This was my first time taking something from the Cloud Academy and now I am wondering why I haven't done it sooner. It was a great learning format. I had some floundering but was able to go back and get some answers and try things out.
I was working on this course in the student support room when others working in here asked what I was doing. I told them I was taking a course about g-mail since we would all being using it come January. They were thrilled and said that I could then teach all of them. While I'm happy to help when I can I will encourage those coworkers to take the course at the Cloud Academy.
Many of the things were brand new to me and other parts were things I knew already from using the calendar on my Iphone. I'm looking forward to using google calendar and g-mail in the near future.
Thanks for your instruction Martha.

Digital Literacy

Digital Literacy is critical for every student in order to successful and safe in the coming years.  Teaching internet safety is what I start my freshmen Digital Communications course with, and it amazes me every year how little the student know and how much information they are sending out without realizing it. ThingLink is a great tool that is more interactive so students won't feel like information is being pushed upon them and it is really about helping them be better community members.

Overall, great use of technology to distribute the information and very helpful - especially to me as I will be probably be stealing a lot for my lessons!!

I completed the Transforming Instruction: Why Tech? course.  I really liked the course, in particular the first chunk about the growth mindset.  The need to instill hardwork and persistence in our students has always been recognized, but the TEDtalk video was great.  The video really distilled why it is important to teach the idea that hardwork leads to learning.  It made me think of the value of looking at pre and post tests with students so that they can see the learning that happened because of their effort over time.  The idea about praising process and effort was also a helpful reminder to me as well.

First of all, I really liked the Cloud Academy idea.  I learned a lot about calendar and I appreciated being able to do this at my own pace.  I just completed the Cloud Academy: Calendars and GMail Course and I'm excited to explore calendars more.  I know it will be helpful to use once the district moves everyone to google in December.  I can imagine my team using it to help schedule meetings together, as well as being useful for district meetings.


As far as using calendars with my students I'm still not sure how I would use this in my classroom.  I know I would use this to help me be more efficient with my time and to schedule events with other adults, but I think with 3rd graders using a calendar (beyond some basic calendar skills) really isn't the best use of instructional time.

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DLW Cloud Academy: Digital Citizenship coming this fall

I've completed another lesson for our cloud academy. Hoping to have several more courses done by the end of the summer. Everyone is welcome to review the resources. MVSD teachers can register, participate in the activities, take a quiz and earn clock hours.

Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology (a preview)

I'm using my summer to create, explore and learn new things.  One thing that I am working on is a series of online courses for our teachers for the next school year.  This course is designed to provide some foundational understanding of the why behind tech in teaching and learning.  I am also participating in the Thinglink Teacher Challenge, so I chose to create my introduction to the course using Thinglink.  This is a bit of a mashup.  I used Canva as my main canvas for creating my infographic.  As I started working, I realised that I couldn't find the copyright friendly images I needed, so I created my own using Google Drawings.

 (Note to readers, if you create something that you don't plan on using to make money, consider using a Creative Commons license so that other teachers may use, with attribution, to build other great tools that they too, can share.)

 When I started looking for short and sweet introductory videos to link to my image, I found some really nice explanations that teachers had created (and shared) using Powtoon.  I will be creating another class on creating a Tech Tool Box. It's great to have tools like Thinglink, Canva, Google Draw and Powtoon in my Tool Box.

So here is a preview of one of my upcoming classes.