Passwords

Thanks to my friend Sara Isbell, who sent this email recently to her staff. I thought it was great, so I stole it with her permission :)  The top 25 worst passwords, in order (and their current rankings compared with the previous year's rankings) 1.  password (unchanged) 2.  123456 (unchanged) 3.  12345678 (unchanged) 4.  abc123 (up 1) 5.  qwerty (down 1) 6.  monkey (unchanged) 7.  letmein (up 1) 8.  dragon (up 2) 9.  111111 (up 3) 10. baseball (up 1) 11. iloveyou (up 2) 12. trustno1 (down 3) 13. 1234567 (down 6) 14. sunshine (up 1) 15. master (down 1) 16. 123123 (up 4) 17. welcome (new) 18. shadow (up 1) 19. ashley (down 3) 20. football (up 5) 21. jesus (new) 22....

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ClassBadges.com

Well! A new, fun thing has inspired me to create a new blog entry! There has been a movement, gaining momentum over the last few years, regarding the use of online "badges". A badge is something that you can earn for completing a set of requirements. There is a Mozilla badge project, which is attempting to standardize the use of badges across communities. The great thing about this project, if it works, is that students could earn credit for skills not necessarily taught (or tested) in your average classroom. Let's say a student is an awesome programmer. That is a pretty marketable skill! One that colleges might be interested in! But how will they know? It isn't covered on a state test. And a programming class in one school might be extremely different than a programming class in another. That's...

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NearPod

NearPod is a fantastic app for the ipod/iPad, designed to help teachers during instruction. Teachers create a presentation onthe computer using the Nearpod site. Then during class, they control the presentation through the Nearpod App on an iPad. Students can use the Nearpod Student App on either an iPad or an or an iPhone or iPod Touch Device. What makes this unique is that this app allows students to interact with the presentation. The teacher can ask students to draw something on their devices, and then can see all of their drawings on the Teacher App.  The teacher can even share a drawing with the whole class (without a student name attached). There are even polls and quizzes that can be added to a presentations,...

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Vennage

It seems that everywhere you look these days, you see infographics. They are a great way to display information because they are so visual and easy to read. Now there are tools to help you create infographics. Vennage is an easy to use tool that allows you build an infographic quickly and easily. You can add charts and graphs, pictures, and text. Easel.ly and Piktochart are other examples of Infographic creators.  This video gives you a preview of Easel.ly so you can see how it works! Source: easel.ly via FISD on Pinteres...

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Google Research

Something new is available in Google Docs! This is groovy. Once you open your document, you can go to Tools>Research and a search window will pop open on the right side of the screen. You can search right there, while you are working on your document! Then hover your mouse over the source on the right and you will see options to preview the source, Insert a link to the source, or get a citation for the source. For more info about Google Research, check out the Google Help Her...

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Gzaas!

Yeah, I have no idea how to pronounce this one. This is a groovy little tool with a very simple purpose. The only thing it can do is take small amounts of text and make them full screen. Now if you are like my, you like to have a bell ringer when the kids come in the room, and you generally put it on a PowerPoint slide so that it will show it HUGE on the screen. And you can do some cool formatting stuff with it as well. What you see in the picture above is basically all it takes to get started. You type your text in the box and hit the orange button. It will randomly select a style for you, but you can change it at the bottom of the finished screen if you want. That's pretty much it! ...

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Summer Technology Courses

Check out these awesome technology offerings for the summer! Registration opens May 12, so be sure to jump in Eduphoria and sign up for the ones you want! In particular, I want to highlight the Moodle offerings this summer. All teachers will have access to Moodle Middle School folks, you may want to check this out. It is a great tool and especially wonderful for Flipped Classroom online environments, and offers discussion boards as well as a way for students to turn in work online. CTE folks, there are some lunch and learn sessions that are designed for the current Moodle user, to show you the differences between the old Moodle and the new (version 2.0) It's a great idea, and if you plan to use Moodle next year I would strongly...

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