Gale Virtual Reference Library - Profile Faculty Meeting 1/6/15

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Dealing with Google Calendar invitations

More in-depth info on Google Classroom

Credits go to Craig Sheil

Short and Sweet Introduction to Google Classroom

following up on Josh's posting:





Enjoy!



Jude

Google Classroom is on

Last year I gave a presentation on Edmodo as a classroom management tool.  There are many of these out there including Moodle, Schoology, etc.  Well, lucky for us (maybe) Google launched Google Classroom just last week.  The coolest thing about Google Classroom as a classroom management tool is that it links to the kids already existing Google Apps account and school email.  In other words, they don't have to sign up for anything extra.  Furthermore, it works really well with the new ChromeBooks because well, Chrome is a Google product.  It will link their Drive folders as well.  All you do is sign in as a teacher...get the access code after you create a class and share that code with your students.  Here is the link:

http://www.google.com/edu/classroom/

Cheers,

Josh 

10 Great Apps for a Teacher’s New iPad

Credits go to Richard Byrnes

Studying Biology with a $10 Microscope and a Smart Phone

Science teachers and other creative folk,  I could  not resist...

New Report Has Surprising Stats About Information Literacy Shifts Over Past 24 Months

With Information Literacy units embedded in English classes and full access to EasyBib and ResearchReady,  Profile is on the right track. (Jude)

Posted by Emily Gover on Jun 3, 2014 in Blog Posts | 2 comments

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It’s been two years since we released our Trends in Information Literacy infographic, one of our most popular downloads. We recently surveyed 1,200 librarians and over 10,000 students to see how the information landscape has changed over the past two years. Thousands of participants answered questions about:

• Student understanding of website evaluation and information synthesis
• Current information literacy instructional methods
• Frequency of plagiarism

What did we find? Some of the statistics were significant, and the percentages may surprise you. We compiled the preliminary findings into a free report. This video features some highlights from the survey:

Toggle the resolution of the video by selecting 720p from the gear icon.

Want to learn all the details about shifts in the information literacy landscape and student research habits between 2012 and 2014? Download the report today!

18 useful apps for 1-to-1 Ipad classroom

Some classics and some new ones... Enjoy!

Credits to Monica Burns

Technology: What Educators Are Most Interested in Learning About This Year

21 Good iPad Apps for Middle School Teachers to Try This Summer

Many thanks to Pam McLeod

Good News from Microsoft Office 365

1 TB of OneDrive storage coming to an Office 365 near you

by Jevon Fark, on June 23, 2014 | 16 Comments | 133

Since we introduced Office 365 for consumers nearly a year and a half ago, customers have told us that one of their favorite benefits of the subscription service is the additional OneDrive storage–for accessing and sharing files on their favorite devices and getting things done from home, school, work and everywhere in between. These are precisely the reasons we included additional OneDrive storage with every Office 365 consumer subscription–and we’re happy that people are realizing the value.

Today, OneDrive and Office are announcing a BIG change to that benefit for consumers, to the tune of 1 TB per user. That’s right–we’re increasing the OneDrive storage allotment included with Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University from 20 GB to 1 TB. That’s a whopping 50 times, or 5,000 percent increase in storage–and it’s going to be here before classes are in session!

As previously announced in April, all Office 365 business customers will also get 1 TB of OneDrive for Business storage per user as part of their Office 365 subscription, which will begin to roll out in July.

What’s a terabyte? Here’s some perspective:

• 1 TB is equivalent to approximately 50,000 trees made into paper and printed
• 1 TB can store about 1,000 copies of the full edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
• 1 TB can hold around 2,000 hours of audio recorded at CD quality
• 1 TB can remember roughly 8,000 times more data than the average human

While other cloud storage providers charge more than $100 a year for the same amount of online storage, we’re bringing in a full productivity suite too–with Office 365–starting at just $6.99 per month:

Office 365 consumer subscription options

Application availability varies by platform. Skype world minutes available in select countries. Seewww.office.com/information for details.

If you’re an Office 365 Home, Personal, University or Business subscriber, you’re good to go. Your TB of OneDrive storage is on its way and will be added to your existing account beginning in July. You should not be concerned about current files that are stored in OneDrive as they will not be affected by this change.

Things are about to get a lot more spacious, and we hope you enjoy the added legroom.

–Jevon Fark, Office Team

Museum of online Museums

Looking for a virtual visit of a museum? Art? History? Science? Technology? Try this portal:

The Epic BYOD Toolchest (51 Tools You Can Use Now)

By Vicky Davis:

Apps for: Formative Assessment, Screencasting, Content-sharing, Note taking, Cloud syncing, Graphic Design, Presentations, Blogging, Social Bookmarking...

Library Summer Professional Development Opportunites

37 Links to Summer Professional Development Opportunities for Librarians 

From the excellent blog of Julie Greller

JUST FOR SCHOOL LIBRARIANS

ALA Las Vegas- American Association of School Librarians schedule HERE

EasyBib Professional Development- on demand and free

Summer Getaway Professional Development Workshops- for school librarians from the Graduate
School for Library and Information Science at the iSchool at Illinois.
The flyer can be downloaded HERE.

On Common Core 2014: Professional Development for School Librarians- instructional webcasts
from School Library Journal

Summer Institute 2014- South Carolina Association of School Librarians

FREE
Annenberg Learner- view videos in these subject areas: arts, foreign language, literature and language 
arts, math, science, social studies and history

Annenberg-Newseum Summer Teacher Institute- three-day institute in Washington, DC for teachers 
using new media; application deadline is May 26, 2014.

Coursera-  verified certificates for certain courses

edCamp- list of all edCamp schedules (it's worldwide!)

EdmodoCon- 11-hour virtual event

Free Professional Learning Through ASCD's Professional Development Tools- includes webinars, 
virtual learning, book study guides

Google Teacher Academy- this summer: Atlanta, GA, Mountainview, CA and The Phillipines

Hidden Histories: Free Summer Professional Development and Lodging for Teachers-  for 
North Carolina K-12 teachers

NEA Member Benefits: Professional Development

NJEA Professional Learning

NSTA Learning Center- science teachers can find workshops in New Mexico, Texas

Smithsonian Educator Workshops- includes the Mobile Learning Institute

Summer Professional Development Blog Series- Edutopia's list of virtual workshops, tools and
resources and their Summer Rejuvination Guide

YALSA Academy- Young Adult Library Services Association's online educational video initiative



$$$
2014 Civics and Civil Rights Institute- Washington, DC 

2014 Summer Institute- Learning Forward's four-day event in Chicago

American Studies Summer Institute- Defining "Public" and "Private" in America: Cultural, Social 
and Political Arguments Past and Present (Washington, DC)

Annenberg Learner- full courses for graduate education credit, courses for continuing education units 
and certificates (Through Colorado State University); facilitated or self-paced courses through PBS TeacherLine

The Art of Education Conference- online conference for art teachers

Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute- covers teachers of grades K-12

The Conference Calendar- lists conferences for all types of educators

Hybrid Institutes for Grades 3-8 Educators- in conjunction with Framingham State University and 
Cambridge College

ISTE 2014 Atlanta- The International Society of Technology in Education

Kansas Summer Institute for School Librarians- open to in and out-of-state teachers

Learning and the Brain- "Connecting educators to neuroscientists and researchers."

Massachusetts Teachers Association Summer Conference

Millard Oakley STEM Center- for Tennessee teachers

NJEA Summer Learning Opportunities

Richard Byrne's In-Person PD Opportunity- Maine

Summer PD Opportunities- Mathematics, Science, Language Arts and Social Studies teachers from 
Ohio

Summervision DC- sponsored by the National Art Education Association

Teaching the Holocaust at the Middle School Level-  at the University of New Hamshire

Follow me on RebelMouse or Twitter,  
Like me on Facebook or Subscribe to this blog.

You might also like:

44 Professional Development Opportunities

21 Websites with Summer Reading Ideas for You and Your ...

An Annotated List of Flipped Class Tools and Resources

Previewing a new Classroom by Google

 Not a lot of specifics, but it sounds like teachers piloting Google Classroom are pretty happy about it.

Jude           

Free Booktrack app for Google Chrome and Ipads

Reluctant reader? Creative reader? Artistic reader? Geek reader? Have fun and improve your skills

Booktrack Classroom allows students to read with a movie-style soundtrack, or to create their own soundtrack for any story, essay or other text. Students can also create and publish their own Booktracks, reading them on the web or on mobile phones and tablets.

Visit www.booktrackclassroom.com to get sign-up and get started.

• 17% increase in comprehension
• 30% increase in engagement
• Common Core integration across multiple subjects
• Proven to dramatically improve test scores
• Free and incredibly easy to use for grades K – 12
• Multiple uses across the reading and writing curriculum

Jude

Google Unveils 'Classroom' Learning Management System

Viewed on Education Week by Jude:

By Michele Molnar on May 7, 2014 9:45 AM 

Google is entering the world of "learning management systems" with the pre-release ofClassroom, designed to work with the Google Apps for Education suite currently used by 30 million students and educators.

The tool, which Google announced on its blog Tuesday, will give teachers a way to create and collect assignments, provide real-time feedback to individual students, make announcements, ask questions, and organize their folders by assignment or by student. 

Below is a screen shot from Google's blog, showing an example of how a home page might look using Classroom, with assignments for each period of a school day.

The free tool, which weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail, is expected to launch officially in September to K-12 schools and colleges. It will be available in 40 languages.

For now, the company is inviting educators to apply for a preview, and ed-tech companies or individual developers can sign up to learn more about integrating with Classroom. 

"We've been working with more than a dozen pilot schools and universities to try out Classroom and provide feedback," wrote Zach Yeskel, product manager for Classroom and a former high school math teacher, in the blog.

Educators interested in applying for an opportunity to try out Classroom before its release can do so here.

Easy navigation between Apple devices and Chrome

Apple devices and Chrome users, our life keeps getting simpler and better.

Thanks to a couple of Chrome extensions, you may access your Apple productivity tools, docs and data on your PC. Syncing between devices is all automatic.Here they are:

- Your bookmarks
- All your iWorks documents: Pages, Numbers, Keynote... In fact, Chrome allows you to create and modify documents as if you were using your Apple device.

- All your pictures, mail (you have the option to sync with outlook, too), contacts, calendar and tasks.

- For the absent minded-ones among us, you can even use "Find my phone" on Chrome.

All you need to do is install in Chrome these two apps, iCloud Bookmarks and iCloud Dashboard.

Jude

Edmodo Snapshot

Whether you are using EDMODO or not they just released a really cool tool for  use in the classroom and for teacher evaluation.  Its called EDMODO SNAPSHOT and it is a very easy way to test student's understanding of the Common Core standards.  You can use it as a pre-test or exit ticket or quiz for lessons or for your class.  EDMODO will create the assessment for you as long as you identify the standard/s you want tested.  It gives instant real time results that shows student strength and weaknesses, thus your strengths and weaknesses since their entire academic potential rides on teacher effectiveness and not diet, home life, personality, community, mood, sleep schedule, job, mental state, and on and on.

Check it out:

https://www.edmodo.com/snapshot

Josh

Microsoft Office for iPad

Yes, it's available. No, it's not free.

You can download the apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote) from the App Store. They are free.

Then, when you open the app, you'll discover the string attached to it; you need a subscription to Office 365.

The subscription is ~$10/month. It automatically saves on the cloud all the documents you create, either on your iPad or your  Microsoft Office applications on your  computer. It also syncs between your devices.

iWorks, the Apple version of Office does this for free. Pages (Apple word processor, not quite as versatile as Word), Keynotes (Apple version of powerpoint), Numbers (Apple version of Excel) are all free apps (if you bought your device after Sept 1, 2013. Otherwise it is ~$10 for each app). They automatically save your documents on iCloud and sync between your devices. Your documents can be exported in Microsoft Office format and iWorks will open Office documents.  

The choice is yours.

                                                                                                                                 Jude

Preparing for the 2015 NH Young Adults Literary Award

For the first time this year, Profile English students participated into the selection of the  2015 Flume Award nominees. 
They can now choose the 2015 Flume Award winner!  All they need to do is read the books on the 2015 nominees list, then cast their vote for the book they think deserves to be the winner (voting deadline is April 30, 2015). See Jude for more details.

The 2015 Flume Award nominees are:

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin
The Selection by Kiera Kass
Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz
Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys
Winger by Andrew Smith
The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Brochures and Bookmarks are on the Flume webpage.

Science Teachers: Free Virtual Chemistry Lab

The ChemCollective is a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests. Teachers can use our content for pre-labs, for alternatives to textbook homework, and for in-class activities for individuals or teams. Students can review and learn chemistry concepts using our virtual labs, simulations, and tutorials. The ChemCollective is organized by a group of faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon who are interested in using, assessing, and creating engaging online activities for chemistry education.

Jude

Teachers: where Ipad and Bloom's taxonomy meet

Ipad users: this poster is worth several hours of Professional Development. I know this sounds like a bold statement, however, I believe you'll see the point after  taking a look at the original posting by Allan Carrington here.
You may download the poster here. 


Jude

Three Extremely Cool Outdoor Sites for Science

Science Teachers,

With Spring in the air, here are great sites and apps to explore outdoor  learning opportunities:

Project Noah   is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

Nature Sound Map: A group of professional nature recordists from around the globe have collaborated to develop Nature Soundmap, an enjoyable and interactive way of exploring the natural sounds of our planet.

Geocaching (and yes, there are geocaches around here): Geocaching is the real-world treasure hunt that's happening right now, all around you. There are 2,364,046 active geocaches and over 6 million geocachers worldwide.

Credits go to Richard Byrne. Visit his blog!

Jude

Gale databases w/content mapped directly to the national curriculum framework

Profile teachers:

In addition to the Profile's  current  subscription to the Gale Virtual Reference Library (logon info here), here is
 a free trial to a series of additional databases with content mapped directly to the national curriculum framework. Your  free trial is just a click away. 

Follow the link below to your free trial:

http://www.galetrials.com/default.aspx?TrialID=76467;ContactID=59049

Having trouble? If the above link takes you to a page asking for Account# and ZIP, please copy and paste the URL into your browser address bar.

Don't delay. Your trial lasts until May 5. I'll ask for feedback at that time. Enjoy!

Jude

Information Literacy at Profile

In light of studies like this one on Edutopia, I am glad to announce that, starting September 2014, the Media Center will provide school-wide access, instruction and tutorials for EasyBib Pro and ResearchReady (Web search, evaluation, and information use) for Middle School and High School levels. To schedule teaching units in your class or individual tutoring, just contact me.

Jude

Information Literacy Units can be designed from 15 minutes to a full hour in a blended format (online and on site). They include practice and assessment. They are aligned with national standards and the Common Core.

(Relatively) Independent News

For those of us who feel that  mainstream, corporate infotainment is not a good enough source of information for themselves or their students, I have compiled a list of relatively independent news sources. Here is the link, located in the Library page of the Media Center website. I update it occasionally. Suggestions are welcome.

Jude

Getting the Best out of Your Google Drive

Getting the Best out of your Google Drive

It keeps getting better!

                 

TeachThought Blog

TeachThough This blog about technology integration in the classroom, blended learning and new learning paradigms always gives you something brand new, original, to think about for possible use.
http://teachthought.com/

                                                                                        Jude

5 Awesome Primary Source Websites

For History, Social Studies and English....

Jude

Chromebooks for education expands with new devices, Google Play textbooks

It looks like all the major players, including Dell, are coming with a Chromebook. Decision time for Profile:

Chromebooks for education expands with new devices, Google Play textbooks

Jude

Basic Facts about Chromebooks - Profile Fac Meeting

Super fast startup time

Day long  battery capacity

What you do online:  Apps and Extensions

What you can do offline

User friendly, light updates.

No need for virus protection

Not all software have their equivalent in apps. Check the Apps store, the specific software company you are interested in, and list serv groups.

More info here

More questions? Email me.

Jude

Free and Bargain eBooks

Following up on ebooks, Kindle owners will enjoy these two sites. They offer free and bargain ebooks.
Subscribe to  them and you'll get a daily update. Enjoy!

Kindle Buffet

BookBub

Jude