Deb Norton Tech

Sometimes the power of technology, computer science and education amazes me. It has been a week of learning, exploring and creating. Next week is the Hour of Code . Many jobs today require employees to code or program in some way. Coding is what makes this possible. Since it is the season to listen to holiday music, why not try Incredibox and make your own music??  You can even share your musical creation. What if Holocaust Survivors Could Teach Your Class ? I love this idea! Virtual Reality is such an amazing learning tool. Inserting images on Docs, Slides or Drawings has changed.  The ability to take a screenshot is no longer available.  Perhaps this extension or this extension can help with taking screenshots? The 70 / 30 Principle - Who’s working harder?  In my opinion, today’s students should be much more active in the learning process.   As I enjoy my weekend, I'm going to think about all of the ways that technology makes my everyday life

What is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the ability for computers to perform tasks that are usually performed by humans such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translations in languages. Machine Learning is a type of AI where computer systems learn to make decisions based on collected data. After listening to the Google Teacher Tribe Podcast on the topic of AI and Machine Learning,  I was inspired to write this post. Here are some examples of AI and Machine Learning that you can use in your classrooms. Quick Draw by Google  - Draw the object and see if the computer system can recognize the object.  Auto Draw  - a game where the computer tries to guess what you're drawing and lets you replace your drawing with an artistic drawing. I drew a turkey Here is one of the recommended artistic images Mystery Animal  - The computer pretends to be an animal, and y

It has been a week filled with great technology learning moments. I attended the Amplify CollaborateIT conference on Tuesday. Here are some of the incredible takeaways from the keynote speaker, John McElligott who talked about Embracing Disruption . John works at York Exponential in Pennsylvania. He spoke about Robotics ,  Humanized Computing and mind controlled bionic arms OH MY!  To say the least, I was in my techy element. This week I listened to this podcast - Is Facebook Spying on You? Have you experienced talking about a product and then having it appear on your Facebook Ads? This book was recommended to me and I’m going to start reading it over Thanksgiving break. It’s about coping with the exponential increase in computing power. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. A friend made me a turkey placeholder like this one .  Simple and fun!

Happy Veteran’s Day - today and tomorrow I celebrate all of the men and women that serve or have served in our military. Thank you to Andrew Schaller for putting together this honor wall   at Oshkosh West High School. My Uncle Jerry Kunde is on this wall. I listened to this podcast this week which gave me so many things to think about and consider with technology and deep thinking.  Are we using the applications and tools to the fullest potential? Did you read my blogpost on Ways to Use Animation for Student Projects and Engaging Lessons ?  It amazes me how far animation and 3D design has come in just a few years. This week I am working with a teacher and her students to record a Ted Talk using Flipgrid . I also set up a new BreakoutEDU , a scrapbooking and card making station and we finished a pixel art poster in the Innovation Lab . This week, someone surprised me with free printable pumpkins for our Innovation Lab. What a thoughtful thing to do.

Animation Comes in Many Forms Using animation tools can help to add engagement, creativity and technological knowledge  for students   . Animations can also add excitement to your lessons. With plenty of applications for animation, the days of static imagery and boring presentations are long gone. Here are some of the possibilities. Create looping Gifs  ABCya Animate or Giphy can be used to make looping animations called gifs. Students could show a process, change over time or movement through a gif.  With ABCya Animate, students can create scenes that will play in a short animated video.  This site seems most appropriate for elementary and middle school students, however, when I showed this recently to some high school students, they enjoyed creating gifs and with the ability to add your own images this site becomes more attractive.  Giphy can be used to upload a series of images to turn into a gif or a paste in the url of a YouTube video and select a portion to

CheckMark is an Extension for Giving Feedback Quickly Classrooms continue to become more and more paperless with writing assignments in Google Docs and extensions such as CheckMark can make the process of giving feedback and grading writing assignments much more timely and efficient. Here is how the extension works. First add the extension in the Chrome Web Store . Once you have added the extension, open a writing assignment in Google Docs.  Next click on the extension to turn the check mark green. Then highlight any word or group of words and a popup list of possible comments will appear.  If the popup list does not appear, you may need to click on the Secure or i next to the url to allow for popups.  When you hover over an icon in the list, the feedback text will show.  When you click on a icon, the feedback will be added to the Google Doc as a comment.  Here are all of the choices for possible feedback that can be given.  If you wanted to

Happy Fall Ya’ll Today is my Friday, so I’m sharing some Links and Loves a little early. I want to try making these pumpkins - this is called Hydro Dipping and it is sooooo interesting!  Or perhaps I will make these since they look simple. This is an excellent video for National Stop Bullying Month (October) The people of Puerto Rico are getting some help with Internet through Project Loon.  Read more about Project loon and other moonshot thinking projects here. Padlet now has voting and grading . Woo Hoo!  I use Padlet all of the time. One of my goals this fall is to eat healthy and prep meals for the week on the weekend. Here are some recipes I’ve been giving a try.  I made the Quinoa and Mushroom Stuffed Acorn Squash and it was so flavorful! And because I had a lot of leftover Quinoa, I also made this recipe . YUMMMMMMM!  Finally, I’ve been savoring this lovely zucchini bread .  You can follow my healthy (low carb) recipes on Pi

Survival Tips Today's post is all about knowing a few tips for helping you to survive your incredibly busy day. Create that To Do List with Gmail Tasks: If you are like me, you probably get a lot of emails throughout the day.    I often don't have time to deal with emails right away, but I don't want to forget to go back and take care of them later.   One way I manage the emails that come through is to add them to my task list.  Click on the box to select the email, click on "more" and "add to tasks". The task list will appear at the bottom of your screen.  Later when you are ready to take care of the email, open up your task list. To open the Task List click on the top left corner where it says Gmail and choose tasks. Look under the tasks that you have saved and click on "related email" and the email that is associated with the task will open up.  Click on the box in the Task List next to the email item to mark the ema