Featured 5-19-2014: Google Classroom

 

Classroom is a new, free tool coming to Google Apps for Education that helps teachers easily and quickly create and organize assignments, provide feedback, and communicate with their classes.

 

By integrating Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail, Classroom can help teachers manage assignments quickly and easily, and communicate with their students more efficiently and effectively. Classroom lets teachers make announcements and pose questions online.

 

Students using Classroom are able to better organize their work, complete and submit assignments, and interact directly with their teachers and peers. Drive folders are automatically created for each assignment and for each student. Students can readily see what assignments are due on an assignments page.

 

 Watch Previewing a new Classroom by Google

 

Classroom contains no ads, does not use your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.

 

 

A limited number of educators are being invited to try Classroom. Teachers can apply for a preview. By September, Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured: 1-14-2014 Nutmeg Education

Nutmeg Education is designed to give teachers an easy way to assess, track and improve student performance and build better Common Core assessments.

Create assessments with questions from Nutmeg Education's repository, or create your own questions. Pick from or create multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank or true/false questions. In the works are auto-generated questions and “interactive” questions, such as responding by clicking on a point in the coordinate plan.

The Live Resource Bank is a collection of Common Core aligned videos, games, and worksheets that can be attached to an assessment. The related Common Core standard appears to students below each question in their quiz results. All of the items in the bank come from free online websites and Open Education Resources  All are rated by teachers and sorted with the best, most-used resources at the top.

  

Students will be sent login details and “New Assessment” notifications via email. Students can take assessments with any web-connected device, or even with paper/pencil.

Students with access to an iOS device can use this free Nutmeg Education app to take your assessments. Students get immediate feedback and access to free tutorials and resources to improve.

 

 

Nutmeg Education supports learning by providing you with data and insights on students' Common Core understanding. 

 

Watch Nutmeg Education: Fostering a National Teacher Community

 

Early adopters will get Nutmeg Education completely free for one year. In a few months, new users will start to be charged for full access to the site.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Featured: 2/27/2013 Common Curriculum [Planning]

Common Curriculum is meant to streamline the lesson planning process so you can stop wasting time and go teach. Common Curriculum makes it easy to build, organize, and share your lesson plans.



View your lessons for the entire week at a glance, and plan with Common Curriculum in the context of the unit and week. Teachers are able to customize templates to suit their lesson plans. Changes to templates affect your entire course

Rearrange the sections of your lesson using a clean drag-and-drop interface. Add activities with the click of a button. Upload student materials to any section of your lesson.



Common Curriculum will automatically generate class websites from your lessons, keeping students and parents informed about homework, tests, and projects. Any sections of your lessons you mark public are published to your own class website.

Watch the video: Common Curriculum -- Plan the way you teach

Be better organized with all your courses in one place. Any lesson created and stored on Common Curriculum can be printed with the click of a button.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION:http://cmp.ly/0

Catch of The Day - SnappSchool - 9/22/2011

Deliver real-time classroom updates to parents by email, text message, or both, right from your cell phone using SnappSchool.

Send your message to SnappSchool, either by email or text message, and it automatically gets forwarded to all of your students’ parents who have subscribed to the service. Parents can choose to receive your updates via email, SMS, or both.

SnappSchool features:

• No managing contact info, parents subscribe to your updates by sending SnappSchool a single text message or email.
• Communication is one-way, SnappSchool does not allow text recipients to respond directly to you through the service. Your contact information remains confidential
• You can create different groups for parents who speak different languages.

SnappSchool provides both a PDF user guide for teachers and a parent flyer template in Doc format.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Catch of The Day - Have Fun Teaching - 9/19/2011

Have Fun Teaching is a rich source of supplemental teaching materials such as  worksheets, coloring pages, songs, videos, and fun activities.

The mission of Have Fun Teaching is to:

• create the best online resource for teachers, parents, home-schoolers, and kids.
• provide teachers with more time with kids and less time with lesson plans.
• give hope and encouragement to fellow educators.
• help teachers to have fun teaching.

Have Fun Teaching offers songs and videos for kids and teachers on topics like the alphabet, math, phonics, grammar, counting, and character.

In the Get Connected section you can link to Have Fun Teaching on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites to get updates, tips, videos, free stuff, and more. The Tools area includes teacher tools, lesson plans, teacher resources, free stuff for teachers, clipart, signs and posters, and more.

You can sign up for the Have Fun Teaching email newsletter for website updates, blog updates, lesson plan ideas, and the latest resources.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Simple Tips for Clearing Your Inbox

I hear so many teachers in our district complain about being overwhelmed with email. Just one peek at their inboxes and I see why. Virtually every piece of email they receive stays in the inbox until they just arbitrarily delete everything (both important and trivial) out of frustration.

And finding a particular email is an agonizing exercise in scrolling through dozens, maybe hundreds, of messages cluttering the inbox.

Today, I put together this tip sheet for those teachers. Apart from the unique technical how-to's specific to our less than state-of-the-art email system, the tips could be used by anyone who finds himself email-challenged.
Managing Your MV Webmail

Teaching Email and Text Etiquette

Are you teaching students appropriate email and text etiquette? Traditionally, students were taught the proper form for letter writing of various sorts, but how many people regularly write letters anymore? Much of modern written communication is done by email and text.

Are we teaching good form for today's methods of communication? Do you, as a teacher, know what good email manners are?

Teaching Email and Text Etiquette - A LiveBinders collection of resources

Teaching Email and Text Etiquette

Related articles by Zemanta

• 100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics (buddypress.southamboyteacher.com)
• Business Etiquette For Dummies (For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance)) by Sue Fox (slideshare.net)

Create and Share Free Videos with nimbb.com

There's a new Web app, nimbb.com, which lets you create short (30 sec max) videos as easily as click Start, click Stop, click Save. You'll get a URL which you can email to people or HTML embed codes for two different sized movies which you can then insert into a blog, wiki, or Web page.
This is a quick example of the larger size embed. Took about a minute all together.

No registration or sign up is necessary. The site is still in alpha, so there may be glitches, but it was flawless for my example.

Getting Things Done: Using Your MV Webmail Account to Manage Your To Do List

Most of us have more things to get accomplished than we can keep track of. I find that a useful to do list is invaluable to keeping me on track. A solution that helps me stay on top of my CFF tasks is a simple to do list tied into my MV Webmail account. I can add tasks to the list from anywhere I can access email, even from my mobile phone or iPod.

There are three steps to getting this kind of Webmail to do list up and running: create a special folder for your to do items, make a filter to sort your to do list tasks from your other mail and send them into your to do list folder, and inserting a flag into the subject line of the emails.

1) Create a special folder for your to do items.

On the Webmail toolbar, click the Folders icon.

Next, name your to do folder, in this example I used the name ToDo List, then click the Create button.

Now a folder with that name should appear in the folder list below.

2) Make a filter to sort your to do list tasks from your other mail and send them into your ToDo List folder

On the Webmail toolbar, click the Options icon.

From the available options, select Filters and Exceptions

You now have four things to do in the window that appears:

1. From the drop-down menu next to If the, choose Subject
2. Following Subject header contains, type 2DO:
3. Choose move from the menu beside then
4. and choose ToDo List from the menu next to IMAP folder

Then click the Add button and the filter you just made should appear in the list.

3) Insert a 'flag' into the subject line of the emails that contain your to do list items.

When you need to add a task to your to do list, compose an email to yourself. In the subject line you MUST include the 'flag' that will send this to your to do list folder. That 'flag' is 2DO:. Also on the subject line, include a brief description of the task. If you wish, you may include more detail about the task in the body of the message.

That email should now be channeled into your ToDo List folder. Select that folder and you should see a list of your tasks.

You might want to add a priority number to the subject line, or due date, or whatever else you like. Delete the tasks as they are completed. Hope this helps you better manage your workload.

© 2008 Thomas Boito

Adding a Signature to Your Email

This short video shows the steps to create an email signature in Mo Valley Webmail.

Pile or File?

Are you a "piler" or a "filer"? Is your inbox a seemingly endless list of mail extending who knows har far into the past or does it contain only the last few messages you've received? How do you process email?

"your inbox, the fact is that if you simply leave everything there and let it get pushed down by new messages that are coming in, you're almost certainly not giving enough thought to the things that hit your inbox. For pilers, the only clue as to whether an email has been dealt with is whether it is marked as read or unread. But all too often we read emails when we are not currently in a position to do anything about them. Even if we're careful about going back and marking messages as unread, they still get pushed down, out of sight, out of mind."

Read more ... Piling vs. Filing - Emailers Anonymous - Download Squad

Pile of File?

Are you a "piler" or a "filer"? Is your inbox a seemingly endless list of mail extending who knows how far into the past or does it contain only the last few messages you've received? How do you process email?

"... your inbox, the fact is that if you simply leave everything there and let it get pushed down by new messages that are coming in, you're almost certainly not giving enough thought to the things that hit your inbox. For pilers, the only clue as to whether an email has been dealt with is whether it is marked as read or unread. But all too often we read emails when we are not currently in a position to do anything about them. Even if we're careful about going back and marking messages as unread, they still get pushed down, out of sight, out of mind."

Read more ... Piling vs. Filing - Emailers Anonymous - Download Squad