What's Up Next? NextUp Keeps Your Classroom Running on Time

If you're like me, you often plan lessons down to the minute only to run out of time in the end because you let something run on longer than it should have. Of course, monitoring and adjusting is part of the job, and often we should allow more time for a discussion or activity than we originally planned. Nonetheless, I can think of several times when I wanted students to do something (for instance, share with a partner) for a specific length of time and not a second longer. Then I wanted them to move on to the next time-specific activity. In many of these cases I just simply lost track of time because I was called over to help or got distracted in some other way. Now there's a solution: NextUp. This site allows you to create agenda items with specific time allotments for each item. This is done on the fly--there's no account sign up and it's very easy and intuitive to use.

First, go to the site and start adding your agenda items/topics with the amount of time you want to allot for each activity.

Once you've added all your items/topic, select "Create Agenda." That will take you to a new screen that will allow you to "Start the Meeting." 

And you're done . . . the clock will wind down and you and students can monitor how much time is left by watching the seconds tick away if you project the site for all to see: 

That's it--it really is that simple. Drawbacks? There's no restarting the clock or pausing, so this wouldn't be appropriate for activities that truly depend on you being flexible about time. However, in certain circumstances, I think this tool would have really kept me and my students on track, in particular when students were working in groups and needed to monitor their time. I hate to think about how much time was wasted sometimes because I failed to keep us on track.

What do you think? What is a series of activities (aka "Topics")  in your class that you could use this for? Take it for a spin and tell us how it goes.

Coming Soon! Google+Tahoma=Go.Tahoma

You recently received an email explaining how next fall all staff and secondary students will have access to our Go.Tahoma suite of free Google Apps for education, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar—all offered under our own domain. View this video to understand the project:

You can read more about the project at our Go.Tahoma website. In particular, visit the Staff Information page for information tailored to you.

So, Learn-and-Earn-ers--what do you think? Take a look at the some of the lesson plans that teachers from all over the world have developed that use Google Apps. Or, do a little bit of "Googling" to find out how teachers are using the apps--try "Google docs in the classroom" or "Using Google sites with students" and see what you find. Or, take a look at the Google tutorials that have been developed by Richard Byrne over at his blog Free Technology for Teachers.

For those of you posting here for clock hours, please share your thoughts and questions after taking a few minutes to get acquainted with the project, checking out our Go.Tahoma website, and perusing one or two of the other links I shared above. I'm eager to hear what you have to say!

Use Socrative to Check for Understanding

I owe Kevin Hurt at TJH a finder's fee for this week's topic. Thanks, Kevin! Socrative is a student response system that allows students to respond to multiple choice, T/F, and open-ended question that you post (or share orally) in class and they answer via a laptop, netbook, smart phone, or iPad--pretty much any device. There is no account set up required on the part of the student. In fact, once you've created your account, you're good to go--all you do is provide your students with the room number that Socrative gives you, then select the type of activity you want students to do. The "Hands On Demo" in the center of their home page does a great job of showing you the way it works from both the teacher and student point of view.

Socrative's Blog has some great ideas for how to use it. For instance, there's "3 Easy Ways to Introduce Socrative--Baby Steps" and "1-2-3 Word Cloud".

What are you waiting for? Sign up and give it a test drive with your students. Come back here and tell us what you thought. Is this a tool you could see yourself using regularly?

Big Ideas for Your Classroom

In December I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Big Ideas Fest outside of San Francisco thanks to a scholarship from ISKME (the organization responsible for the conference). The Big Ideas Fest draws together "teachers, innovators, edupreneurs, policy makers, and students with big ideas for transforming K-20 education" for three days. During that time I was able to work and talk with a diverse group of people, ranging from Lee LeFever, the founder of Common Craft and mastermind behind those cool "Wikis/blogs/etc. in Plain English" videos, to Pete Forsyth, a consultant who helps businesses and organizations "make sense of collaborative communities," in particular Wikipedia. It was truly an interesting group that offered a variety of perspectives that we don't always get at educational conferences. I encourage you to keep your eyes open for the 2012 conference and consider attending.

Our Prototype

In particular, though, I was most intrigued by the "Action Collab" process we all participated in over the course of the conference. In our Action Collabs, we tackled BIG challenges for education then brainstormed and prototyped solutions.  This process is based on design thinking and the whole time I just kept thinking about how it could be an incredibly powerful tool to use with students. Then, just a few weeks ago, I discovered an article  by Betty Ray, a participant at Big Ideas, on the Edutopia website. In her article, "Design Thinking: Lessons for the Classroom" Ray summarizes the process and provides insight into how a teacher might use it in the classroom. Take a moment to read the article, then come back here and share how you could imagine using this process in your classroom. And, of course, if you're inspired to actually try it out, let me know--I'd love to help!

Google's New Privacy Policy

My guess is that most of you have never read a privacy policy before. I hope that's about to change.

As you may have heard (because there's a lot of hubbub about it the media right now), Google is changing its privacy policy, essentially bringing one unified policy to bear on all of its products (e.g. Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.). This is kind of a big deal (thus the hubbub). Google even urges you to read it right underneath their search bar on the standard Google Search  page as you can see here:

You can read what the Washington Post said about it on Tuesday, and if you Google it, you can find a myriad of blog posts and other reactions to the announcement. They range from outrage to it's-no-big-deal. Regardless of how you feel, I think it's just good to be informed. Even though I've been well aware that Google uses the content of my Gmail to tailor ads to me for quite some time, for some this might be a surprise. And it hasn't been coincidence for a long time when an ad for that Ann Taylor sweater you were admiring online yesterday suddenly shows up in the right sidebar of that blog you read.

Yes, Google has been paying attention to what you do online for a long time. They do it to provide you with better search results and they do it to provide you with (hopefully) advertising that you might actually be interested in. But if you're using Google or have an Android phone, you should be aware of the change which will become effective March 1. It's actually not that horrible of a read. Go read it now, and if you have a Google Account, check out your dashboard to see specifically what information Google has and is collecting about you.

NOTE: I'm not at trying to alarm you. In fact, I'm not planning to cancel my personal Google account, but I am planning on carefully reviewing my dashboard this weekend. I think it is important to be informed in this digital world of ours. Also, it's probably not a horrible idea to encourage your students to take a look as well. So, take a minute to read the policy, then come back here and share new learning, insights, questions and/or issues that this post raises for you.

Another NOTE: If you recall, last spring I did a post that included a really interesting TED Talk about how web content gets personalized for you by sites like FaceBook, Yahoo!, and Google. Reviewing that talk in light of this change makes for some interesting thinking.

Creative Commons--Better Searching Available

If you've been with the Learn and Earn since its beginnings you know that each year I eventually talk about copyright and Creative Commons licensing. Understanding and respecting copyright is becoming increasingly important as more and more "common folk" like you and me (and, of course, students) access, download, use, create, and post digital content. In other words,  understanding and respecting copyright isn't just about knowing whether you can make extra copies of a story in a book for your students anymore. If you need a good primer about copyright and how it applies to teachers and students, this blog presented as an online short course in copyright is very useful--even if just for review.

Even when simplified, copyright and fair use can be difficult to understand--there's just so much grey area. That's why I love Creative Commons licensing! The best part of CC licensing is that content creators (artists, writers, musicians, students, teachers, etc.) specify permission levels upfront. With Creative Commons, there's no need to track down the person who holds the copyright of a work to seek permission to use it. Here is a lovely 5-minute intro to Creative Commons for your own edification that would also be appropriate to share with students.



Every time I talk about Creative Commons people are usually very receptive, but they whine (understandably) about the extra work it takes to seek out images, music, etc. that is CC licensed. Fret no more! The Creative Commons folks have finally created a good search page. I tried it out today for images on Flickr and I was happy with my results--much easier than going directly to Flickr and searching for CC licensed images there.

For clock hours this week, take a moment to consider where and when in your curriculum you could reinforce good digital citizenship with your students by expecting them to only use CC licensed content AND/OR expecting them to license their own work with the appropriate Creative Common license.

Happy New Year! and YouTube

Welcome to 2012! I hope you all had a relaxing break. It was fun to read what folks were thankful for technology-wise and see some of your goals in the last post. To me, it's amazing how quickly document cameras, projectors, and ready student access in the classroom have become something we've just come to expect and rely on in our daily lives as teachers. I think that's real progress--seeing technology as a reliable, essential ingredient to making teaching easier and learning more engaging, thus enhancing our Classroom 10 objectives.

Now, onto this week's post: YouTube. I suspect you are all using video in some way, shape, or form in the classroom, so I thought I'd take a few minutes (paragraphs) to talk (write) about YouTube. As you know, YouTube is blocked at school for students, but it is open to teachers. Please note that if you ever get an Access Denied! warning as a teacher, you likely only need to log off and log back on to solve the problem. This video explains the problem and the solution.

Back to YouTube. Yes, there is lots of content on YouTube that is inappropriate and just plain stupid, but that shouldn't stop us from exploring, using, and sharing the incredible resources available there with our students. In fact, I'm betting most of you already do. This blog post offers tips for making YouTube easier to use in the classroom. Also, if you scroll down to the bottom and look at the comments, you'll see a reference to YouTube for Schools. Once we have our school Google accounts set up (coming later this spring) we'll register our schools. However, in the meantime, you can still check out the "Edu" side of YouTube here, and I encourage you to do so! For instance, do you know about Kahn Academy? Kahn Academy (whose videos are readily available through their site or YouTube channel) offers a huge range of short educational videos/tutorials. Then there are the incredible array of MIT, Stanford, and other university courses that are available. It's really something! Certainly, there may not be something for everyone, but as access to education content is becoming more open and available we need to know about these resources and share them with students when appropriate.

For this week's assignment, after you've looked over some of the links I shared, I'd like you to share how YOU are using content from YouTube (or other video resources such as Discovery Streaming, Vimeo, TeacherTube, etc.) in your classroom.