Screencasting

Screencasting and screencasting tools have become very popular with teachers recently due to a rise in flipped classrooms and blended learning scenarios.  Although teacher-created screencasts have tremendous value, a student-created screencast is personally my favorite way to utilize this tool. Students can create screencasts to demonstrate their learning.  They  demonstrate their understanding of a topic by combining annotations, images and voice comments. Here are some screencast projects created by our fifth graders to demonstrate their understanding of cause and effect.  Thank you Mrs. Adametz for sharing!





 Some classroom assignments where you might find screencasting useful:

• science lab results

• report on research

• solve and explain math problems
• compare and contrast 
• oral descriptions
• how-to tutorials
• oral reading
• story retells

These screencast projects were made using the free version of Educreations.  What tools do you use to screencast?  Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

An Interview- Paul Elliott

I had the great honor of being able to interview teacher, Paul Elliott this morning.  Paul is the Gifted/Enrichment teacher in our elementary building at South Side Area School District.  Paul graciously agreed to talk with me about how he utilizes a wiki in his classroom.  Paul is quite knowledgeable about how wikis can and should work, but doesn't lose sight of the fact that a wiki is simply a tool and it's use should be balanced with other appropriate tools- both digital and analog. Our recorded conversation is linked below.  Please note that the conclusion of our conversation is not included because my recording device ran out of space, however, the recorded exchange is full of best practices and some excellent thoughts for using this tool in your own classroom.  I am also including links for Paul's wiki page and for pages of some of his students so that you might check these out yourself.  Thank you Paul for sharing!  I enjoyed our conversation and learned a great deal as well.



http://explore.sswiki.com/

http://joslyt.sswiki.com/

http://adapav.sswiki.com/

Please add to the conversation by sharing your experiences with wikis for teaching and learning in the comments below.

Two Time-Saving Tools For Your Classroom

This week, Beth Skibinski, one of our first grade teachers asked me to check out an app called Tiny Scanner.  I instantly fell in love with this app!  This is an easy to use scanner for your smartphone. Of course, a scanner for your phone is an awesome idea for so many non-school reasons, but as a classroom tool it can potentially eliminate your need to visit the copy room.  What teacher can't appreciate that?  With this app, you can scan non-digital content wherever you are and share it with your students digitally.  Don't redo all of those old pre-digital units that you spent so much time to build!  If you are using Google Classroom, as our district does, just attach your scanned pdf to your assignment.  Your students can access the document, open and complete it using an annotation tool such as Notability.  After previewing the lite version of this tool, I almost immediately upgraded to the pro version so that I would have more sharing options (Google Drive, Dropbox etc.). Thank you Beth for sharing.

Tiny Scanner Pro

Kristen Woodling, one of our Special Ed. teachers, shared another easy-to-use tech integration idea.  She and her team are using the Chirp app to help students who have difficulty transferring information from the board.  During morning routine, students are asked to edit a sentence from the board.  One student takes a photo of the sentence on his or her iPad, then "chirps" it to all of the other students in the class.  Learners then have the sentence on their own device, right in front of them to reference.  Thank you Kristen for a simple and thoughtful solution to a long-time classroom challenge.

Chirp app for iPhone

If you use a smartphone scanner  that you like, please share it with us in the comments below.  I would also love to hear about additional pdf annotation tools that our students with laptops can take advantage of.  Thanks for reading!  Thanks for sharing!