Deb Norton Tech

My co-teacher and I often begin the year with a few mini lessons in reading.  This year one of the lessons we are starting with is a lesson on making connections.  We searched and found a simple presentation on the Internet to use.  I love that searching Google led to a presentation that will save us a lot of time and will supplement our lesson perfectly. This presentation suggests using the book "The Best School Year Ever" by Barbara Robinson to practice the skill of making connections.  So I turned to Google Books to find this book. I simply typed in books.google.com and searched for the title.   I found that the book costs $1.99 which was within my price range!  I used Google Wallet to purchase the ebook version. Here are the results for a search for the book "Shiloh". When we use this book in our lesson in class, we can project the ebook on our SMART Board. There are some helpful features we can take advantage of when using an eboo...

Several of the sites that we use such as Kidblog and Glogster allow students to upload a profile picture.  Since we teach our students not to post actual pictures of themselves online, we create avatars. The site that we will be using is called Doppelme .  There are a lot of sites for creating avatars, but my choice is Doppelme .  Here's why. Doppelme does not require an account.  Simply create the avatar and the right click and save your image.  You can get an account for free and have access to all of the choices if you would like to. Doppelme has plenty of choices so that students' avatars will all look different. Doppelme looks realistic and like people. Doppelme is simple and easy to use. Before we start, I make sure students know that they must be appropriate in their choices. Here are what our avatars looked like last year. Notice that we also use pseudonyms instead of our real names for privacy on th...

We will begin our school year teaching our students about Copyright, Cyber and Internet Safety, Plagiarism, and Fair Use. Here are the sites that we will be using: #1 Surf Swell Island This is an adventure game from Disney.  Through playing the game, students will learn all about how to be appropriate and safe on the Internet. #2 Game Classroom  This interactive is a great way to answer questions that students have about Fair Use, Copyright, Creative Commons etc.   #3 Cyber Saftety This is site that looks very similar to an infographic.  The topics covered are Cyber bullying, Identity Thief  Plagiarism, Computer Viruses and Internet Safety. #4 Webonauts  This is an adventure game from PBSKids.org.  Students work to become part of the Internet Academy.  They will learn about privacy and how to be safe on the Internet. Here are the important concepts that Police Departments want students to learn about...

This past week was spent getting things ready for another year in the classroom.  My co-teacher and I met to lesson plan (thank you Google Docs!) and also went into our classroom to get things organized and decorated. It used to be that I would spend the majority of August in my classroom decorating and organizing, but things have changed over the past 20 years.  Today I spend most of my time at home on the computer getting things ready for our 1:1 laptop environment. Let me share with you some of the ways I have been getting ready. #1 - CSV file - I create a Google Spreadsheet with student names, email, a common password and usernames.  I can then download this Google spreadsheet as a CSV (comma separated values) file.  This saves me so much time in setting up accounts for my students.  I type everything in once and then can use this information to set up most of the accounts for my students. Here is a peek at the spreadsheet.  I won't show any ...

One of the sessions I had the pleasure of teaching at the Ripon Summer Tech Academy was a session on Google Apps and the Common Core. One of the main parts of this session was too look at actual examples of how teachers are using Google Apps (docs, forms, drawing, presentations, and spreadsheets) to meet the CCSS.   Feel free to take these examples and adapt them to your grade level and content area.  These examples promote collaboration, require higher level thinking and many use the new research tool. Group Research Form Students work collaboratively to decide on an essential research question.  They then use the research tool to find web sites that help them to collect information. And finally the students present their conclusions. Tree Chart Students edit this drawing to insert the topic, main idea and supporting details for a literary piece. Supporting Evidence Chart Students read a literary piece and then answer questions using supp...

Last year we had the opportunity to begin using iPads with our students through our Media Center.  We had 12 iPads available. This made creating online content and utilizing educational apps very doable. This year we are supposed to be getting 12 more ipads in the Media Center which should make the possibilities even greater for student creation!  :) I plan to make the best use of these iPads and to help me out I can refer to the generous amount of iPad apps shared by various presenters at the Ripon Summer Tech Academy . Dan King shared multimedia apps in this presentation .  Consider using the  iTalk app and the VidEditor app. Dan also shared a nice collection of apps for creating ebooks.  Click here to see this presentation.  Last year we used the Book Creator app as well as Story Kit and I was very impressed with both of these apps. Tim Nielsen also shared wonderful lists of apps.  Click here to view the list of...

Greetings! I've been gone for a week, but with good reason.  We have just wrapped up our second Ripon Summer Tech Academy facilitated by Naomi Harm of Innovative Educator Consulting .  And what a great academy it was.  Naomi's team of presenters delivered amazing presentations and were inspiring as always. The next series of posts will highlight several of the resources shared in various sessions.   All of the session resources and presentations can be found in this shared folder . Today I would like to share with you some very useful video tutorials from Naomi's session on using 1:1 Chromebooks.   Many teachers today are using Google Drive and the Google Suite of Apps to have students create assignments and turn them in. These video tutorials show how to manage this process in an organized and efficient way.  Each video is approximately 5 minutes in length, so in just about 20 minutes, you will have a good understanding of what to do. Vi...