Anchors of Support for Afternoon Tech Snacks June 15-18

The learning continues this week at the 2015 Curriculum Writers Cadre.

Anchors of Support are available for this week's afternoon tech snack topics.

Today’s Meet

My StoryMaker

WeVideo

Powtoons

Buffer (Topping off your Social Media Feeds with Buffer)

Anchors of Support for June 15-19 Morning Tech Snacks

It's a new week for the 2015 Curriculum Writers Cadre and with it comes new morning tech snacks.

Anchors of Support are available for this week's morning tech snack topics.

YouTube for Education / YouTube for Schools

Linoit

Screencasting with Screencast-o-matic

Answer Garden

QR Code Resources

AISD Anchors of Support

An anchor is usually seen as a heavy object tied to a boat to keep it from moving.  In this case, our Anchors of Support are connecting teachers to a constant source of support documents for the technology being used in classrooms today.

Teachers can search their Google Drive for "Anchor of Support" or just go straight to them at bit.ly/aisdanchors .  This link takes you to a growing collection of support documents that will continue to be updated and added to throughout the year.  We will be highlighting some of these on this blog, so come back and search the site or look for the "Anchor of Support" in the right margin.

Discovery Education- SOS Activities

Discovery Education not only provides quality media for teachers and students to use in class, but they provide Board Builders and a great new resource, the SOS Activities.  These activities provide highly effective instructional strategies that can increase student engagement and deeper content discussions.  This anchor, bit.ly/aisddiscoverysos , provides support for getting started.

One SOS Activity that students enjoy is The Snowball Fight.  (This link explains this strategy in a video, or search 'Snowball Fight' in Discovery Education to get the video and PDF resources.) After watching a video or reading a passage, students write one thing that they learned on a clean piece of paper.  The teacher announces "Snowball Fight" and everybody throws their page into the middle of the room. They retrieve a new page, read it, and then add one new idea to that page. After repeating this a few times, the students have at least several ideas to bring into final discussion about the video or passage. 

Kahoot 

Teachers are using Kahoot with students as a easy Formative Assessment tool. Our Anchor (http://bit.ly/1efDsXF) provides information for getting started using this tool on desktops, laptops and mobile devices.  Students do not need an account and can easily use their personal mobile devices without installing any software. 

Want An Anchor?

For what classroom instruction would you like to see an Anchor of Support? Share a comment below so we can make sure you get what you need for your instructional time.

Safe Video Viewing In The Classroom?

Video used well in the classroom can both engage students and help the teacher express ideas in different ways. Showing the perfect instructional video with Party In Padre ads on the page, however, can be distracting and ruin the points being made.  There are some great tools that work well with YouTube that teachers can take advantage of.

SafeShare.tv is a resource that allows you to not only block the ads, but present the video on the page all by itself.

Choose the color of the border around your video, give the video a new name and even choose beginning and ending points for your safe video.  (We suggest that you don't use SafeShare's download option, but instead use KeepVid to download your YouTube video.

SafeShare.tv provides you with a URL that can be shared with students which presents the video with all of the settings you chose.

KeepVid.com is a different site that lets you download the video to your computer.  The best rule for using video with students is to plan for a busy network and use video from your computer rather than a web-streamed source.  KeepVid gives you options for downloading the video to your computer.

KeepVid provides a box to paste your YouTube link into before clicking the Download button. The result is a list of downloadable files.

The (Video Only) options are just that, videos that include no sound.  Those are actually fantastic resources for some class projects.  For example, have the students drop the video file into WeVideo and provide their own soundtrack that teaches the viewer a lesson!

We have provided an Anchor of Support that steps you through both of these online tools. Check out these Anchors:  SafeShare.tv (bit.ly/aisdsafeshare) and  KeepVid.com (bit.ly/aisdkeepvid)

How would you use these in your classroom? Do you use a different tool for sharing YouTube videos with students?  Leave a comment below to share!