Category: blogs
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4 Free WordPress Plugins to Reduce Comment Spam
As eCommerce has continued to grow over the past decade, comment spam on blog websites has also increased dramatically. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is financial: In an attempt to increase the “page rank” (Google search engine ranking) of different websites, unscrupulous people have employed comment spamming methods to try…
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2 Challenges: With STEM & iPads
There are a lot of challenges I face at school, but two stand out to me tonight. One concerns depth of learning with STEM content, and the other involves iPads and deep reflection. We finished the second day of a four-day unit on kitchen chemistry today, and after two and half months of using our…
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Backchannel with 5th Graders & Pie Chart Questions on the Winter Olympics
I’ve used “backchannel” websites and collaborative documents MANY times with teachers during professional development sessions and conferences, as well as with graduate and undergraduate students in classes. Monday I substituted for one of our fifth grade teachers who was out sick, however, and this provided me with my first chance to use a text backchannel…
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Podcast413: Post-Workshop Reflections on Improving Student Writing with iPads
This audio podcast is a reflection by Wesley and Shelly Fryer following a series of workshops on “Improving Student Writing with iPads” shared in Lewisville, Texas, January 23 and 24, 2014. We reflected on the tools and apps shared during the workshop, including TodaysMeet, KidBlog, and AudioBoo, and also discussed how different teachers (with different…
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Lessons Learned With Elementary STEM Centers
The past two weeks I’ve facilitated a series of center-based lessons for my 4th and 5th grade STEM students (@iesSTEM) in a unit I titled, “The Science & Technology of Sound & Music.” In addition to learning about sound and music, my students have been practicing ways to “document their learning” using text, images, and…
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Improving Student Writing Using iPads
These are the presentation slides for a series of hands-on workshops I’m sharing Thursday and Friday with elementary teachers in Lewisville, Texas, on the topic, “Improving Student Writing Using iPads.” Improving Student Writing Using iPads from Wesley Fryer Access referenced resources on Interactive Writing and Narrated Art Projects, as well as student blogs on stem.wesfryer.com.…
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Mobile Writing on the Go with KidBlog and WordPress
The evening of December 18, 2013, I shared an online presentation for the “Digitizing Writing Wednesday Webinars Series” titled, “Mobile Writing on the Go with KidBlog and WordPress.” The archived video from the Adobe Connect webinar is now available! My presentation slides are available on SlideShare. Miguel Guhlin collected a variety of show notes on…
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Why I Switched My WordPress Web Host from WP Engine to Site5
Over the past two weeks I’ve reluctantly completed the arduous and stressful task of migrating 30+ websites to a new web host. Most of these sites run WordPress. In this post, I’ll share some of my lessons learned and the specific reasons why, after 8 months as customer of WP Engine, I switched to Site5…
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Great Posts on Interactive Writing (Blogging)
This evening I shared some ideas about interactive writing in a webinar series on digital writing hosted by Texas technology directors Miguel Guhlin and Diana Benner. These are a few of the links shared by Miguel and Colleen Rose (a participant from Northwestern Ontario) during our session. If you use a free offline web reading…