Arts Education

Did you ever want to take the content you find on a website and turn it into a PDF? Or eliminate the clutter on a website for an easier read? Or to print it? Or maybe you want to save content from a website for a favorite school project? Today I tried an iOS app called InstaWeb  to make a PDF and loved the results. Let's say I want to take a blog post I wrote, like this one , and turn it into a handout that I can use for PD. Open InstaWeb and paste in the URL of the website. There's a button in the lower left that gives you a reader view, with no distractions.  This cleans up a blog post so you just see the text and images of the post without the sidebars. It makes it easier to read, like this: Tap the button in the lower right and you make a PDF. Give it a quick title and save it to Drive or Dropbox or your favorite reader app. Then you can print it or email it. InstaWeb is an iOS app that usually costs $2.99 but is available for FREE right now. If you like the idea of maki...

I first wrote about Classkick almost two years ago. This powerful iOS app allows teachers to make slides to share with students as assignments. Students work on them a page at a time and teachers can watch in real time. Students can ask for feedback and teachers, or other students, can provide it. Classkick is one part presentation slides, one part student response system, one part collaboration tool, but, until recently, only for iOS devices. Early this year Classkick added a web-based viewer so students, or parents, could go back and review assignments that were already completed. I really liked that addition  but recently I received even better news that soon Classkick will be available as a web app for students using laptops, desktops, or chromebooks! When asked if I wanted to take a sneak peak at what the web app would look like, I jumped at the chance. Here's what I found out: Joining an assignment is about the same as in the app. The teacher provides a code. The stude...

I have been so excited this week to try out the new Slides Q&A feature in Google Slides. I saw lots of posts that announced this new feature, but haven't seen one that shows how to access it. So, since I was finally able to access today, here are step-by-step directions: 1. Open your presentation in Google Slides. In the upper right hand corner is the present button, now with a drop down arrow. Click the arrow to reveal two options: Presenter View and Present from Beginning. Choose Presenter View . You'll see a pop-up window like this one.  2. Click the Start new button. This creates, and provides, a link that the audience can use to submit the questions. The link shows in the pop-up window (with a toggle switch to turn questions off) and at the top of your projected slides, like this: Meanwhile, in the audience, people follow the URL to the link. Here they will find a simple window where they can type a question, choose to ask anonymously or not, and submit the question: ...

image from vimeo.com For years I made it a practice to write a note to one teacher who really influenced me as a student or a teacher, or both. This year I am reflecting on three extra special teachers - my most influential college professors - because  I am headed back to Hiram College for my twenty-fifth class reunion in June. The first of the three was my chemistry advisor, John Andrews. Thirty seconds after I met him, I wanted to be his advisee. He loved chemistry, he had a great sense of humor, and he was such a character. His classes were packed with information, but were also so entertaining! At the end of my sophomore year, I had had it with Organic Chemistry; I decided to change majors. I lined up my new English department advisor and went to him for his signature, the seal on the deal. He convinced me to give it one more quarter, take the next class for majors - one that he taught - and so I am a chemistry teacher. The second of the three was a Communications professor, ...

This month I taught a PD class called "Using Blended Learning to Enhance Vocabulary Instruction." I was looking for a FREE simple service to host the materials and serve as a digital classroom for my face-to-face class and I found it in Chalkup . Chalkup calls itself a "class collaboration platform" and it is very easy to use. Log in (with Google single sign-on or create an account with an email address) and do the typical new account stuff. Click "my courses" to join or create a class. After you create a class, you can invite students to join with a class code. The picture at the left shows most of the options for the class once you are ready to get started. Click on Materials to add links, files, videos and more to your class. You can organize it all into folders to make everything easy to find. It is very intuitive with drag & drop functionality. Creating assignments is very easy. Click Assignments and fill out the particulars. Upload a file or atta...

Here's a fun thing to try. Make a list of vocabulary words. New ones. Ask students to write short definitions - one-word definitions if possible. Assign each person one of the words and ask them to introduce it to the class by acting it out. After each student portrays the word, everyone else can guess at which word is being acted out. I tried it last weekend during a vocabulary class with a list of challenging adjectives. Participants wrote one-word definitions for each word. Then class members introduced themselves while trying to portray themselves as the adjective they were assigned. While listening to the introductions, class members tried to guess each word. When we were finished with all the introductions, we reviewed the one-word definitions and our guesses. Some were very easy to guess; others were more difficult. Here is the list of adjectives we used: affable, capricious, diffident, disconsolate, ebullient, erudite, garrulous, incisive, insipid, jocular, languid, loquaci...

Last weekend a colleague and I taught a professional development class about teaching vocabulary. He suggested a technique called "Story Impressions" to introduce a reading assignment. Here's how it works:  Give the students a list of words in the order they appear in the reading. Ask the students to write a story that includes these words in the order given. Ask the students to share their stories. Students read the assigned reading. Talk about the use of the vocabulary in the stories and the reading assignment. Since we were teaching a class about vocabulary, our assigned reading was an article about vocabulary. Our list of words was: Systematic,  Principled,  Cornerstone,  Comprehension,  Element,  Methodology,  Consensus,  Condensation,  Indirect,  Receptive,  Exposure,  Facilitators Our participants wrote wonderful stories. Five people shared their writing in class. Each story was different from each other story, but the...