Presenting at EdMedia 2014 Conference

I enjoy participating in AACE/EdMedia conferences. I have been a member of AACE since 2010. I love this community of passionate and generously sharing their knowledge and skills of teaching with
technology educators.

My colleague and friend, Nellie Deutsch, and I have been presenting workshops and papers at this conference already several years on a row. This year, in Finland, we will run a workshop and present a paper together.

 

  Let's Moodle: Getting Up and Running with Moodle 2.6

 I also encouraged one of my research students, Lindsay Bordonaro, to submit a proposal. How excited and proud I was to find out that Lindsay's proposal was accepted and she will present at the conference in June. The topic of her presentation is: Exploring the Use of iPads for Engaged Learning in the Elementary Classroom: A Survey of Teachers.
I am doing my best to raise money to support Lindsay and make her trip to the conference a reality!

More tools for Formative Assessment

I have just come across with this new tool Geddit that can be used with iPhones, any tablets and/or computers in the beginning (Entry ticket), during, and in the end (Exit ticket) of the lesson.



Here is a video that explains how it works:



Amazing what teachers can do with the use of new technologies to reach every student in class and help them learn and progress.

Presenting at CELL conference 2014

I am presenting at the CELL conference "Family, Community, School: Literacy Connections"
and created a list of resources for my presentation at List.ly. Join my session at 10:20 AM, use the hashtag #cell14_drS to tweet about it and stay connected.

Promoting Literacy with Technology: The Potential for Teachers, Students and Parents to Collaborate

View more lists from Ludmila Smirnova

Slice of Life Challenge #sol14 My Missed Tuesday SOL

Wow! It is already Wednesday. I forgot to write my Tuesday's Slice of Life challenge story. I will write it anyway!

Tastes Differ!
I had a guest coming over. Half of the day was spent cooking. Oh, it is a good topic for a slice of life. Cooking helps me to relax. I enjoy cooking especially when I welcome somebody to my home and introduce to the Russian culture. I usually prepare the Russian dishes. This time I made my favorite beet salad. Not all Americans love beets, by the way. But when they try my beet salad (boiled and shredded beets, garlic and walnuts + Russian mayo), they fall in love with this amazing dish!

I also made the Russian soup (in Russia it is called "Schee") and Salmon in a hazelnut flour! Hm! Yummy! I enjoy making dishes with kale lately. I never knew about kale in my previous Russian life.
I learned about kale, here, in the U.S. I read a lot about this fantastic source of energy, its important diverse ingredients that help to stay healthy, young, and fit. See it for yourself in the inforgraphics below!

I make smoothies, salads, soups, and garnish side dishes with kale. Absolutely LOVE it! Of course, it is a matter of taste and acceptance. My guest chose other dishes I cooked, instead. Tastes differ!

It was really a relaxing day but then, when my friend left, I had to catch up with the work I hadn't done.

I am getting ready for a big event starting on Friday, Spring BLOG Festival.

I will present on "Blogging to Reflect."

I am behind with reading and commenting on my 4 classes student blogs and assignments. No time to breeze. That's the slice of my life.

I will do my best to not miss blogging next Tuesday!


Day 11 of the March SOLSC! #sol14 | TWO WRITING TEACHERS:
'via Blog this'

Поздравление с 8 Марта - Видео открытка. by Татьяна Пехота

SpeakPipe - receive voice messages from your audience directly on your website.

Today is Tuesday and I encouraged my Literacy and Technology class to accept "Slice of Life"challenge.

I plan to participate in this challenge myself.

There is so much you can write about. I have learned a lot of things today. Besides reading students' assignments and posts on eClass forums, I joined webinars "Mapping for Common Core" from the PD Common Core 360 website. I would recommend school districts and pre-service teachers to join the site and participate in these webinars to be enlightened on how to map the curriculum with Common Core Standards.

I sent a message to Donna Perk, a teacher from Bishop Dunn Memorial School and shared some resources on teaching with iPads and Smart Boards.

While I was browsing Google + communities I came across @One Community moderated by one of my virtual friends, Michelle Pakansy-Brock. I enjoy seeing how Michelle is progressing with her career as an online professor, the author of the book Best Practices for Teaching with Emergent Technologies, a moderator of several communities and a keynote presenter at the conferences and symposiums. She presented at the SLN SOL Summit in NYC in February 2014 on How to Help Faculty to Humanize Online Teaching and Learning Experience. Impressive!
I am surprised how much Michelle and I have in common as far as online course design and implementation is concerned!

When I read Michele's blog, I learned about an interesting tool, called SpeakPipe, a voice comments tool. I will try it out (it is free!). I am curious how it will work for my students. I added Kaizena to my g-docs to provide voice comments on the pre-service teachers' lesson plans.  It didn't work well to begin with. The team sent a message recently that they improved the programs an added more tools to it. I will add this tool to my toolkit and use it in my classes to provide voice comments.

It is time-consuming and overwhelming at times to learn about new tools! I immediately try them out.

SpeakPipe - receive voice messages from your audience directly on your website.:


'via Blog this'

A New Jouney Begins

Today was the first classes in the Spring of 2014 semester. I am always curious what the students will be like, how well they are prepare for accepting the challenges, how tech savvy they are.

I always share with them the videos about the Net generation students in today's classrooms. I am surprised that in most cases, teacher candidates haven't see these videos and haven't heard about the term Web 2.0. 

Below is one of the videos I usually share with teacher candidates, "The Vision of Students of Today."

I enjoy seeing the change of students' face expressions, and love discussing why it was important for me to share the video with them. 

During the first week of classes, I use as an ice-breaker, an activity where each student is assigned a Web 2.0 tool that they have to learn about and use to introduce themselves. It is so exciting to see how quickly teacher candidates learn the tools, how creatively they use them to express themselves and then how proudly they share their new learning with the whole class.

I challenge them to use this activity as their first teaching experience to the whole class. It is much more challenging to teach to your own peers than to the elementary school children! Some teacher candidates confess that this presentation really breaks their fear, stage fright, and helps them develop confidence.

I am excited to learn about MoveNote and I have used it already to introduce myself and all Moodle classes to my students from the four courses.

Here it is, one of the introductions: