeds. You do this by clicking on the universal RSS symbol on the dashboard setup page. Don’t worry, you can customize your dashboard later.

4. Play around with the interface. Everything on the page is editable. If you want to start from scratch and only have your customized RSS feeds on your dashboard, you can start by deleting all of the suggested widgets.

5. Watch the demonstration and take some notes to help guide you through the process.

www.tweetdeck.com

Tweetdeck is a desktop aggregator for Twitter feeds. You will need a Twitter account in order to use Tweetdeck. If you do not have an account yet, what are you waiting for? Go to www.twitter.com and set up your free account.

1.Go to tweetdeck.com

2.Choose to download Tweetdeck to your desktop.

3.Click and follow the instructions for downloading and installing the program.

4. Once installed, open the program. It will ask you to login. You can login using just your Twitter account, by clicking on...

Don’t worry, Twitter just recently bought Tweetdeck and all of your login credentials are used safely and securely.

5. The next screen will ask you to sign up for a Tweetdeck account. You don’t need to do this, but if you want to use Tweetdeck on multiple computers (your computer at school, your desktop and your laptop for example), then I suggest making a Tweetdeck account. This will make sure that every change you make on one computer will show up on the others.

6.Play around with the interface, settings and columns. Take notes below as I walk you through customizing your Tweetdeck.

www.diigo.com

Diigo is a social bookmarking web service with a twist. It allows you to keep all of your bookmarks, organized by tags, in the cloud and accessible at all times. With a Diigo account, it does not matter which computer you are using, you will always have access to your bookmarks. In addition, Diigo has groups that you can join to collaboratively build bookmark libraries.

1. Go to diigo.com

2. Click on

There is an option for setting up and educator account, but a standard account must be created first. Diigo supports educators and gives you free upgrades and an easy interface for adding students to your account. I use this in class as a way for my students to build annotated bibliographies and I encourage you check out these features.

3. There are a number of options on the account creation page. You can easily set up your account by linking it to your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter or Yahoo accounts. This simplifies the process.

4. Once logged in, click on “My Groups” in the top navigation bar.

5. From this screen click on on the right hand side.

6. This gets you access to a search bar where you can search for educational technology groups.

7. Once you find a group that has a good membership and appears to offer links that you could use, join the group.

8. The next screen is what makes Diigo Groups amazing. You can choose to get instant, daily or weekly digests emailed to you. You get an email summary of all of the bookmarks people added to the group.

Additional Web2.0 ToolsThese are some of the tools that are vital to the success of my classroom. I found

all of these through the services covered in this workshop.

http://www.tagxedo.com/Turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

http://www.glogster.com/“Poster yourself”. Create digital posters that can be embedded in blogs and on websites. Education accounts allow you to add and manage student accounts.

http://nieonline.com/aaec/cftc.cfm#Association of America Editorial Cartoonists: Editorial cartoons that can be used in the classroom.

www.grouply.com“Connect with a world of people who share your interests and passions!” Create free social networking style webpages for your classes. Easy way to continue the discussion outside of class.

http://www.slideshare.netAn easy way to share and/or embed PowerPoints and Keynotes, embed .pdf’s or docs. You can record your voice over and sync it to a presentation in a “Slidecast”. Great way to keep the class moving when there is a substitute.

http://www.classjump.comThe easiest way to set up a consumption type class website. Very easy to use, customize and navigate.

http://www.plagium.com/Copy a block of text and paste it into plagium. It will scour the web and tell you exactly what sources were used in the creation of the text with a very easy to read plagiarism report.

http://www.vizu.com/index.htmlFree web polls that can be embedded into websites or blogs

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/If you have a revolutionary project or lesson idea, uploaded here and see if you can make some money off of it. Great resource for very cheap lesson materials.

www.grantwrangler.comEasy way to search for grants specific to education. Got a project idea that needs funding? Write a grant.

http://goo.gl/l2YVhGizmo’s resource of free tech for teachers. Great go to place for cutting edge tech.