Deb Norton Tech

At some point in time our district will be opening Google Play for our staff and students. When this happens, I will be recommending the app Book Creator for creating digital ebooks.  If your district has iPads, you can get the Book Creator app from iTunes . Book Creator allows students to infuse audio, text, images, and color  to personalize each page of their story. Watch this Chat with Deb to see how the Book Creator apps works: As you can see, the Book Creator app is simple to use and yet the end result is an impressive digital ebook.  Thank you to Intel's Teachers Engage for sponsoring this post.

Thematic is a really neat way to create a very simple presentation with photos and text. Click here to see my presentation. Just scroll down when you get there. It just doesn't get any easier. I started by signing up for an account. I then clicked on Create a Story From there I was able to choose whether I wanted to bring in pictures from my Dropbox account or from my computer. I used a folder from my Dropbox of a school in Middleton, Wisconsin that I had saved pictures of their 21st century design. Once the pictures were uploaded, which was super fast, I added text to each of the pictures. I was able to choose the color of the text, but it was limited to white or grey scale. When I had finished the story, I had the option to make it public or private. Sharing is simple. Email, social networks, embed or just copy the link. I created my story in just a few minutes. The story is saved in my profile. There are ma...

This week I presented a session on Gamification to a group of educators in our district. This is a very popular topic in education right now and one that I am passionate about. Here is my presentation: What is important to remember, that is not written down anywhere in my presentation, but is something I talk about when presenting on Gamification, is that while we can engage students by adding gaming aspects to our lessons and through game-based activities to help teach the content, the true focus should always be on the love of learning and the intrinsic rewards that come with it. Never should the focus be solely on extrinsic rewards and motivation, although they can play a part, this is not what we want to rely on. The ultimate goal is engagement, not materialistic rewards.  There are a lot of great resources and sites in the presentation for Gamification and Game-based learning. I hope you consider incorporating some gaming elements into ...

In this digital age of 2 in 1 devices, there are unlimited amounts of applications available for student and teacher use in the classroom. With the productivity of a laptop and versatility of a tablet, 2 in 1 devices give students and teachers the opportunity to make the best use of a mobile device. Here are a few applications that work perfectly with a 2 in 1 device. OneNote Chrome App Website:  www.onenote.com Also available from the Windows Store and Google Play OneNote is an outstanding app for taking notes, capturing images and making to do lists. This app is available across all platforms including Windows, Google and Chrome which makes it a great app to download on all of your devices. What makes OneNote the perfect app for a 2 in 1 device is that it allows you to make use of the tablet for capturing images with a camera, creating drawings on the touch screen, recording audio notes with a mic and dragging items around on the canvas to organize y...

Check out the new speech recognition add-on for Google Docs. 1 -Open a new or existing Google Doc 2 - Click on Add-ons and then Get Add-ons 3- Search for Speech Recognition and click on Free and then Install the add-on 4- After the add-on is installed, click on Add-ons again and then on the Speech Recognition add on. 5- Then allow access to your microphone and begin speaking in what you want to say on your Google Doc. Here is a quick demo: I highly recommend trying the new speech recognition add-on with your students.

Aurasma is an augmented reality app that works well with STEAM classes and really isn't as difficult as people may think. Watch this Chat with Deb to see how to create Auras that will show images, animations or videos layered on top of a scannable object. I also give some ideas of ways to use the Aurasma app with students. Do you have an idea of how the Aurasma app might be used successfully in the classroom?   I highly recommend giving the Aurasma app a try. Thank you to Intel's Teachers Engage for sponsoring this video.

Today I share a post about something that is fun and creative. I believe it's important for us to remember to bring some fun, enjoyment and love of creativity into our students lives.  School, teaching and learning should be enjoyable! I've always enjoyed drawing and sketching and I think it is partly because I grew up with a Spirograph when I was younger. So you can imagine my excitement when I came across this digital version of Spirograph. Inspirograph  has the exact same tools as the Spirograph kit used to have. Change the gears (wheels) and select a pen color. Choose your paper and start creating.  To save yourself from overuse of the mouse or trackpad, check out the keyboard shortcuts and use the arrow keys to move the gears. If you need a reason to justify the use of this site, it's good to remember that mathematics can play a part in this type of artwork whether it is patterns, scales, gears or ratios. There are also artist...