Sunday, September 22, 2013

International Dot Day 2013

This post is about a week past due. Last weekend was my birthday. This weekend was just family time. It’s all good!

While my room is in the process of being transformed to the STEAM Lab, it is the old art room. About half of the kids call me the art teacher. I was discouraged by the number of students who declared to me (the ‘art teacher’) that they can not draw. There were kindergarteners who refused to try to draw because they are not good at it.

I consider myself to be more creative than artistic. I have always worked to integrate the arts into my teaching. Teaching an actual art lesson is a little outside of my comfort zone, but I’m working on it.

I decided to start with The Dot because of the message behind the story. We started with individual dot galleries (see here for more about that) made up of four to six little frames.

For our International Dot Day display, each student made one additional frame. With just over 400 students, it took me about two hours to hang these all in the hall.

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I sorted the dots by grade level. I’m loving The Happy Caterpillar paper set by My Clip Art Store. (Not MY clip art store by the way – that is the name of the store!)

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The teachers and staff got into the fun as well. I gave all interested adults a full sheet of paper from the teacher’s guide.

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Next year I should be able to add a digital component to the day. I’m still waiting for the computers and SMART board to arrive, but they should be set up in the next couple of weeks. By next year’s International Dot Day, we should be in business! There are lots of possibilities with Skype and such. I can’t wait!

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Using Evernote Web Clipper to Save, Organize, and E-mail Posts

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I am a huge fan of Evernote. After years of taking notes on random sheets of paper at every meeting, I made the switch to Evernote last year. I love that I can organize my notes in notebooks and search for key words to find notes.

I was a huge fan of Google Reader. I like some of the features in Bloglovin’, but I was miss being able to e-mail a blog post. I would often e-mail a post to myself for later.

I often find posts like this one or this one that I want to share with my coworkers. Pinterest is great for keeping things for yourself, but some posts are worth sharing via e-mailing to others. Some people have a button to allow you to e-mail a post, but that usually just sends a link. The Bloglovin' mobile app sends just a link. I discovered last week that I can use Evernote to e-mail full blog posts from Bloglovin’. It made my week!

The first thing you need to do is download the Evernote Webclipper for your browser. It will add a little button with an elephant on it. This picture shows Firefox. The button went to the other side on my Mac, but it still served the same purpose.

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If you are signed into your Evernote account, you will see this box. You can chose to clip the whole page, part of a page, or just the address. You will also be able to choose the notebook and add any tags to the post.

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That’s it! It is saved as a file in your Evernote account.

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The note looks just like the website.

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From here you can share it via e-mail or other social media.

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I have found some fantastic resources through blogs. E-mailing the webclip this way makes it easy to save, organize, and share posts.

How do you save your favorite posts?

(Button credits: Computer: Ashley Hughes , Background: MyClipartStore.com)


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I’m so excited about this that I’m linking up for my first Tried it Tuesday.



Be sure to stop by and read some posts worth e-mailing to your friends!

Friday, September 6, 2013

Five for Friday

We had a three day week. It feels more like a Monday than a Friday, but I’ll take it!

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1
 My classroom is under construction. Literally.

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They are adding electric outlets and data ports for the new computers and SMART board. There was no school on Thursday, but today my classes were relocated to the Media Center. By this time next week I should have enough outlets for a lab.

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 There was no school Thursday, but I spent the day cleaning my house. Sad, but true.

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I’ve used Evernote for note taking for the last year or so. Last week I discovered the Evernote Web Clipper. I’m going to go a blog post on the topic, but it is awesome. For now you can just take my word for it!
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My other new (old) love is Dropbox. I’d used it in the past, but I’d exceeded my free space. I broke down and upgraded my account a couple of weeks ago. I’d been using a combination of flash drives and server space. I’m so much more relaxed now that all my files are safe in one place.

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I’m so ready for my room to be finished. By October, I *should* have the tables, computers, and SMART board in place. I can’t wait! I’m trying to be patient, but it is wearing thin.

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Enjoy your weekend!