Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

We all know that parents and families are part of any learning equation, so Google has launched a fun site to bring parents up to speed on some basic technology tasks. Teach Parents Tech care packages are aimed at students who want to help their adult parents learn such skills as taking a screenshot, adjusting time on your computer clock, copying and pasting text, and resizing photos, but this site could easily be a neat “present” for parents from their children. The categories deal with media, the basics, using the Web, finding information, and communication.

Google certainly gives the site a playful look, as it is set up as an email form letter. The tongue-in-cheek format also allows the sender to show how impressed they are, or how worried they are, about the technological skills of the receiver of the message. Each “care package” message comes complete with a (Google-created) video tutorial on the topic that was chosen. Of course, this is Google and all of the videos has a Googlized tint to them.

Teach Parents Tech care packages

BY REBECCAH HAINES

No matter how much you want to deny it, cool names and flashy advertising is often what draws you to try out a product. Well, with Weebly.com, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t check it out because I liked the name. Of course, once I got to the site, I found it to be a very simple website maker, and something that teachers might like to use in their classrooms.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

As most of you know very well, the day-to-day (not to mention hour-to-hour) tasks of a teacher can be hectic and time-consuming. In addition to actually teaching the warm little bodies in our classes, we have to grade papers, attend meetings, participate in school leadership committees, create bulletin boards, set up for labs, meet with students, plan future lessons, prepare for and administer tests…the list seems endless. As if that isn’t enough, we’re also faced with the critical task of communicating with parents about their students and the classroom in general. Thankfully, the internet has made this task a little less time-consuming for teachers and parents. This article will discuss the many tools that can help you design a website to keep parents in the loop.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas parent-teacher conference season. For a few parents, this is just a formality, the latest conversation in a year-long dialogue. Of course, a lot of parents will be meeting you for the first time, leading to all the hazards of first-time interactions — awkwardness, shyness, and occasionally, tension.

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This week’s MBTN features alternative teaching methods, how to use colons & semicolons, a web backpack for students and the best search engines for student research. Details after the jump.

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Welcome to May’s random roundup. This month’s theme: Little Johnny, one-man stand-in for school-aged children the world over. After a year-and-a-half of hard work, we figured this overused cliche deserved a post of his own before he gets back to studying.

Time-savers for teachers
For other notes and resources the students need, consider giving this stuff to them as a whole, at the beginning of a session or semester. That way you only have to keep a master copy for Little Johnny who struggles to keep himself organized.

Learning exercise: Promote healthy living this school year
If you’re concerned about your students’ health, you can do something about it by extolling the virtues of healthy exercise. Ask Little Johnny how his little league team did over the summer. Do you have any joggers or climbers in your midst? Take an interest, and maybe they’ll get more active.

Search Visually, Safely with RedZee
RedZee filters out porn and other inappropriate content, so you don’t need to worry that Little Johnny will “accidentally” stumble across something he shouldn’t be looking at on a school computer.

Swap your Stuff at Zwaggle
But Zwaggle might be a good resource to pass along to parents. If you can make their lives easier by showing them where to find Christmas presents on the cheap, they might make your lives easier by encouraging Little Johnny to buckle down and try a little harder for his nice teacher.

Keep Your Grade Book Online with Engrade
If students (and their parents) can track their grades at any time, it may motivate them to stay on task throughout the class. Come parent-teacher conference time, you won’t have to deal with parents who are angry about Little Johnny’s surprise “D.”

Instructifeature: How to Stimulate Class Discussion Using Discussion Forums
In the classroom, you’re limited by clock. There’s only so much time you can devote to class discussion. Students feel the time crunch even more keenly—they’ve got to compose a thoughtful response in mere seconds. And while thinking on one’s feet is a valuable skill, how much better would Little Johnny’s answer be if he had more time to compose his ideas? Using discussion boards, students have the time they need to think of the best answer they can.

Photo credit: khalid almasoud on Flickr.

Some of your students may have family members fighting overseas. If these brave souls are in combat, there’s always the chance they might not come home in one piece (or at all). Sesame Street, which has never shied away from the unhappier parts of life, will air their special episode Coming Home: Military Families Cope with Change on April 1 at 8 p.m. (check your local TV listings).

Muppets Elmo and Rosita, along with guests Queen Latifah and John Mayer, will help kids deal with the consequences of their family members suffering battlefield injuries such as losing limbs, or dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Coming Home is designed to help kids cope with a new way of life by asking questions and supporting one another.

The Sesame Workshop recommends kids watch Coming Home with their parents, so make sure to mention that when you mention the program to your elementary students. They might ask you a few questions, too, so it may be good for you to watch this episode as well. -BILL FERRIS

Coming Home: Military Families Cope with Change

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I’m at the NCTIES conference in Raleigh. The intro session featured Vicki Davis of the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. Renowned for using nifty tools in her teaching, she shared a great philosophy for integrating technology into your classroom: focus on what you want to DO, and THEN pick your tools. Deciding you want a blog because that’s what everybody else is doing isn’t going to lead to a good learning experience for students.

In my first morning session, Wilson Diaz from Chapel Hill High School talked about how using the Google suite of apps (Docs, Groups, Calendar, etc.) helped him with both parents and students. He hit all the high points, such as using Google Docs for collaboration and such. However, he also noted that by using Google as a class information tool, it stopped parents from calling him with the same old questions. You know the ones — “If I only knew Little Johnny was having problems, I  could have done something sooner!” or “Little Suzy told me she didn’t have any homework.” And so on.

In addition, Diaz said he uses Google to post assignments and due dates. That means, for example, if a kid loses a worksheet, he or she can download it immediately, rather than wait until after school to stop by the teacher’s room. It was a nice presentation on how to use a series of tools to eliminate headaches from the teaching process.

Overall, I enjoy NCTIES because it’s more hopeful than other conferences. It focuses on possibilities rather than problems. Don’t get me wrong, people discuss problems here all the time, but the solutions — usually creative and incorporating technology in ways that will engage students — sound like opportunities rather than obstacles. -BILL FERRIS

Families and teachers alike can be daunted by the sheer volume of book choices out there for early adolescent readers. Wading through the good, the bad, and the ugly may not be the way we choose to spend our own reading time, and, yet, many of us want to be informed about or even influence the book choices that our children and students make for independent reading. With bookstores dominated by massive displays for the popular Gossip Girl and Twilight series, a grown-up may need a tour guide.

Bookwise Parents recognizes these concerns and responds with a service that provides monthly book reviews organized into three categories: 1) Great books read on…; 2) Great books use caution…; and 3) Tread lightly. The book reviewers are two North Carolinians, both of whom are teachers and parents of children between the ages of 8 and 14 — the target group for this site. The sample book reviews are concise and informative, highlighting themes and messages as well as basic plot points. Each review is accompanied by icons to indicate subject matter that might be of concern: sex; drugs; violence; alcohol; and language. The usual suspects. The first three months of service are free, with subsequent monthly reviews available for $6.99.

The founders of Bookwise Parents emphasize that their intent is not to censor books for children, but rather to provide parents with the information needed to expose their children to quality books and to provide an educational context for the child when books deal with mature themes. But is that what parents will actually do? Wouldn’t it just be easier to ban Gossip Girl? Wouldn’t it just be easier to steer kids away from those quality books that happen to deal with sex because, really, who wants to have the sex talk? Although these attitudes are certainly not recommended by Bookwise Parents, parents may well take the easy road. The harder road is to take this information about books and help kids develop their own taste and media literacy as they read it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Before you recommend this site to parents of students in your class, consider how each family is likely to use the information about the content and quality of books out there. It may be more fruitful for certain kids to make their own discoveries about the world of books, with a little, subtle guidance from you. –ABBY MARTIN

Bookwise Parents

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The recent disgraceful outcome of the Julie Amero case does at least show how very, very much we want our children to be protected from the worst parts of the internet (and there are some very, very bad parts of the internet). If you know some parents who are worried (or ought to be) about what their little ones might see online, you might recommend that they give KidZui a try. KidZui, which is meant for kids younger than 12, is basically a kid-safe browser; you download it to a hard drive and, presumably, remove the icons to other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox so that your kids can’t use those.How can a browser be kid-safe? Well, it’s only allowed to access certain sites and certain content on certain sites such as YouTube; over 200 teachers and parents worked for about three years to create a long list of approved online content. A parent can add additional sites with a parent account, and can even recommend those sites for inclusion in everyone’s KidZui. Parents can also track exactly which sites their kids are visiting, which makes me a little uncomfortable — but then again, kids under 12 don’t have or even need the same level of privacy that teens or adults do.

Perhaps most importantly of all, there are many educational websites on KidZui’s approved list, and a “Homework Helper” is available in the paid version (the “Basic” version of KidZui is free). The Homework Helper is described as “an exclusive teacher designed [sic] system of websites and content matched to their grade level and the subjects they’re studying in school.” (I hope they study hyphenation at some point.) It’s nice to see a company that trusts teachers so much that it involves them so thoroughly in the design of a piece of technology. — AMANDA FRENCH

KidZui

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When I attended school there was a big push for whole language instruction and very little emphasis was placed on phonics. Now in education the pendulum has swung the other way and we are seeing that phonics instruction is crucial, not only in reading but spelling as well. The English language with all its rules is a tricky one to teach, especially in the areas of phonics. BBC Schools has a great site to help teach and provide reinforcement with all of these tricky phonics patterns.

BBC Words and Pictures is an interactive site that offers many resources in phonics and reading development. Teachers can use this site to initiate lessons and provide extra practice for their struggling readers. You can also find resources parents can use at home. The site offers numerous interactive activities, working with phonemes, consonant vowel consonant patterns, consonant clusters, long vowel patterns, and high frequency words. With each activity, a colorful character with a charming British accent gives students the directions needed to engage them in the activity. The site also makes the proper phonetic sounds for the student. This additional aspect of the site makes it valuable to your ESL learners as well as your non-reading students.

The teacher and parent resource sections are full of printables that can provide students with additional practice. BBC Words and Pictures also offers curriculum relevance to help correlate these activities with your learning objectives. As teachers, let’s make sure our early readers get the phonics foundation needed to become life long readers and proficient spellers.-MONIQUE ST.LOUIS

BBC Words and Pictures

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Schools get hit hard by rising gas prices — not only do teachers and staff have to pay more in gas, but so do parents dropping off their kids. A lot of kids take the bus to school, but it’s not an option for many families.

GoLoco is doing its part to encourage car pooling by making it easier to find folks to share rides with. You can sign up for a free account to find other commuters going your way. Fewer cars on the road will save you pennies, reduce traffic congestion, and do a good turn for the environment.

Your fellow teachers will love the idea of saving a few bucks, but don’t forget to let parents know about GoLoco, too. The more people sign up, the more likely it is to find rides. And the more people in your car pool, the more money you save. -BILL FERRIS

GoLoco

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Stranger Danger! Children are taught at an early age how to recognize a stranger in their community and how to respond appropriately. However, in the 21st Century our students are socializing in more communities, on and 0ffline, rather than just with their local neighbor. As many more of our students are becoming active participants in the community of the World Wide Web we need to teach them safe ways to interact without shutting them down.

iKeepSafe is a website full of ideas on how to keep our students safe online. They focus on the three main dangers students will face: inappropriate contact, inappropriate content, and inappropriate conduct. They provide great resources for parents on hot topics such as social networking and cyber-bullies. For educators, iKeepSafe has resources that can be customized to align with your state’s laws. The site also includes game simulations for students to put into practice what they have learned to keep them safe.

This site would be great to introduce to your parents during an open house or a family reading night. So the next time you are teaching your students safety rules, don’t forget the global community. Remember, as parents and educators we have a responsibility to our students to keep current, keep communicating, and keep checking! -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

iKeepSafe

Looking for a platform for a school or classroom website? Have you always wanted to have a classroom blog that allows blogging between parents and you, or you and your students? If so, WordPress has everything you are looking for and a lot more – plus it’s the platform that powers Instructify, so you know it’s high quality.

WordPress is a free publishing platform. This site is extremely user friendly – in addition to being a quick sign-up, the site has great tutorials to help walk you through setting up your blog or website. All you need is a computer, Internet access, and an email address to get started. WordPress has more than 60 different themes for you to customize your blog to fit your needs. You can switch between your themes at any time with a few clicks of your mouse. You can also add event calenders, links and pages. Upload your own pictures, or included images from Flickr or Photobucket. Don’t forget to add a stats collector to your site that will give you instant statistics on the different visitors you have to your site.

The choice is yours whether to share your page with the public or a selected few. As for interactivity, WordPress gives you the freedom and security to allow you to have comments posted on your site with or without your prior approval. You can even set your site up to not allow any comments at all.

Blogging is a great way to keep parents informed about what’s going on in your classroom. If you blog with WordPress, you can allow parents to become active participants in your class activities. WordPress is also a great tool to allow students to collaborate on group projects. You can have as many blogs as you want. The sky is the limit. -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

WordPress

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We almost put this in Monday by the Numbers, but Sesame Street deserves a post of its own. Babble, a parenting blog, presents the 50 Best Sesame Street Moments. It’s not just a list, either – there’s a video clip for every entry, so you can relive great Sesame Street moments like the “Rubber Ducky” song, Bert and Ernie’s fishing trip (“Heeeeere, fishy fishy fishy!“), and that pinball machine song that counts to twelve.

For years, Sesame Street has helped young kids learn about spelling, colors, the concepts of near and far, not to mention teaching them not to fear monsters. These are great videos to show to young students, or if you’re a parent, your own kids. If you’re a sucker for nostalgia like me, you’ll probably enjoy viewing these again yourself. Just try not to cry when you watch “Mr. Hooper Isn’t Coming Back.” -BILL FERRIS

50 Best Sesame Street Moments via Babble

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