What I learn from Twitter and Hashtags.
While scrolling through Lucy Gray's twitter feed, I found a bunch of great blogs and resources, but one in particular stuck out to me. During the 2016 CUE fall convention, Lucy and her colleagues launched the CUE Chrome Warrior game. This game involved a significant amount of social media. There are weekly tasks to complete and you receive points for doing so. A couple of the tasks for this week include taking a screen shot of your phone while playing the game and tweeting at #FALLCUE. This is a great game to play, especially if you are a teacher wanting to become more technology-savvy.
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On Amanda Dykes' twitter feed I found a website that will me and all other teachers a great deal of time. It is called Google Time Savers for Teacher (as I mentioned, something all teacher need). There are a numerous amount of things that Google has to offer for teachers that I was not aware of. On Google you can create a discussion board for students to post on. This would be great for students whom need help on an assignment or questions about the class. The discussion board allows for the students and the teacher to reply to other students discussions and questions. This is a great resource for upper elementary, middle, and high school. The discussion board is just one of many great Google hacks for teachers.
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I had no idea about the Book Creator App, until reading about it in one of Monica Burns' tweets. This is such a great app, that all teacher should consider purchasing. The Book Creator App is very useful when students' are doing reading responses. On this app, students' can make create daily journals, video reflections, audio recordings, snap pictures and collaborate responses with other their fellow students. This app is very easy to figure out and the best thing about it is, that it can be useful in grades K-12.
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Throughout the hashtag "#edchat" there are a numerous amount of great postings. One in particular that caught my eye was about more things that teachers can do with Google Classrooms. An incredibly simple thing that could potentially save teachers HOURS of time is grade and return assignments online! This will cut down on the time spent taking staying after school to hand-grade each individual assignment. My favorite new resource on Google Classroom is that teachers can create Exit Tickets. Exit Tickets are a great way to assess students and doing them online would make things a lot quicker and simpler.
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Another great resource from #edchat that I found on twitter talks about some really great instructional strategies. There are multiple useful ideas for monitoring progress, comparing and contrasting ideas, working together, adapting content, sharing ideas and opinions, and taking notes. There are 10+ ideas and resources for each instructional strategy that I never would have thought about using!
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STEAM Kids is a wonderful book with a bunch of great resources and projects for your students to learn hands-on!
There are numerous amounts of activities for science, technology, engineering, art, and math that elementary students will love. Each activity in this book is step-by-step and easy to explore. One of the most interesting ideas I saw while looking through this book was the Insect Hotel. In this project, students use simple household items to create a "hotel" that insects can nest in. This would be a great activity for when teaching students about different insects. |