Lynda.com

My school district has purchased a school subscriptions to Lynda.com. This is a website that plays online video courses. Each course is broken down into managable 3-8 minute clips on each subject. The site reminds me of how Udemy.com is set up. On that site, you have to purchase each lesson individually but the delivery format is about the same.

I have watched a couple courses that were suggested by the technology department. One was about how to influence people and the other one was about how do a presentation. Both were pretty interesting and informative given by experts that knew the topics well. Although the videos didn't have very much to do with teaching in the classroom, I can see the value of knowing how to do both.

I have spend some time browsing the education section and have found some clips that interest me. One was on using PowerPoint in the classroom. I use Noteability a lot but I am not against setting up slides in PowerPoint and projecting them with my iPad. A google search for powerpoint presentations and what ever topic you are interested in presenting should result in plenty of results. I googled "Metric system powerpoint" and found a pretty neat .ppt on metric system conversions that I am going to use tomorrow. The PowerPoint App on iOS actually works pretty good to display a presentation. I can use my wireless keyboard to progress the slides also.

RLK

First attempt at using Google Classroom in a 6th Grade Science Class

Since I had the computer cart for ELA PARCC testing, I decided to finally get my science class onto Google Classroom. I created an assinment last Firday which was a shared Google Spreadsheet. My goal was for each student to log on and fill in their own data about their pulse (an activity that we did last Thursday) and by using some nifty spreadsheet functions, we would have averages neatly displayed.

I also created an assignment during my prep today that was a graph created in Google docs that would reinforce concepts learned in 3rd period Math class (they are my same students). Graphing independent and dependent variables was my goal for this assignment.

So how did it go? Lets just say that half of the students were more or less focused while the other half could not stop commenting in the comments section. I will have to say that I want to walk them through this together so I failed to write detailed instructions about what I specifically wanted to happen. When we were all on the same google doc, entering data, a few students were deleting and changing other kids' numbers, which everyone found to be very annoying. This feature will be used in the future amongst small groups that are working together.

The second assignment, the one with the graph, had some redeeming features. Primarily, it was because I used Google Classroom to assign a Google Doc to each one of my students, creating a new seperate, private document only for them. This cut away from everyone being on the same page which was actually good for this set of students. The graphing didn't get too far but I did get to introduce Google Classroom to the students. Next time, I will include clear instructions and assign only one assignment at a time, as the 2 different assignments caused some confusion.

RLK