Teaching for the 21st Century by Tammy Worcester #cmtc10

These are my notes from Tammy Worcester’s Tuesday keynote at the 2010 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Manchester, NH on 30 Nov 2010. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Track conference conversations using the Twitter hash tag #cmtc10. All Tammy’s keynote and breakout session links / resources are available on her website handouts links page.

Barrier I hear frequently: I don’t have enough TIME!
– http://www.tammyworcester.com/

Text tammyw to 50500

Email: tammy [dot] worcester [at] gmail [dot] com

Starting with a video of game show bloopers, from the Family Feud under a time crunch

Now we are going to work under a time crunch: Addition test
– sometimes under a time crunch we often make mistakes

Great example of clever student vs time (lottery commercial from Great Britain)

A lot of teachers are relectant to do technology projects because they don’t have 2-3 weeks of time to spend on it

I’m going to show you how to use tools like PowerPoint for publishing
– This is the T-rrific activity, students

How many of you are Macintosh users? Windows Users
– I’ll switch over to the Windows side of my computer since it appears more of you use Windows

[TAMMY IS USING VMWARE, LAUNCHED PPT 2007 IN WINDOWS XP]

Now putting PPT into landscape mode
– inserting Word Art
– type something like “I’m T-rrific Because” and move it to top 1/3 of the screen
– now insert a text box, have students type in 4-5 reasons they are terrific
– hold down Control-Shift (windows) or Command-Shift (Macintosh) and press the + key to increase font size
– use “e” to center the text

PowerPoint is great because even if the Internet is down, PowerPoint still works and is available as a standby!

Now an activity called “Building Healthy Bodies”
– have students use two PowerPoint slides
– brainstorm ways to keep our bodies healthy
– students print their two PowerPoint slides, then use tape or gluesticks to build their own bodies

I love how you can print in a variety of ways with PowerPoint
– you can have students print PPTs as handouts with two slides per page, for example
– this gives you smaller versions

You can do this with measurements too, “gallon man”

Another example
– print onto sticky notes
– we are going to use PowerPoint to print onto sticky notes (3″ x 3″ square)
– go to page setup area of my PowerPoint so they are the same size: I’ll change dimensions to 7.5″ by 7.5″

How many of you use rubrics for student evaluation?
– you can do this for scoring sheets for rubrics
– I also use these for writing checklists

So how do we print onto a sticky note?
– example: “From the desk of…” at the top, “Tammy Worcester” at the bottom
– you can do 4 of these at a time, duplicate this design with control-D
– I need to print this as a handout, 4 slides per page
– first I print it on a regular sheet of paper
– the borders around these slides are exactly sized as 3×3″ squares
– so now I can put sticky notes on that page, and put it back in my printer to print directly onto the sticky note

Now we are going to look at some web tools
– how many of you go to Google as your first line of defense for learning something new?
– how many of you have access to Google from your phone now?
– before I got a smartphone, I would call home to a friend who was online – so “smart friends” can help you Google as well as smart phones can

Google Search Tricks
– If I want to know 798 + 20 * 3 – 40 / 2 I can put that into Google
– Google will not only do your calculation on the fly, it will also show you the correct order of operations for your equation

You can also use Google for conversion
– I discovered this years ago when I wanted to do baking and create scones
– converting metrick units into conventional unit

Use Google as a dictionary
– lots of web definitions if you use a colon after a word or term

In my next session, “beyond copy and paste” we’ll look at

How many of you find yourself going to the same website repeatedly, or googline for the same thing
– you can use Google Alerts to save you time
– they are really cool, isntead of you looking for information Google will send you an email when it finds something
– this summer I moved to Colorado Springs and I heard a rumor Les Miserables would be coming to COS, so I set a Google alert for “Les Mis Colorado Springs”
– I leave defaults except change it to “as it happens”
– if someone puts something on Twitter,
– not a bad idea to create a school alert for your school name, so if students blog out your school, put a tweet out
– I have a Google alert for my name, I have a rather unusual name, so if you have a more common name that might be good
– I also have a Google alert for my 3 sons, and that is how I found out one of my sons was in a car accident in Salina last year which he hadn’t told me about

If you want to quickly find information, you might want to use Wolfram|Alpha
– it gives information as

Now turning on tethering for my iPhone

Demo of entering an algebraic equation into Wolfram Alpha

How many of you use a browser that lets you have tabs open at the top?

In the FireFox browser you can show thumbnail views of your own windows

There is a shortcut for bringing back the last tab you closed
– command-shift-T
– as long as you haven’t closed out of your browser window

I have some other tips like that on my website you might want to check out

My favorite time saving tips
– anyone thought about setting up a blog, but thought you didn’t have enough time to do it?
– I’m going to create a blog right in front of you, and I’ll create it in 3 minutes!

MY COMMENT: SETTING UP A BLOG WITH POSTEROUS.COM IS EVEN EASIER, JUST SEND AN EMAIL TO POST@POSTEROUS.COM – NO PRE-CONFIGURATION REQUIRED!

I’m up to 93 blogs in my Blogger account now!
– explaining what a captcha is: a tool for preventing robots from setting up blogs

Blogger now lets you “Edit Pages” and you can add up to 10 static pages to your blog
– you can create your entire class website this way

GLAD FOR TAMMY TO MENTION THIS, I’M DOING A 3 HOUR WORKSHOP THIS EVENING ON “PLATFORMS FOR PUBLISHING: SHARE YOUR IDEAS” AND I’LL REFERENCE THIS!

You can even email photos right from your cell phone, and it can go over to your blog
– I have more information about this on my website

How many of you have ever tried to do podcasting with students?
– Garageband on the Mac makes it pretty easy to record them, but you still have the problem: Where am I going to publish these, who will host these?
– On Windows machines, you can use Audacity for podcast creation

Check out Vocaroo.com – no login or password required
– has 1 button so it’s pretty easy
– demonstrating how to record with Vocaroo, and embedding it on a new Blogger website
– you could have 1 student each day record about what you did in class that day
– easiest way I know of to do podcasting, it’s all free, and it doesn’t take any of your server space
– wonderful one to use

Another cool tool I want to show you: Jing
– especially those of you on a Windows computer, better than choosing Alt-Print Screen and then needing to crop the image somewhere
– Jing great for annotation of screenshots as well
– it will also do screen recordings

MY COMMENT: I’M GLAD TO SEE THIS DEMO OF HOW JING SCREENSHOTS PERMIT ANNOTATIONS LIKE SKITCH ON THE MAC.\\

Demo of creating a Jing-based screencast
– you can record up to two minutes in the free version, you can also break your presentation into segments
– you can upload to Screencast.com with the free space it gives me
– within Jing settings, I can either get a link or I can get it to give me embed code

Now showing how that embed code can be copied and put up on my blog
– this can be a huge time saver

I am really fascinated by QR Codes
– they are going to become huge soon in our society and in our schools
– they are funny looking barcodes, using them a lot in Japan
– any smartphone supports a QR Code Reader
– Android phones have them built in, iPhones have lots of available apps
– it can open a webpage, dial a phone number, show a block of text, do all kinds of things
– lots of people can generate QR Codes
– I have lots of websites for this

Tammy has a registration link on her website to win a free copy of one of her books (IT’S A GOOGLE FORM)

How long do we have to wait for the 21st century? It started 10 years ago
– we are well into the 21st century

Instead of saying “It’s all about TIME” we need to say “It’s about time”

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Teaching for the 21st Century by Tammy Worcester #cmtc10

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