Tech Happenings @ LvHS

Padlet is a 2-dimensional space like a board on a wall.... where you and your students can stick "sticky notes" all over it by double-clicking. The notes can also be links, images and webcam shots. By embedding a padlet board within a class Topic page students can refer back to it any time. Brainstorming - students can put their thoughts randomly all over the board, more than once. Then then can be sorted, duplicates removed, and re-arranged all over the board. The owner is the one who can control all the posts, so this is a great interactive whiteboard activity once everyone has posted their ideas. Pre-writing, problem solving, critical thinking. Gathering and sharing links  among student can sometimes be challenging. By asking students to share their Prezi or Blogger or Google Sites or Voki links on a Padlet board, everyone can quickly view all the student work. Students can also share links to youtube videos, research materials. Sharing images or graphs or map...

"So how do we as educators help students respect other people's work and not abuse it in this era of accessible information? The answer is, of course, to teach ethical academic behavior in a targeted way, to model it yourself, and to hold students accountable."... see Heather Wolpert-Gawron's blog post. This is a great resource, she includes a scavenger hunt that she uses with her students.

Interesting! Topics pages on WhippleHill (our Learning Management System) are secure pages, behind a password. You can embed some third-party content on a Topic page behind a password by simply pasting in the embed code and there you go... like youtube and Google Forms. Other sources of embed code need to be tweaked to  trick the browser  into thinking it is coming in as a secure source, and here is how you trick it: Where you see the web address, add an s to the http so it is now https. This works for Padlet, Prezi, and hopefully others. But not TED.com (y ou'll have to link to them for now instead of playing them on the page). Remember to change the width to 100% so it fills the space correctly and not too wide. Example: From testing I see that Safari seems to display things on a secure page without complaining. So if you use Safari exclusively you may be unaware of this issue. Internet Explorer may ask permission and then work fine. FireFox an...

Ever wonder how to embed a video so that it doesn’t extend beyond the column? Here’s an easy tip to make sure it fits regardless of the browser size. Set the “width” in the embed code to 100%. Take this video on DNA, when I’m looking at it from the Tablet view, it extends beyond the boundary of the column: I’m not liking how this looks. I want it to fit perfectly. To solve that problem, I changed the width from “320” to “100%”. 320 PX: 100%: With that simple change, my video is guaranteed to fit perfectly on the page.

We've seen man eye-catching and engrossing infographics lately. Here's a great one... http://www.studyblue.com/projects/infographic-mobile-studying-online-flashcards-on-smartphones/ and here's "40 useful infographics " that present a range of styles and topoics . http://sixrevisions.com/graphics-design/40-useful-and-creative-infographics/ Here's a mini course on infographics in education, designed by the NY Times: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/teaching-with-infographics-places-to-start/ And here's a great list of infographic information and samples: http://www.delicious.com/jkrauss/infographics As a teaching tool, here's a list of infographic sources: floating sheep: www.floatingsheep.com cool infographics : www.coolinfographics.com GapMinder : www.gapminder.com information is beautiful: www.informationisbeautiful.net But what about having students CREATE infographics as projects? Here's a great article! htt...

My Louisville's TOPICS feature enables you to post content by lesson, topic or unit. Quickly learn how to organize documents, links, text, message boards and embedded content for your students. Here is a short video demonstrating how to pull in materials that you had on your class pages in the past.  The first video shows you how to creat a topic, the second shows how to add older existing content to the topic. Note: you'll change the school year to 2012-2013 to search for last year's stuff... Third video is a school-created tutorial on making Topics, very nicely done! Thanks to the Latin School of Chicago! http://www.whipplehill.com/learning/new-improved-topics/?wemail=lflynn%40louisvillehs.org   http://www.whipplehill.com/learning/from-bulletin-board-to-topics-making-the-most-of-existing-content/?wemail=lflynn%40louisvillehs.org http://bcove.me/t45nmahx