Deb Norton Tech

Wow, supply lists sure have changed over the years.  I've noticed that we have been asking for fewer and fewer school supplies since receiving our 1:1 laptops.  All we ask for are a few folders, some looseleaf paper, some pencils and a few odds and ends.  Don't worry, we still glue, color, cut and create every day.  Today our goal is to fill our students' desks with digital tools that promote creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving skills. Here are the digital tools our students will need to start the school year: Google Apps for Education including:   Gmail, Google Drive (no more Dropbox for us), Google Sites, Google Presentations and Google Forms                         SMART Notebook 11  this is usually one of our students favorite places for creating projects. Kidblog  most of our students have never blogged before 5th grade.  They lov...

Well, the Ripon Tech Academy sure was a great experience and I came away with so many new tools to implement this year in our classroom. Here are a few of the best take-aways. Naomi Harm is a phenomenal presenter.  She is a wealth of knowledge and I found her to be such a positive  inspirational  speaker.  I  truly  appreciated the fact that Naomi openly shared her digital tool box of resources with all of us to download and use in our profession.   If you don't currently follow Naomi on Twitter , you should start.  Course Director is my new choice for hosting online classes.  It is integrated with a Google account and I am quickly seeing all of the potential of this LMS.  Check out the online lesson I created for science.  I consider this a simple version of a course.  I can't wait to delve into Google Groups for discussions and give the grade book a try as well. Explain Everything might just be m...

For a while now I've been wanting to put our classroom projects and tools that we've used in our classroom into one place.  So I created a Project Showcase on Scoop.it to do just that!  This showcase does not include any professional tools.  I have only included what the students have used. Take a look: Click here to visit my Project Showcase Scoop.it page. I also have a Scoop.it for sharing technology resources  that includes many resources I come across each day on the web.  and  a Scoop.it for sharing Friday Fun   which are sites I share with my students to improve creativity and critical thinking skills. I just love using Scoop.it for bookmarking, but even more for finding what others are using and bookmarking.  

I love change and and rarely do the same thing over and over.  So a blog makeover was  inevitable .  It takes quite a bit to make a blog look completely different, but I have found ways to make it easier on myself. Here are the resources I used to complete my blog makeover.   I found the background at the Dotty Dot Dot blog.  I chose Summer Sunset and simply had to copy the code and insert it.  I found directions on how to do this here .  I could have use the header (the title at the top of a blog) from this site as well, but I decided it was too plain, so I searched for a different header. Shabby Blogs provided me with a header that fit my background perfectly.  I found directions to change my header here . I wanted to add my blog title to the header, so I used a photo editing site called Fotoflexer .  This was the first time I had used this site and I loved it!  I have since used Fotoflexer for some other projec...

Below I have embedded one of my Google Docs with some really neat fonts. I can't believe I didn't already know how to add more fonts to my Google Docs.  As I was going through my Google Reader, I read a post on Google Apps Experts blog .  Take a look and see how simple it is to add new fonts. Isn't that really easy?  I never even noticed "add fonts".  I need to pay better attention! Would you also like to know how I made a colorful background in my Google Doc? First click on File and then Page Setup In Page Setup, click on Page Color and click on any color. If you don't see a color to your liking, click on custom to get the whole array of possible colors.  Notice that you can also change the orientation, margins and paper size. And now for the biggest thing I just learned. . .  When I first tried to embed the above Google Doc into this blog it looked like this: I was very frustrated that my document was so small.  I trie...

Last week I sewed 30 new chair backs for our classroom.  This involved material, a cutting mat, a sewing machine and thread. Yes, I love DIY projects and enjoy doing something crafty now and then. One of my favorite places to find DIY projects is Charity Preston's blog called T he Organized Classroom Blog .   I also subscribe to Charity Preston's You Tube channel .   Check out this video on making colored glue dots: Recently I came across another great blog for DIY Projects.  It is called Classroom DIY .   I wasn't surprised to see that Charity Preston is a contributor to this blog among many others.   Here are some of my favorite posts that inspire me to create things for our  classroom. #1 - Create Digital Frames #2 DIY Crate Seats #3 Student Welcome Kit #4 DIY Student Work Display #5 DIY Clip Bookmarks #6 - DIY "Marbleized" Bulletin Board Borders If you love DIY project...