Category Archives: instructional technology

Popsicle Stick Santas

The full tutorial is at the bottom of this post, but here’s what you will need:

  • Large Popsicle Sticks
  • Black, white and red paint
  • Cotton balls
  • Pop poms
  • Q-tip
  • Hot Glue Gun
  • Ribbon

You will love transforming an ordinary popsicle stick into adorable Santas with some paint and just few other supplies!

Instructions

  • Paint 2/3 of the popsicle stick with red paint as well as a small portion at the top for the hat.     
  • Once the paint is dry, add a white stripe at both red edges as well as a black stripe around the center of the popsicle stick. Use a Q-tip to help make an even line.

  • Use the back of a paintbrush to add 2 small black dots for eyes.
  • Using the glue gun, add a white pom pom to the hat and a yellow pom pom on the black stripe for Santa’s belt.
  • Add a tiny red pom pom for the nose, just underneath the eyes.
  • For Santa’s beard, stretch out a cotton ball and glue it to the bottom of the face.
  • Glue a 4 inch loop of red ribbon to the back of the popsicle stick for hanging.
  • Your popsicle stick Santa ornament is complete!

Reference: https://onelittleproject.com/popsicle-stick-santas/?fbclid=IwAR32EcyGkKtwjPDxjdmtCfIgQAtohABHfU06QuQZjXJoYb3WpasjaqBr770

9 New Ways to Use Flipgrid in the Classroom

The popular tool has features that teachers in any subject can use to help students connect with each other and share their learning.

The video-sharing tool Flipgrid, as we all know, is popular in schools—so popular, in so many countries, that its rapid rise been attributed to “Flipgrid Fever.” The tool has been free for educators to use for over a year now after being acquired by Microsoft.

One of the main things going for Flipgrid is its ease of use. Teachers set up an account and create grids, which act as communities for students to work in. Within each grid the teacher creates prompts called topics, and students post video responses to the prompts and replies to each other’s videos. Most of the videos are quite short, just a minute or two long, and the tool is simple enough that kindergartners use it.

9 NEW WAYS TO USE FLIPGRID

1. Sharing book reviews: With Flipgrid’s new augmented reality (AR) feature, classrooms and classroom libraries can use the video QR code to create an engaging way for students to share book reviews. After a student records their review, the teacher can print the QR code and tape it on the book, and the student’s classmates can use their devices to scan the code and watch the review as a way to help them decide if they’d like to read the book.

2. Practicing world language skills: Flipgrid makes it possible for teachers in different districts and different countries to collaborate. For world language teachers, this creates opportunities for students to practice their speaking skills with a larger group than just their class. Students can post videos to get practice with the vocabulary they’re learning, and instead of being limited to practicing with the people in their physical classroom, they can engage and build their skills with other students around the world studying the same language or have conversations with native speakers of the language.

3. Increasing accessibility for all students: Flipgrid has expanded many of its accessibility features to ensure that all students can participate. Students can use closed captioning when viewing videos, which also generates a full transcript for each video. Microsoft’s Immersive Reader can be used within both the closed captioning and any text within a topic to read the texts aloud and break up words into syllables for easier decoding.

4. Inviting outside speakers: Using Guest Mode, teachers can invite guest speakers to participate in classroom discussions. Guests can watch student videos and post their own videos. This option provides a way for experts in a field to share their knowledge asynchronously, with students posting videos of their questions for the expert to answer at a convenient time in a video response. STEM teachers, for example, could invite engineers or scientists to discuss their careers and research and to answer student questions.

5. Building student portfolios: A teacher can create a grid for student portfolios. Within this grid, the teacher creates a topic for each student, and students post videos explaining their work, demonstrating a recently learned skill, or reflecting on an in-class experience. The teacher can share the link to a student’s topic with their parents or guardians so they can view their child’s work throughout the year. Since the topics can also be available to every student in the class, students can observe their classmates’ work.

6. Adding annotations: When students record a video, they have the option to write directly on the video, and they can add sticky notes with additional text. For students in math practicing solving problems or students in chemistry learning to balance chemical equations, this feature is a great way to show their thinking.

7. Building a mixtape: The mixtape is a way to curate videos from any topic or grid in a single location. A teacher can select any student video and add it to the mixtape, which can be shared with the entire class. Collecting memories from throughout the year is a great way to take advantage of the feature: As the year progresses, the teacher can save interesting videos or important moments from different topics. Watching the mixtape as a class at the end of the year will help students recall what they’ve learned.

8. Sharing and celebrating work: Celebrating completed projects or finished assignments is often forgotten in the classroom due to time constraints, but Flipgrid makes it fairly easy and quick. Using the student-to-student replies option, everyone in the class can view and respond to each other’s videos. For example, students in a history class could share a long-term project they have completed, walking through what they learned and what they created. Peers in the class compose video responses, providing positive feedback on the work completed. When I do this with my ELA students, I require everyone to comment on two or three classmates’ projects from any of my sections.

9. Supporting absent students: Flipgrid can be a catch-up solution for students who are absent. The teacher creates a topic for work completed in class, and if a student is absent during a given class period, one of their peers can post a quick video about what assignments were completed in class so the absent students can quickly learn about what they missed.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/article/9-new-ways-use-flipgrid-classroom?fbclid=IwAR3GF0dhGwCeCHQ7EWGbvk905JUtCwr5yLzuTe3J7t5B5Rhma27dlmjOPHc

Using Technology to Support 10 Executive Functioning Skills

Teachers can use a variety of digital resources to foster the skills students need for long-term success.

The challenges we have faced when returning to our campuses this year are more than just academic. Some of our students haven’t been in a classroom for almost two years. Academic progress and social and cognitive development may be substantially affected, and executive functioning skills are one such impacted area. Teachers already face the arduous task of educating future generations. Because we are charged with meeting academic and social needs, it’s important for our approach to be more intentional to support cognitive skills.

PLAN TO DEVELOP 10 CRITICAL EXECUTIVE FUNCTION SKILLS

Teaching is a social endeavor. Interaction is essential for the transmission of knowledge from one person to another. In addition to crucial social interactions with classmates, far-reaching implications result when students can’t benefit from daily interaction with teachers. Students returning to school to join their friends and classmates this year have a steeper hill to climb.

Teachers can address and help students develop some of the most urgent and critical executive functioning skills:

1. Planning: The ability to figure out how to accomplish goals

2. Organization: The ability to build and maintain a system that keeps materials and plans orderly

3. Time management: Having an accurate understanding of how long tasks will take and using time wisely

4. Task initiation: Independently starting tasks when needed

5. Working memory: The mental process that allows us to hold information in our minds while working with it

6. Metacognition: Being aware of what we know and using that information to help us learn

7. Self-control: The ability to regulate ourselves, including thoughts, actions, and emotions

8. Attention: Being able to focus on a person or task for a period of time and shifting focus when needed

9. Perseverance: The ability to stick with a task and not give up, even when it becomes challenging

10. Flexibility: The ability to adapt to new situations and deal with change

If we can nurture these aspects of executive functioning, we can better ensure that students have the capacity and skills to flourish in school and life.

STRENGTHEN STUDENTS’ WORKING MEMORY

Executive functioning skills in the category of working memory include retrieving information from long-term memory, internalization and transfer of understanding, processing information, and varied instructional modalities. Students can strengthen their long-term memory by using the strategy of visualization and active note-taking during lessons.

Notability is a practical technology resource that can be quickly and efficiently integrated. It’s commonly referred to as a “whiteboard app” because it acts similarly to a whiteboard where the teacher or learners can draw or write. Notability provides additional capabilities to the learner by incorporating multimedia, text, and screen recording. Educreations and ShowMe are similar apps.

When a student demonstrates their learning, internalization and transfer of understanding is more assured. For instance, students can use the app ChatterPix to narrate or describe their knowledge of a concept in a fun way using digital puppets or any image they select. The application records audio and imbeds it with the image while moving the mouth of the chosen character in the picture. FlipGrid also allows students to record themselves and share with their teacher or classmates.

Sometimes, chunking information will help students process it. Google Slides, Padlet, Trello, and Mind Maps also make it easy for teachers to create a step-by-step process or break down a complicated task into smaller pieces, so that students don’t get overwhelmed.

Teachers can integrate a variety of instructional modalities—such as multisensory stimuli—to support students in demonstrating mastery of skills within a lesson. iBooks and iMovie support several modalities (with multimedia that include sound, images, graphics, text, and video) that allow students to consume and create. Additionally, Adobe Spark provides a platform where students can take advantage of easy creation tools using multimedia to demonstrate their understanding.

SUPPORT STUDENTS’ FLEXIBLE THINKING

In the category of flexible thinking, executive functioning skills such as planning, metacognition, organization, time management, and auditory preferences are essential considerations in lesson creation.

When students understand how they process information or have support in planning how to accomplish a task, they can achieve tremendous learning success. Providing students with step-by-step instructions, with which they control the pace, is an advantage for teachers who have a classroom with students whose needs are quite varied. Teachers can use YouTube to create a channel, upload their recordings, or curate others already made for students to view at their own pace. Another practical resource is iorad—a tutorial builder that allows students to control the rate of instruction.

Time management is often a high-priority skill that can be strengthened by posting schedules, agendas, and graphic organizers. Tools that support this skill exist on Google Classroom integrated with Google Calendar. By organizing the workflow of assignments and providing students with access to a schedule created in Google Calendar, teachers can quickly help keep students on track and organized. Apps like Remind and Trello can help students prioritize tasks and send reminders for important events.

It’s important for students to be able to internalize information based on need or preference. For example, some students internalize information more efficiently when they hear text read to them. The text-to-speech features in the Google Chrome extension Read&Write can accommodate students who have an auditory preference.  Students can also take advantage of the speech-to-text feature “voice typing” by using the accessibility tool in Google Docs.

The present challenges are teachable moments. The good news is that teachers are already deploying many resources and strategies to support executive functioning skills. We can be more mindful of moments where they will fit seamlessly into our instruction.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-technology-support-10-executive-functioning-skills?fbclid=IwAR2cBt8Bhv-W4cpdwwQEf5eo-2Fckip-JloIsoc8UEdHOJTEYnTC1sMhthw

Peg monster craft

Easy peg monster craft for kids

Materials:

  • Wooden pegs (clothespins)
  • Yarn – for best affect use different textures and colours but any will do
  • Pipe cleaners
  • Googly eyes — or use our free printable paper eyes for a more eco-friendly version
  • Acrylic paints
  • Plastic beads
  • Gel pens
  • Tacky craft glue – regular glue usually isn’t strong enough to hold a yarn pom pom

How to:

  1. Paint your pegs in bright colors and allow to dry
  2. Wrap some yarn around your fingers. I’ve wrapped it around three of my fingers, but a child might need to wrap it around four. Once you have a nice sized bundle (no specific size, anything goes really) slide it off your fingers and tie a separate piece of yarn around the centre tightly in a double knot.
  3. Use your scissors to trim the looped ends on either end of the yarn bundle giving you a thin pom pom.
  4. Apply glue to the inside top of your peg, and stuff the bundle of yarn in so that the pom pom ends are sticking out like hair. Once the glue dries you will still be able to open and close the peg even with the yarn glued in there.
  5. Cut a pipe cleaner in half and poke it through the spring in the centre of the peg. Thread a plastic bead onto each end of the pipe cleaner to make hands and twist the pipe cleaner ends back around themselves so the beads stay in place.
  6. Glue either one or two googly eyes on the front, and draw a mouth with gel pen.

Reference: https://www.thecrafttrain.com/monster-craft-for-kids/?fbclid=IwAR3jXHkr3zVcYAkdLq6YqkvMFNUhjcmdD08BrJ9AvH-MWcwYA4MWn7nY0fU

Facebook Changes Name to Meta in Embrace of Virtual Reality

    • CEO Zuckerberg calls the metaverse the ‘next frontier’
    • Stock to begin trading under new ticker MVRS on Dec. 1

Facebook Inc. is re-christening itself Meta Platforms Inc., decoupling its corporate identity from the eponymous social network mired in toxic content, and highlighting a shift to an emerging computing platform focused on virtual reality.

“The metaverse is the next frontier,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a presentation at Facebook’s Connect conference, held virtually on Thursday. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”

The name change is the most definitive signal so far of the company’s intention to stake its future on a new computing platform — the metaverse, an idea born in the imaginations of sci-fi novelists. In Meta’s vision, people will congregate and communicate by entering virtual environments, whether they’re talking with colleagues in a boardroom or hanging out with friends in far-flung corners of the world.

The new name won’t affect how the company uses or shares data, and the corporate structure isn’t changing. Apps including the flagship social network, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp will also keep their monikers. The company said its stock will start trading under a new ticker, MVRS, on Dec. 1.

The erstwhile Facebook is hoping to parlay its social-media user base, comprising more than 3 billion people globally, into an audience that will embrace immersive digital experiences through devices powered by augmented and virtual reality software, a business already being aggressively pursued by Meta and its rivals.

“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked with one product that can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today,” Zuckerberg said, “let alone in the future.”

Adoption of virtual reality gadgets — like Meta’s Oculus headset — has so far been minimal and their use mostly relegated to games and other niche applications. While achieving the broader vision of the metaverse is still years away, at Thursday’s event Meta announced a handful of product updates meant to advance that goal.

Shares of Menlo Park, California-based Meta rose 1.5% to $316.92 at the close of New York trading. The stock has risen more than eightfold since the company’s 2012 initial public offering.

The name change follows Meta’s disclosure on Monday that it will start breaking out financial results for the division known as Reality Labs, which includes the Oculus hardware division, next quarter. Meta wants to separate its main digital advertising business from its new investments in AR and VR to let investors see the costs and revenue associated with those efforts. The company also said it will see a $10 billion reduction in operating profit this year because of investments in Reality Labs.

Meta isn’t the first tech giant to rebrand. Internet search leader Google changed its company name to Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, seeking to provide a stronger, more accountable corporate structure to oversee its disparate businesses, co-founder Larry Page said at the time. Alphabet became the holding company for Google’s internet businesses, self-driving car developer Waymo, life-sciences subsidiary Verily and others, including a variety of experimental endeavors. Facebook’s name change doesn’t include such a significant structural overhaul.

Meta may have other reasons to make changes to its corporate identity. Leaning harder into the metaverse lets the company appear to be diversifying its business at a time when it’s facing new pressures in the social media market. Younger rivals such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok are gaining traction among the under-25 age cohort, and Zuckerberg said on Monday he is retooling Meta to focus on attracting young adults again.

Building out the metaverse will also allow Meta to reduce its dependency on mobile operating-system and browser makers such as Google and Apple Inc. to deliver services to consumers. Meta’s third-quarter sales and the fourth-quarter forecast missed analysts’ estimates in part because of Apple’s new rules around the data apps like Facebook and Instagram can collect from iPhone users. The company seems increasingly aware that it doesn’t own the foundations of the digital real estate most users occupy.

Still, Meta is a money-making machine, and has grown to be the sixth most-valuable company in the world by market capitalization. Revenue is expected to top $117 billion this year, up from $5 billion in 2012, the year Facebook went public. Net income is projected to approach $40 billion in 2021. The social network has about 24% of the estimated $200 billion digital advertising market, according to analyst EMarketer Inc., dominating the industry alongside Google, which leads with about 29%.

Meta may also be hoping the name change will divert public conversation from a wave of negative news reports based on the documents collected by former product manager-turned whistle-blower Frances Haugen. The documents, dubbed the Facebook Papers, were disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The company is battling accusations that it has misled investors and the public about its user growth, efforts to fight hate speech and disinformation, and how the platform was used to organize the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Realizing the company’s vision of a widely used metaverse will be an uphill fight. For starters, Meta will have significant competition when Apple releases a rival VR device. Facebook was years behind rival Snapchat with its debut last month of Ray-Ban Stories, smart glasses that can record audio and video but don’t yet have AR capability. Zuckerberg has said that multiple companies should build and contribute to the metaverse with interoperability in mind.

Reference: https://www.bloomberg.com/technology