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Blog, ‘Cast, Engage!

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

How are you showcasing student accomplishments in your classroom now? One great way to do so combines video, audio, and text in a simple interface. That interface? Blogs. At the TCEA 2020 Convention, I had the opportunity to share a few ideas and resources with educators. Let’s take a moment to revisit some of those ideas, even if you missed the TCEA 2020 Convention.

Make Conversations Happen

Blogs and podcasts make it easy to engage students. After all, who wouldn’t find their own voice and performance engaging? Here are few examples of educators sharing how they are making conversations happen or how to create conversations.

Ready to explore some specific ideas? Let’s begin!

Step 1: Select a Blogging Platform

castOne of the first steps you need to take is to select a blogging platform. This is an online space to share content. Avoid getting caught up in the strict definition of a blog (e.g. RSS feed or an online space with content you can subscribe to). Another point you need to consider is that you need something you can control as the teacher. Students are often blocked from using tools like Blogger because they are for students older than thirteen years old. As a teacher, you need an online platform that makes it easy for you to manage content online and student posting.

Fortunately, we have access to a wide range of tools. You are looking for something that’s easy to set up, maintain, and support. Here are a few blogging platforms that give you control over publication content and commenting:

  1. Wakelet
  2. KidBlog
  3. Write About
  4. Edublogs
  5. Seesaw Class Blog (View sample blog)

Items two through four above cost money, while blog platforms one and five are free. Although Wakelet isn’t a true blogging platform, several educators have chosen it. The ability to embed all sorts of content, including Flipgrid shorts videos, make it a choice worth exploring. You can see one example from Jon Forney’s Wakelet class blogs collection above.

Seesaw Class Blogs is a great free alternative, but your work does end up in a system that may cost money in the future. Another possibility not listed above is the new Google Sites. While Google Sites is a wiki rather than a blog, it is easy to maintain and update. Schools may also want to use G Suite EDU’s Blogger, which is full-featured and allows for close control.

Before you commit to any one solution, be sure to run it by your organization’s technology team.

Did You Know?

Sign up for one of our Google Certified Educator certifications. You’ll learn about more than Google Meet, as well as earn 12 CPE hours per course. Use these courses to get Google Educator certified. Find out more online.

Step #2: Select Podcasting Solution

castUnless you’re engaging in full-blown podcasting which involves scripts and audio editing, use Voxer to record interviews of less than 15 minutes and then post to social media (e.g. Instagram, Twitter). Be sure to combine your media shares online via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. In the meantime, here are some suggested tools for working with podcasts:

Need to Record on the Go?

If you are in a classroom situation, it may be prudent to set up a microphone on a desktop computer. This makes it easy to edit audio using a free program like Audacity Sound Editor. If you need recording on the go, then get a portable microphone for your smartphone or tablet.

Here are a few choices:

  • iRig Mic Cast for iOS/Android ($35) – Less expensive that the Mikey Digital, this offers solid audio recording. This is what I carry around with me for interviews. It also comes with iRig Recorder software. I like the fact that it plugs into your microphone jack on your device and includes another headphone jack for earbuds. You can also get a handheld microphone that plugs into your iPhone or iPad. As the website says, it features “unidirectional pickup pattern that minimizes background noise, making it ideal for single-source audio recording.” Learn more online.
  • Shure MV88+ (>$80) – While this version is iOS only, the MV88+ works with iOS and some USB-C enable Android devices.Learn more online.

Remember, you don’t have to have a microphone for your smartphone. But audio quality will improve if you decide to use one.

Quick Ideas for Podcasting in the Classroom

Wondering how you can use podcasting in the classroom? Here are a few.

  • Current Events Newscasts: Practice nonfiction reading skills by having your students do weekly or monthly podcasts on an interesting current event.
  • Reading Radio: Have your students make short radio broadcasts summarizing the books they are reading.
  • Roving Reporters: Send your students out into the “field” (a.k.a. the school) to interview key players in important school events.
  • Celebrate Culture: Have your students record podcasts about important cultural months like Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month and then present them to the school or parents to commemorate the events.
  • Podcasting Library: Have your students collaborate to create a library of podcasts from which future students can learn.
  • Music Casts: Have band or orchestra students create podcasts for each instrument, detailing specific notes, sounds, and characteristics of each instrument.

You can find more ideas online with a quick Google search. Start small and build up.

Step #3: Decide Where to Save Content

When podcasting, it can be difficult to find a reliable place to host your audio or video over the long term. Consider one of these locations:

  • Enhanced podcasts (video)
    • YouTube
    • Google Drive
    • OneDrive
    • Seesaw Class Blog (vidcasts)
    • Flipgrid
  • Audio only
    • Google Drive
    • OneDrive
    • Seesaw Class Blog (vidcasts)
    • Write About

My recommendation? Rely on YouTube for video-casts (vidcasts), if possible. Otherwise, take advantage of whatever cloud storage solution your school or district uses. For example, G Suite EDU provides unlimited storage, and Microsoft OneDrive for Schools is about the same. Need more inspiration? Check out the TCEA TechNotes podcast series.

Step #4: Make an App

Want to reach your audience, which includes students and parents? Appify your podcast using a tool like Glide. It is a service that lets you add information to a Google sheet, then quickly create an app from its contents, all without coding.

You can save your blog entry links (or links to audio/video) to a Google Sheet, then have Glide put it into an app. Just pick one of your sheets and Glide assembles it into a polished app that you can customize, share with a link, and even publish to the app store. You can view a tutorial online.

Showcasing student work has never been easier. With a few quick steps, you can publish your students’ creations online to a global audience. You can then appify that content and make it accessible for your local community.

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guide signs with japanese writing on them
Good TeachingProfessional Learning

Five Guideposts for Making Learning Connections

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

How do you connect your own learning with others? One way that I create learning connections involves blogging. It translates into reflecting on my own efforts and setting loose learning goals. These flexible goals allow me to learn at my own pace as I move forward towards measurable growth. But I did not always approach learning this way. It began when I decided to blog for a global audience. In this blog entry, let’s explore what it means to be a learner in a hyper-connected world.

ISTE Standards for Educators: Learner

Though there are seven ISTE standards for Educators, the Learner begins with you. It puts the focus on you and how you can learn from others. The how involves taking specific steps that make you a student. In this way, you, as learner, are able to leverage technology to improve student learning. Here’s how you do that:

  • Set personal, professional learning goals to explore.
  • Apply pedagogical approaches that technology makes possible.
  • Reflect on the effectiveness of these tech-enhanced, pedagogical approaches.
  • Pursue professional interests.
  • Create and be an active participant in local and global learning networks.
  • Stay current with research that supports student learning outcomes.

Wondering how to start your journey? Let’s walk through a road map of steps to start.

Guidepost #1 – Set Professional Learning Goals

Not sure where to begin, where to sink your shovel in? Your goals need to be flexible and reflect who you are and where you are in your career. Teachers have to be able to set their learning goals before beginning any training cycle. For early to mid-career educators, learning goals tend towards curriculum and instruction. For late-career educators, extra-curricular tasks and innovations are more relevant (source).

From a coaching perspective, assist others in this process. Help them set meaningful goals and clarify steps to achieving those goals. Learn more about coaching others in setting goals.

Action Steps: Get a coach that can assist you in setting learning goals. Pick three technology-enhanced actions that you can start with.

Guidepost #2 – Apply Pedagogy That Technology Makes Possible

Making learning and collaboration at a distance serves as one example of this type. Dr. Judi Harris (September, 1998) described activity structures as design tools. These tools assist teachers in using the internet to achieve curriculum-related learning goals. Dr. Bernie Dodge and Tom March (1995) employed activity formats in the same way. In 2017, Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis came together and their work resulted in inquiry-based learning and self-paced student-centric opportunities known as hyperdocs. From subject samplers to hyperdocs, technology-enhanced pedagogy has been around for many years. These approaches are inquiry-based, collaborative, and involve self-directed learning. Project-based, or problem-based, students must solve a problem using materials at hand.

Use Dr. Chris Moersch’s H.E.A.T. observational framework to describe students’ efforts. In the best ways, students engage in:

  • Learning or questioning at evaluating/creating levels of Bloom’s
  • Collaborating to define the task, the process. The solution extends beyond the classroom walls.
  • Creating a product with a real-world purpose beyond the classroom that impacts students

Projects and technology work well together. Well-implemented PBL develops students’ critical thinking skills, improves long-term retention of content learned. What’s more, it increases students’ and teachers’ satisfaction with learning experiences (source). How does the teacher gauge success?

Action Step: Embrace PBL, design thinking, engineering design process, or the 5E Model. Then blend in simple technologies where appropriate. Don’t be afraid to try DIY activities.

Did You Know?

A team of trained professionals is available to perform a technology audit. Whatever size your district is, our educational auditors can help. They will provide insights that can help you grow. TCEA is a non-profit association. The cost of the audit will be less than if a commercial entity did it for you. The team of TCEA Technology Auditors is ready to assist you. Make contact now.

Guidepost #3 – Reflect on Success

The HEAT observational framework provides some insight. In activity-rich environments like classrooms, approaches may not impact learning. That is why reflecting on an activity remains important. In these projects, students self-select technology. When designing lessons, teachers can use this simple reflection-on-action checklist:

  • Did students use tech to create something and then test to see if it worked? (Rapid prototyping)
  • How did students use technology to focus their work, how they went about it? Did students use technology to collaborate on a solution extending beyond the classroom?
  • When did students engage in a real-world, real-life problem solving opportunity?

Whether it’s a blog, an audiolog, or vidcast, make the effort to reflect on teaching and learning. Assume the stance of a community member peering into your classroom. What would they see? Without this reflection, we miss the power of transformation. Dr. Wilson and Dr. Alaniz suggest reflection must be active and persistent. How persistent is your reflection?

Action Step: Use a blog to keep track of your reflections. Share what you expected to see and what you observed. Explore the gap between the two.

Guidepost #4 – Be a Global Connector

Ready to get started with social media? You may have a Twitter or Facebook account. How do you move into the role of being a global connector with a worldwide reach? Embrace the power of ideas and change in your life. Find ideas that align to your efforts. Apply new concepts to your work. Share that online via a blog, audiolog, or vidcast. It’s that simple. You build your professional learning network (PLN) one step at a time, one person at a time.

Action Step: Connect with others online, pursuing your professional interests as an educator. Become a hashtag hero. Accept the #OBSERVEME challenge. Start a district Twitter chat. Make connections beyond your current experience.

Guidepost #5 – Curate Content for Yourself and Others

Are you ready to keep up to date with research on what works and what doesn’t in the classroom? You need to make it easy to keep up with learning new things. Building a global professional learning network is step one. Step two involves finding a way to manage the torrent of data and ideas coming at you. To do that, learn to curate content in ways that make sharing it easy.

Action Step: Adopt a content curation tool you can use to save and organize online content any way you want. Learn to automate sharing of content. Align your social media to your learning needs.

References

Feature image. Available online

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six-word memoirs
Good Teaching

Creating Six-Word Memoirs

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” wrote Ernest Hemingway. This six word memoir‘s brevity hints at a deeper tale. In my fifth grade Writers’ Workshop, helping students focus on one aspect of their lives could be challenging. Memoirs can be powerful when reduced to their essence. Let’s take a look at some ways six-word memoirs might find a place in teaching, learning, and leading.

Six-Word Memoirs in the Classroom

Memoirs are more than sad stories.  One teacher describes the assignment for students:

My students had just finished a unit on the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. I asked my students to create six-word memoirs for the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. If people like Voltaire, Newton and Diderot only had six words, how would they describe their accomplishments? I made the project and requirements simple (source:Jonathan Olsen).

Jenny Rich (@jdrich219) suggests five ways to use six-word memoirs in the classroom. These include ways students can use them to:

  1. Introduce themselves
  2. Capture a fictional (or non-fictional) character’s perspective
  3. Memorialize key aspects of a character
  4. Summarize critical concepts in a lesson
  5. Describe media (e.g. song, art, film)
  6. Reflect on learning experiences

Let’s blend a few examples of technology use with the six-word memoir sentence structure (a.k.a. six-word structure) in the classroom that Jenny and Jonathan suggest.

#1 – Six-Word Blog Entries

“Memoir involves the whittling away of a whole lot of stuff that you have lived and a focusing on one slim section, full of power, that demands to be told,” says Lisa Dale Norton. Writing a blog entry is about whittling away the unnecessary. The writer plays the part of  a marble sculptor, cutting towards his mental vision of perfection. Students can learn to write short, summarizing key concepts for a chapter or unit of study using the six-word structure. One way to publish summaries is in a classroom blog.

Some blog platforms that you may find useful:

  1. KidBlog
  2. Write About
  3. Edublogs
  4. Seesaw Class Blog (view sample blog)

 

Growing up reading textbooks in class, I soon developed the ability to focus on the essential ideas. What would I ask a question about on a test? What nugget of information was worth picking up? As a result, my grades improved. Writing blog entries in brief can become a game. Who can best capture the main ideas in brief?

#2 – Six-Word Memoir Music-Enhanced Images

Combine stirring images with six-word memoirs. See examples below:

You can create a slide show with music using Google Slides and a screencasting tool of choice, such as: PowerPoint with Office Mix add-in, Animoto, or Shadow Puppet EDU (iOS). You can find many examples of six-word memoirs as music-enhanced slideshows. Here’s one more from eighth grade students, the class of 2024:

#3 – SketchNote That Six-Word Memoir

Sketchnotes are “…rich visual notes created from a mix of handwriting, drawings, hand-drawn typography, shapes, and visual elements like arrows, boxes, and lines,” says  Mike Rohde, author of The Sketchnote Handbook. 

Learn more about sketchnoting. Check out these TCEA presentations at the upcoming 2018 Convention & Exposition: Sketchnotes for Non-Artists (Vanessa Perez), The Art of Paying Attention with Sketchnotes (Peggy Reimers), as well as this premier resource, Sketchnoting for Beginners (Sylvia Duckworth).

Another fun idea includes sketchnoting the six-word memoir using a tool like Microsoft OneNote. See some more ideas about sketchnoting to assist student’s development of their memoirs.

Wrap Up

In this blog entry, we’ve taken a look at a variety of technologies you can use to create six-word memoirs, among them, blogs, audio/video apps, and digital drawings known as sketchnotes. How are you blending technology into six-word memoirs?

 

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man at a typewriter
English Language Arts Reading (ELAR)

Three Tips to Blogging Author Chats, Part 2

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Welcome to Part 2 of Three Tips to Blogging Author Chats. We will explore some easy-to-use technologies, as well as share some possible solutions.

Tip #2 – Blend in simple, easy-to-use technologies that empower your conversation.

“Ok,” you may think, “I know how to do Socratic Seminar. But how do I work technology into all this?” You can use technology in a variety of ways. One easy way is to establish an online space where conversations can take place. A perfect location for this is a web log, or blog. The blog organizes its latest entries–think of them as multimedia journal entries that allow for text, video, audio–in reverse chronological order, and allows people to leave comments. And these can be moderated to prevent inappropriateness.

Some blog platforms that you should consider include:

  1. KidBlog
  2. Write About
  3. Edublogs
  4. Seesaw Class Blog

In addition to these four blogging tools, consider taking advantage of tools like the new Google Sites or Microsoft OneNote. Each allows for open-ended questions that students can respond to, or develop questions in response to a prompt. You can have these prompts available and roll them out for inner/outer circles to ponder and discuss, or, better yet, have the students create the prompts themselves.

Tip #3 – Take the Well-Worn Path to Success

Why not follow tried-and-true approaches taken by other teachers?  If you can find a book author on Twitter, you have a great opportunity for initiating an online conversation. For example, I’ve easily connected with my favorite fantasy authors (Jonathan Maberry and Jonathan Moeller) via Twitter. They might be willing to join in on a conversation with students.

You can also invite other well-known educators, community members, university professors, and/or writers. Each can participate in conversations with your students online. The goal is to nurture a rich, free-flowing, wide-ranging, academically-focused conversation. This allows modeling for students as to how this happens in real life.

Adapt Socratic Seminar for a Blog

Here’s an approach you can take, adapted from the work of other educators online:

  1. Read one chapter a week.
  2. Students in center circle (in the fishbowl) lead the discussion.
  3. Students in the outer circle (outside the fishbowl) listen to the inner circle and have their own conversation via the blog.
  4. Invite adults learners from around the world to discuss chapters and leave comments.
  5. At the end of the process, have the author respond to questions students in both circles have generated.

At the end of each session, have students share their reflections online in the blog or blog comments section. You could even use Flipgrid or LetsRecap to mange an asynchronous exchange with the author. Watch this 38-minute video of Arapahoe students and teachers sharing how they approached this.

Live or Pre-Recorded Author Chats Made Easy

Given the wide availability of desktop video conferencing solutions such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, Adobe Connect, and Appear.in, there’s no reason why your students couldn’t meet other adult learners and/or author(s) face to face for short discussions (15-20 minutes), discussing key concepts in the text. There are many ways to engage young writers and authors. Blogs and Twitter are simple ways to “shrink the world” and bring people closer together.

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lumen5
Good Teaching

Lumen5-Powered Videos

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Want to capture people’s attention with video? Then Lumen5 may offer you a way to create powerful videos from blog entries, news articles, and online text. If you’re like me, you are not a video designer. I have no idea how to better arrange pictures with quotes to create a video segment, or what accompanying music to use for the soundtrack. Therefore, my videos often lack punch and engagement because I’m uncertain in my arranging skills. Allow me to introduce you to a tool you can use in the classroom to create a technology anticipatory set.

Lumen5 Saves the Day

The good news is that Lumen5.com has some absolutely beautiful video arrangements and tools for the video challenged. Take an existing blog entry or web-based text and then let Lumen5 do the rest. Here are two examples that I shared via YouTube.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMsqo6m5-Fs]

Read the blog entry, Creating Worlds of Tomorrow, from which the video above was created. Here’s another example, Enhancing Parental Access with OneNote Class Notebook.

Creative Process

After getting your free account at their website, you can click on the CREATE VIDEO button and see a screen similar to the one shown below:

lumen

The process is drop-dead simple, allowing you to paste in a website address. You will have the option of grabbing the text from the first section of the article. You can also cherry-pick choice sentences. Each sentence series gets a slide with its own picture. Longer text is split across slides with matching images. You are able to edit sentences once selected for readability. You can put (a.k.a. upload) your own pictures in the slides. Another option for finding relevant images involves an internet search, which is built-into the Lumen5 interface. Placing pictures in the slideshow is drag-and-drop easy.

A few other screen shots:

lumen

In the shot above, you can see the results of an image search with “Minecraft” as the search term. Below, you see stock soundtracks you can add to your video. You also have the option of NOT adding sound, saving the movie as an MP4, and then modifying it in iMovie, WeVideo, Shotcut, or another video editor.

lumen

Rendering the video can take anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour, as shown below:

lumen

Once the video is done rendering, you can save it as an MP4 to your computer/device in anticipation of putting it on YouTube or another online storage location (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive).

lumen

In the Classroom

It wasn’t until high school that I started figuring out how to read non-fiction text, picking out what text would make it into a test. Now, much of the non-fiction text that students read finds its way online. Pull text from anywhere, such as Dogo News, Newsela, Newseum,  or Tween Tribune and then paste the web link into Lumen5 for a quick summarization tool.

lumen

For example, the video below was generated from the Tween Tribune article, Watching Others Play Video Games the next big thing. It might be fun to create a summary of online content using Lumen5.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJIURH2NWCw&w=560&h=315]

Rendering Time: 90 minutes*

*Note: When I checked with Lumen5 crew, they mentioned that the long rendering time is atypical. Most videos are rendered in ten minutes or less. They asserted that my experience may have been due to some unfortunate server errors they experienced early on. As I recall now, the server did crash while I was using it, so this supports their assertion. Let me know in the comments if your experience matches their assertions.

Closing Thoughts

How do you see yourself using Lumen5 in your K-12/adult learning situation? Given the rendering time, it’s not a quick tool to use. Another piece that needs tweaking involves the slide editing component. Although I uploaded a picture, a screen shot of the actual article at Tween Tribune, I was unable to place the picture on its own slide alone. I would have had to replace the image and text of an existing slide. That may just involve some planning ahead, adding slides you don’t need so you can replace the image.

One thing is for certain, students can easily adapt the technique Lumen5 introduces with a variety of video editors. Lumen5’s approach serves as an excellent starting point for beginners like me.

 

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OneNote
MicrosoftOnline Tools and Apps

Overcoming Detours to a OneNote Blog

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

“I am interested in the Integration Blog project,” says Jennifer Moore, “but I am wondering if I can do a OneNote instead?” Jennifer participates in the TCEA Campus Technology Specialist Certification program, a phenomenal learning opportunity for TCEA members. In this blog entry, we explore a few detours to a Microsoft OneNote-based blog. For a blog to be read, it must be relevant to its readers. Yet reader-relevant blog entries cannot be the sole measure of a successful blog.

The Measure of a Blog

The rubric for an Integration Blog Project includes the following elements:

  • Blog Layout and Theme
  • Blog Entries (minimum of five)
  • Spelling and Grammar

You could use a traditional blog platform (e.g. Blogger, Tumbler, Wordpress, old Google Sites’ Announcement feature, etc.) and miss a Microsoft option, OneNote. Three elements characterize blogs: 1) Content readers can subscribe to the blog via real simple syndication (RSS); 2) Entries are organized in reverse chronological order; and 3) The blog offers reflection on an experience, research, or current topic.  As John Dewey points out, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

Creating Enduring Content

“Either write something worth reading,” quipped Benjamin Franklin, “or do something worth writing.” The best blog entries combine both in a simple formula:

  1. Introductions: A fresh take on an instructional strategy or technology that excites.
  2. Compelling Narrative, simply organized: Ready to jump into your blog entry? Start with these three steps:
  • Define a problem that held you back.
  • Tell about the hero’s journey you made to find a solution, including audio/video interviews and/or demos.
  • Move forward, step by step, to a successful resolution. Use the list approach (e.g. listicle) and keep it simple.
  1. The Call for Adoption: In short, punchy sentences, call for adoption of the new strategy. This can also be a call to action. Write fast, write short.

Mix the steps and use a quote or problem scenario to set the hook.

Detours Around OneNote Obstacles

“I want to use OneNote as a blog,” some have said, “but OneNote doesn’t quite work as a blog.” To use it as such, you have to overcome a few obstacles:

  • Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds are not available for OneNote Online Notebooks.
  • Reverse Chronological order of blog entries isn’t publish and forget it.

Eager to adapt OneNote for a blog solution, I sought out various solutions. Most failed, but these were workable. Let’s explore the detours.

Detour #1: RSS Feed

detoursCreate an RSS feed for OneNote blog entries with the Diigo Social Bookmarking Tool. Every web page you bookmark and tag gets added to an RSS feed for the tag. Below, you can see items tagged “mgc” via Diigo bookmarks. These tagged items reflect favorites from my OneNote Online notebook, TCEA Connects!

Scroll to the bottom of the page shown above to see the distinctive RSS feed icon:

detours

Get the RSS link, then add an RSS icon of your own to the front page of your OneNote Online notebook (example shown below). Subscribers click on the RSS icon to subscribe with their RSS Aggregator of choice (e.g. Feedly.com):

detours

 

Now that you have an RSS feed via Diigo tagged items, copy and paste the link to a specific OneNote Online page:

detours

With the “Copy Link to this Page” in your device’s clipboard you can paste the link into Diigo to add it to the RSS feed:

detours

Update 12/1/2016: Another way to obtain a link, especially if you are using the free Windows 10 OneNote app (as opposed to OneNote 2016), is to do what Marjolein Hoekstra (Twitter: @onenotec) suggests in this 11/30/16 blog entry:
“Share a view-only link to an individual page through Share > Get a Link. Unique for OneNote for Windows 10 and only for notebooks stored on consumer OneDrive. Recipients can open this page in a browser.” See Marjolein’s example, Emoji Keyboard sample page, below:
detours

Once added, view the RSS feed (only if you must) and see the result (highlighted section is what we just added):

detours

Sharing the RSS Feed via Twitter/Facebook

The next step is to use IFTTT.com to publish your RSS feed content to Twitter/Facebook. Anything added to the RSS feed will be shared via detoursTwitter or Facebook. Check out this how-to available online.

Detour #2 – Reverse Chronological Order

Re-organize your pages in OneNote to get a reverse chronological list of blog entries. Simply click and drag the title of the blog entry to where it should go.

detours

 

Give It a Try!

OneNote 2016, 100% free, features a full-blown editing toolbar, automatically timestamps your blog entries, makes it easy to embed content (without messy embed code) from various sources (a feature other blog platforms make difficult or for pay), and image embedding is drop-dead simple. This makes it the perfect blog tool, especially when you incorporate Diigo RSS feeds and take care to organize pages in your OneNote blog. You can also publish a notebook via Docs.com as an ebook, viewable across numerous mobile devices. And you can password protect sections to prevent unauthorized access to blog entries (e.g. for pay, embargoed or not ready for release). Wow, give it a try!

 

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e-newsletter
Google Tips and TricksLeadershipMicrosoft

Quick Ideas for Creating a Classroom e-Newsletter

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Since the year is getting rolling now, you may be thinking of ways to send information and success stories home with your students. Why make paper newsletters that might go home every week, but never get read? Why not make something more engaging?

I’m always on the lookout for fresh ways to share classroom content. Here are some quick ways to revamp your classroom, or campus, e-newsletter:

  • Smore – If you simply want your current newsletter to look better, then Smore is for you. Smore offers beautifully designed templates that let you create your e-newsletter very quickly. You can then publish via email or social media or post on your teacher or campus website. Smore can track who opens the email and works seamlessly on all devices. The educator’s version is $59/year, which is very reasonable for unlimited flyers.
  • Blog – With a blog in Blogger, Weebly, or Wordpress, to name a few, you can easily create an ongoing series of posts that beat out print any day of the week. The benefit of going digital is that people can get your content via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and any other social media platform that allows you to craft an IF This Then That (IFTTT) recipe. You can embed content (like video, audio, and images) into each blog entry to make it more engaging, and you can also schedule when it will appear online. What’s more, you can grab the RSS feed for the blog and feed it into a mobile app that parents can view on the go. View an example.
  • YouTube – Create a YouTube channel and combine all your news into a video broadcast. There are lots of possibilities here and engagement is easy. View an example
  • Touchcast – Touchcast, a free, powerful iPad app, allows you to blend news broadcasts, websites, and more, including green screen, into an easy-to-use interface that will have you looking like the person on the evening news. You end up with a video e-newsletter that you can publish via Touchcast or share on YouTube. View an example
  • LucidPress – This is a nice tool that allows you to blend video, audio, and text in a multi-page format. Unfortunately, unlike the other options mentioned, it costs money. View an example.
  • Microsoft Sway – Sway is a powerful tool for e-newsletter creation that allows you to blend audio, video, and more into a rolling view that works on any device. View an example.
  • Office Mix – Take a Powerpoint slide show and organize it like a newsletter, then share it online with MS Powerpoint Online so anyone can view it. Use Office Mix to add audio narration and interactive quizzes to keep the reader engaged, as well as make content viewable as a movie.

Of course, these seven ideas are all powerful alternatives to creating a paper newsletter. But what happens when you need something you can print for the people who don’t know what to do with digital content, something that can also be viewed online via a mobile device or on a computer? One response to this question is the eighth and final tip for creating an e-newsletter: Google Slides.

Google Slides makes it possible to easily embed video from YouTube, images, text, and more. It can be visually attractive on the printed page as well as on your mobile device. What’s more, you can embed it on your website or blog so that it can be viewed at the appropriate size or full-screen.

You can see what that looks like in the examples shown below:

Join the ongoing TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) SkypeChat via rour mobile device or online. Explore and share concepts at the intersection of teaching, learning, leading, and technology!

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Announcements/Important Dates

Our New Website and Blog

by Lori Gracey
written by Lori Gracey

TCEA recently completed a major update to our website, thanks to IT Manager Matt Dawson and Graphics Design Specialist Ben Starr. The update was needed to make the website mobile friendly and easier to navigate. A greatly improved calendar system was also installed making it simple for users to search for and find specific courses or webinars using the Magnifying Glass search feature in the top right of each page. The new website was also tied into our membership database, providing single sign-on for members to access member-only content like our Recommended iPad App List, Community, and Job Board.

In addition, the new website now includes a blog available to anyone. The blog, which updates several times a week, will feature short articles on apps and extensions, Google, leadership, good teaching, content area resources, and Web 2.0 tools. Readers may access the blog in the menu bar across the top of the page or here. You can also subscribe to the blog on the right side of the blog page and receive one email every two weeks with links to the articles. Please feel free to share this resource with other educators.

We will continue to add new content to the website over the next month, including such popular features as the Free, Must-Have subject area iPad apps on the bottom of this page. If you have any feedback on the site, please pass it on to Matt. And thanks for your patience while the site was under construction!

Another big change you probably have noticed is in our e-newsletter TechNotes. TechNotes is sent out every two weeks during the school year to more than 40,000 educators around the country and is filled with tips on best practices, new Web 2.0 tools, apps and extensions, and technology integration ideas. Because we realize how valuable your time is, we have shortened the format of the newsletter, giving you just the more popular of our blog posts. You can read more great articles to impact your classroom at the blog itself where you can search for the particular topics in which you are most interested. (By the way, TechNotes is free to anyone, so feel free to pass it along to your colleagues.)

We are always trying to serve our members better, so please share any comments you have about the website, blog, or TechNotes with us. And thanks for taking the time to read what we have to share.

 

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