Deb Norton Tech

Yesterday I tried out a new app called Three Ring on my iPad.   Three Ring is used to quickly and easily digitize student work and keep a portfolio of student work or classroom resources. Here is how it works.  First I signed up for an account at www.threering.com .  Once I had an account, then I set up my classes (math, reading, etc.) and entered my students' names.   Then I downloaded the app onto our ipad.  It is FREE! Once I had opened the app, I chose a subject    and student.   Then I clicked on Capture Student Work.   The iPad's camera opened and I took a picture of the student's work.  I also took some pictures of students working together to help keep a record of assigned partners. I could then view the work I had captured by going to the website on my browser.  From the website I could add more students to the work that was captured and I could add a note like the one you see in the above ca...

Here are three sites to use with your students if you are studying money. #1 - The Lifespan of a Dollar Infographic #2 - Festisite -Put your photo onto money.  Look at money from around the world. #3 - Presidential Portraits - Show what you know about the Presidents on money. And a bonus: #4 - A collection of links on Delicious  by one of the people I follow, jmillot. Enjoy!

Today, I just have to share this Prezi presentation by Clint Stephens.  The Prezi is about Educational Apps and it is so well organized and full of great apps.  Here is the Prezi: 60 Educational Apps in 60 Minutes on Prezi

Fact Monster is a site I recently discovered full of fun facts and information for students and teachers. Find facts about many topics including sports, science, people, etc. Also there is a great reference section with a homework center, atlas, dictionary, almanac, timeline and encyclopedia.   Here are a few things I found while searching through Fact Monster : A huge collection of U.S. facts and info. Profiles on each state. A really nice atlas of The world A continent A country Biographies from all over the world! There is so much more to discover at Fact Monster .  I highly recommend using Fact Monster with your students.

It was time for our Scholastic Book Fair this past week.  Students always love exploring the new books available.   Bookwinks is a site that introduces books to students through video book talks.  The videos are very well done.  A person can search for books by subject, grade level, title or author.  Not every book has a video.  My reading students really enjoyed watching these videos and looking for the books at the Book Fair.  I highly recommend sharing a video book talk with your students.  It peaks their interest in new books and gives them great motivation to read.

  For about seven months now I've been wanting to Flip my Classroom!  What am I talking about?  The Flipped Classroom.  If you have never heard of the Flipped Classroom before, click here to see what it is and some examples of classrooms using it.   When you flip your classroom it means that students are watching videos created by the teacher to learn a concept.  In a true Flipped Classroom, the learning is done outside of the classroom and then class time focuses on having better interaction and engagement among the students through collaboration and creation using what the students have learned.   I was not able to implement a true Flipped Classroom since we have several students who do not have computers or Internet at home.   So I have started a Partial Flipped Classroom.  Here is how I'm doing it. We started with a Google Presentation that helps students to understand what they would need to do in order to be succe...

I made a Simple Booklet to share some language sites with you. Enjoy!                                                     Click here to  Check out this Simplebooklet   You can make your own Simple Booklet by clicking here .

Sometimes the best way to explain something is through a drawing.  Today I'd like to share two drawing sites that have some great features.  One feature that they don't require a registration.   The first site is FlockDraw .  Here are some of the features: I especially like the fact that students can work together on a drawing.   If you use the embed code to embed the drawing on your site, you are actually sharing the link to your drawing and then people can join you and draw with you.  For example, here is a drawing embedded onto a wiki.  If you type in a nickname, you can draw on my picture.  This could be a bit risky with privacy.  I wouldn't use this in my classroom. Here is a drawing I made using Flockdraw to demonstrate my understanding of classifying triangles. The second site is called Drawzit .  This site has some really nice features as well.   There is no registration needed  There are ho...

  This past week I used QR codes in my science lesson.   This is a lesson I created last year to supplement what my students had learned about the Circulatory System.    It worked somewhat like a scavenger hunt in that the students were using the QR codes to take them to a website and then they needed to answer some questions or fill in some information from what they had learned from that site.  The QR codes and questions were on small bookmarks. QR codes were a great way for our students to use the Internet and gather information.  The websites they visited included an interactive site showing the scale of objects, two videos, an informational site and a virtual microscope.  My students were certainly demonstrating the 21st Century skill of digital literacy within this lesson. Click here  to see the bookmarks that I created.  Feel free to make a copy for yourself and adapt this lesson to your needs and content. Cl...