Handling documents on your school site

No one loves having to download a document from a website in order to read it. Even the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, which display PDFs within a browser, require a new window or tab in order to see a file. If you’re downloading a Word document, you have to leave your browser entirely.

To resolve this problem, use a service like Scribd or Box to embed and display important documents in one place on your site. First, upload your PDFs or Word documents to either service. Then, select the “embed” option to display the files on your site. If your document has multiple pages, visitors can scroll through them without having to leave the site. Embedded files are also printable by downloading and printing through the Scribd and Box document viewers. There’s an example of a Scribd. document display on my blog. Since Scribd and Box both use HTML5, they’re fully accessible on iPads.

Streamlining permissions forms

September means sending students home with a lot of paper forms that need parent signatures and then waiting—hoping?—for their return. You can bypass the black hole of student backpacks entirely by adding DropItToMe to your site. The service allows your site to receive files from visitors. Here’s how it works: after you’ve added a DropItToMe link to your Web page, visitors can click it to upload a file, which then goes to your Dropbox account. Dropbox gives you 2MB of free storage—more than adequate for collecting scanned documents from a classroom’s worth of parents. I used the DropItToMe and Dropbox combination to collect students’ work for a semester and never ran out of room. More free space, however, is available through Dropbox’s many promotions.

An alternative to adding DropItToMe to your site is to collect files directly in Dropbox through an email service. Send To Dropbox is a free tool that allows you to create a dedicated email address for your Dropbox account. This saves you the hassle of opening attachments within your personal email.

Save time with voice recognition messages

After you’ve been teaching all day, listening to voicemail messages can be a laborious task. Why not use voice-to-text tools so you can read the messages instead, getting to the main points faster? Google Voice or Speak Pipe widgets are handy to have on your website or blog. Both free services (available only in the U.S.) give site visitors the option of leaving a voicemail message, which is automatically transcribed to text. You can read them in your account’s inbox. If the text is unclear, the audio recording is also accessible.

Technical improvements aside, it’s also important to assess your site’s visual aesthetics, and adding some simple design elements can make a big difference. How effective is your choice of font style, size, and color? Your font style conveys a lot about your site, you, and your organization. For instance, Comic Sans in white on a dark green background evokes an association with chalkboards. Moreover, light fonts on dark backgrounds can strain the eye. And while Comic Sans or a chalkboard font might appeal to second graders, it could suggest a lack of seriousness to adults visiting your site. Save the fun fonts for short headings and articles that kids will read, and try using a standard Verdana or Georgia font for parent-oriented pages. Finally, is your home page cluttered looking? Consider putting only the most important information there and moving the rest to subpages.

Incorporating a few new elements into your Web presence this summer could pay dividends in the fall, with an improved site that looks cool and also saves you time.

We’ve all endured “death by PowerPoint.” It’s a painful experience for the audience and probably not all that fun for the presenter either. To help my students deliver effective presentations—free of those deadly bullet points—I have my go-to applications.

First, a good presentation begins with a clearly outlined story. Even presentations that are strictly fact-based can have a narrative. I always have students write outlines for the stories their presentations are going to tell, and I offer them a choice of outlining tools, including Text2MindMap, Penultimate, and that reliable standby, Google Documents.

To get started with Text2MindMap, students type their outlines on the provided “canvas.” When they click “draw,” a mindmap appears, illustrating the connections between the topics they provided. If the visualization doesn’t match what the students think are the connected items, they can edit their outlines and generate another mindmap.

Penultimate, a free iPad app, allows you to use a stylus to handwrite and draw in digital notebooks. Students can drag and drop pages into any order at any time during the outlining process. For the student who likes the long-hand approach, Penultimate is a nice blending of analog and digital processes.

After the outlines are done, we can begin creating slides. Telling a story with the aid of a slideshow is best accomplished with high-quality imagery. High-resolution pictures won’t become pixelated when you expand them to fill the slide. If students don’t have their own pictures, they can search for public domain (PD) and Creative Commons licensed images. Pixabay is an outstanding place to find images in the public domain. The Flickr Commons is another recommended source of PD content.

A free, beautifully designed application, Haiku Deck is the best presentation tool currently available for the iPad. Haiku Deck helps you find Creative Commons licensed images for your presentations. Each time you add a slide to your set, the application provides an image search button alongside it. Enter a search term and Haiku Deck will suggest high resolution images for you to use. You can also upload your own images from your iPad or import them from Instagram and Facebook.

When it comes to presentation software, there are plenty of alternatives to PowerPoint or Keynote. There’s Google Slides, which in the last year has expanded its theme options. Like Google Docs, Google Slides is a collaborative tool that students can use to create a presentation as part of a group project. Another benefit of using Google Slides is that as a teacher I can attach comments to specific parts of student slide shows, whether its calling attention to spelling mistakes or praising an especially well-designed slide. Two other worthy applications in this category are Empressr and Slide Rocket.

Empressr is a Web service for creating and sharing high quality online slide presentations—with a couple of features differentiating it from its competitors. First, Empressr gives you the option of embedding video from multiple sources into your slide show. Next is the editor feature, which allows users to draw, create, or edit images inside their slides.

Slide Rocket is similar to Empressr, with some very nice features such as 3-D transitions and a collaboration feature that enables other users to co-create presentations. Slide Rocket makes it easy to include video, images, or third party plug-ins. There’s also an option to sign in with a Google Account, which is why Slide Rocket has become fairly popular in schools that use Google Apps. Students can log in using their Google credentials, work on their projects, and save their work without having to keep track of a separate username and password.

Before my students stand in front of their peers to share their presentations, there’s one last thing that I require. And that’s to share their speaker notes with me so that I can provide some guidance if the images they’ve selected don’t match the spoken message.

A well-designed slidedeck is key, with the potential of making a good presentation into a great one. Have your students try these tools to help them do their very best work.

Three Sources of Images for Student Presentations from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

I vividly remember being disappointed during my first year of teaching: my students weren’t nearly as excited about primary source documents as I was. Primary source documents, as you know, offer readers a unique, real-world perspective, and I thought my kids would love delving into them. I soon learned that my disappointing results weren’t due to the documents that I’d selected, but rather how I was having students use them. That first year, they weren’t doing anything but reading them. Today, Web-based tools enable students to discover more primary sources than ever before and engage them in dynamic ways. The following items are some of my favorites.

The U.S. National Archives Experience Digital Vaults (pictured above) offers students a good introduction to discovering and working with primary source materials. Rather than turning kids loose on millions of records in the National Archives, Digital Vaults focuses on a curated collection of 1,200 items. Within the site, there are activities designed to help students discover important connections between primary sources. One section, Pathways Challenges, provides quizzes that ask kids to analyze a specific resource and then find the related document within the collection. Teachers and students can create their own quizzes or take advantage of the premade challenges. Students who create free Digital Vaults accounts can collect primary source documents and images and use them to create digital posters and videos within the available templates.

A related resource, National Archives Docs Teach offers seven free tools that educators can use to create interactive learning activities based on any primary source in the National Archives. The seven tools are: Finding a Sequence; Focusing on Details; Making Connections; Mapping History; Seeing the Big Picture; Weighing the Evidence, and Interpreting Data. To get a sense of how each of these works, you can view activities that teachers have created and shared.

Historical Scene Investigation, hosted by the University of William & Mary School of Education, provides a good model for primary source-based classroom activities, presenting historical cases for students to crack. Each case presents kids with clues to analyze in order to form a conclusion to each investigation. The clues come in the form of primary documents and images and include secondary sources. HSI provides students with “case files” in which they can record the evidence they find in the historical content. At the conclusion of their inquiries, kids must answer questions and decide if the case should be closed or if more sleuthing is necessary. If the premade activities don’t fit your curriculum, use the model to create your own historical scene investigations with your own resources.

The World Digital Library is a database of more than 7,000 primary source documents and images from around the world. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, WDL can be searched by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource. Search tools and content descriptions are available in seven languages. And roughly half of WDL’s resources, in my estimation, consist of historical maps and images. Students can also search the database by clicking through the map on its homepage. Use the Historical Scene Investigation or Pathways Challenge model to develop activities for your students to complete when they visit the World Digital Library.

How about your students? If they’re not wild about primary sources, then try using these tools to get them to interact with the documents—instead of just passively reading them. You ust might be able to change their attitudes for the better.

It’s spring, a time when high school students start looking for summer jobs or internships—and that requires some attention to their resumes and portfolios. While some prospective employers may be fine with traditional documents, the companies where I’d like to see my students land a position favor digital portfolios. Assembling an online personal showcase can be accomplished with a number of freely available tools. The following recommended sites and apps are also worth a visit by teachers and librarians looking to retool their own resumes.

About.me is a free tool for creating a one-page display (pictured) of your best work, highlighting examples of select blog posts, video creations, and more. You can also link to your social network profiles on About.me. Most prospective employers are going to seek these out anyway, so do them a favor by linking directly to your Twitter or Tumblr account, for example—a time-saver for an employer that also indicates that you don’t have anything in your digital footprint to hide.

Another option, Visual CV, lets you apply the traditional one-page resume approach to building your digital portfolio. In the main column of your Visual CV page, add all of the typical elements of a resume, such as “objective,” “experience,” and “education.” In the side columns, you can include links to your blog and social network profiles and embed video or audio clips. Your Visual CV is assigned its own URL, and via several available widgets, you can embed the file on your blog or website. Need a hard copy of your resume? Download your Visual CV as a PDF and print it minus the multimedia elements.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t have a blog or website or any multimedia to display,” now is a good time to start creating those materials. The technical aspect of starting a blog is the easy part. Blogger and Edublogs offer great tutorials that can get you up and running with your first blog in under 30 minutes. The real work of blogging comes after you’ve chosen your URL and your blog design. Committing to a regular schedule of posting can be difficult. A weekly reflection about your teaching practice, including your successes and failures, might be a good start. Write more frequently if you like, but write consistently. Over time, you’ll have a nice journal of your experiences. And when someone asks you to share your philosophy of education, you won’t have to develop one on the fly because you’ll be able to pull your best ideas from all of your blog posts.

Writing isn’t for everyone, and, thankfully, blogging isn’t restricted to composing prose. Try posting in the form of a video clip or audio message. SoundCloud makes it easy to create audio files to share on a blog. Use the SoundCloud website or mobile apps (available for Android and iOS devices) to make brief recordings about your latest library project, for example, or share your thoughts on the flipped classroom concept. Ready for your close-up? Create a video message to post on your blog with YouTube apps for Android and iOS devices. Or give YouTube’s native recorder a try in your Web browser.

Diagram created in GoClass

Regardless of what curriculum areas we teach, observing and assessing our students is something that we all do every day. Thanks to mobile devices like iPads and Android tablets, recording our informal observations and formal assessments has never been easier. Here are some of the best mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites available.

Infuse Learning is a free service that allows you to create and deliver assessments on your laptop, iPad, or Android device and push individual questions, prompts, and even complete quizzes out to students’ devices in private virtual classrooms. Your questions and prompts can take on a variety of formats including multiple choice, true/false, and short answer style; it even allows students to respond by creating drawings or diagrams on their own devices. This would be especially useful, for example, in a biology class, where you could ask students to create cell diagrams on their devices and submit them to you electronically. Infuse Learning is the most universally accessible app on this list because it offers both audio support and multiple language options—the service will read your questions and prompts aloud to students, or translate them into students’ native languages.

GoClass is a free iPad application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. Your lessons can include annotated images, freehand sketches, text, and video. GoClass also gives teachers various tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using which lessons and when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their kids, then project those student responses to the class without showing students’ names. The image (above), from GoClass, illustrates how a teacher might use the app in the classroom.

Google Documents is a great means to creating assessment forms that display properly both in Safari on iPads and on Android device browsers. I often use Google Forms to create a simple pre-learning skills assessment or prior knowledge survey for my students, using the scale option built into the interface. For example, when I facilitate Google Apps trainings, I ask participants to rank their current skills on a scale of one to five. In professional development settings, I make form responses anonymous. When I use Google Forms in classrooms with students, I require that they enter their names. Then I can mill about the classroom with my iPad, view responses as they come in, and have discussions with students on an individual basis. For directions on creating and distributing a form using Google Documents, check out my professional guide, Google Docs and Google Drive for Teachers.

For totally informal and unplanned recording of observations about my students, Evernote is my go-to app. I have Evernote installed on every device that I use on a regular basis (MacBook, iPad, Nexus 7, Windows 7 on my desktop PC) to jot down just about everything, from interesting sites that I find while browsing the Web to reminders to myself to pick up eggs at the market. The speech-to-text option in Evernote makes it exceedingly handy because you can dictate notes rather than type them; if you speak clearly, the transcription is quite good. Evernote also allows you to tag your notes—which makes it easy to search through everything in your Evernote account—and sort your notes into different notebooks. I create a notebook for each class that I teach so that I can quickly access all of my relevant notes and resources out of the thousands of notes currently in my account.

Finally, if you’re looking for a tool to record your observations of student behaviors while also creating an engaging student experience, give ClassDojo a try. ClassDojo will work on any modern Web browser on your laptop, iPad, or Android device. ClassDojo allows you to record your observations and easily share them with students and their parents.

There isn’t one single system of observation and assessment that works for every teacher, but the tools outlined above have been a hit wherever I have shown them. What’s your favorite mobile system for recording observations and assessments of your students?

’Tis the season for prizes, including the 2012 Edublog Awards. Announced yesterday, the winners and runners-up include “Best Individual Blog,” “Best Twitter Hashtag,” and “Best Individual Tweeter.”

Sponsored by blogging service Edublogs, the awards are determined by a nomination process open to the general public, and winners and runners-up are chosen by vote. The awards were started in 2004 as a response to schools, districts, and educational institutions blocking the use of social media with the intention of promoting the importance and relevancy of these sites.

SLJ’s “Cool Tools” columnist Richard Byrne garnered both “Best Ed Tech/Resource Sharing Blog” and a runner-up award for “Best Individual Blog” for his site Free Technology for Teachers, where he provides practical tips for incorporating technology into the classroom. From apps that help students keep track of homework assignments and platforms for peer tutoring, to infographics on the solar eclipse and programs providing an in-depth look at human anatomy, Byrne’s site has something for everyone.

Bibliophiles looking for a site melding tech and kid lit will appreciate John Schumacher’s (aka Mr. Schu) Watch. Connect. Read (pictured), which was runner-up in the “Best/library/librarian blog” category. Exploring the world of book trailers, Schu’s blog also features interviews with authors and illustrators, revisits Newbery and Caldecott-winning books, and recently included the highlights of a Twitter chat about the “Babymouse” and “Lunch Lady” graphic novels. “Best Library/librarian blog” winner, Educational Blog, Iliana Ilieva-Dabova shares tips and suggestions for Bulgarian teachers creating lesson plans.

For educators eager for apps but overwhelmed by the vast selection, there’s the Edublog category “Best Mobile App.”: The winner, Flying Books, is based upon William Joyce’s short film and picture book The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (Atheneum, 2012), the story of a man who follows a flying book into a library where he spends years working. Runners-up included apps for Dropbox, which lets  users  share videos and images, Evernote, for storing ideas and notes, and the Night Zookeeper Drawing Torch, a game that features animals and monsters and that lets players tap into their drawing abilities.

“Best Student Blog” and “Most Influential Blog Post” went to Jaden, a student in California who blogs on subjects ranging from the past presidential election to the “Hunger Games” series at Jaden’s Awesome Blog. In “Ten things I’ve learned from blogging,” the fifth-grader shared wise words about lessons learned while creating a social media presence. Tips:  “When people are nice enough to comment on your blog, comment back so they will return to your blog,” “Don’t post pictures of yourself,” and “Add gadgets to make your blog the best it can be.”

The winner of the “Best Twitter Hashtag,” #UnfollowBullying was started by  the Elk Grove Unified School District as a way to take a stance against cyber-bullying. Best Hashtag runners-up included #comments4kids, providing ways for students and teachers to find blogs they’d like to comment on, and #slpeeps, for speech and language professionals.

@SpeechyKeenSLP won the “Best Individual Tweeter” award, while @ictmagic and @RossMannell were among the runners-up.

Making the most of Twitter was a common thread in this year’s awards. The runner-up for “Most Influential Blog Post,” “Nomenclature and basic functions of Twitter” by Lexical Linguist, for example, gives novices a “101” introduction to the social media platform, sharing pointers about hashtags, privacy issues, and how to interact with other users.

Other winners included Jamie Forshey, instructional technology coach and teacher at the Bellwood-Antis School District in Central PA, who took “Best New Blog,” for Edutech for Teachers and Tim Rylands, an experienced teacher from the UK known for his integration computer games and technology into the classroom, who won Edublog’s “Lifetime Achievement” award.