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Saturday, August 2, 2014

Twitter Fast Follow

I am so excited about this little nugget of information! I have been (sometimes) participating in Todd Nesloney's Summer Learning Series and this week Amber Teamann, another Texas teacher, gives one of the best tips for sharing information via Twitter. Many parents are already on Twitter but some may not want to venture into this territory yet. But they still want to stay informed. The Fast Follow option does just that. Anyone with texting capability can receive updates from any Twitter account. Amber explains how to do this as well as the benefit of using Twitter for classroom and campus communication in this post. I'll be posting more about Twitter in the next few weeks but I encourage you to read Amber's post, sign up, and just see what it's all about.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Social Media Icons - for free!

If you are working on your website or will be working on it in the next few weeks, there are tons of free social media icons, like the ones to the right on this site, here, and here.

The icons I used can be found here or this list has an extensive collection. You can also Google "social media icons" to find something else you might like.

Using these icons can make your website look more professional and give your viewers easy access to your information.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Symbaloo ~ Sharing With Ease

Our school website was moved to a new host July 1, and it looks great. This video shows you how to easily share links, documents, videos - anything with a URL - using Symbaloo which you can also embed to your new teacher site on the new host. Here is my class page with an example of what Symbaloo looks like embedded on that site.




Tuesday, May 20, 2014

#txgoo part II

What Do You Love?
Searching in Google is great but sometimes you have to wade through millions of results to find what you want. Enter What Do you Love? from Google.  WDYL takes your search and turns it into categories. This reminds me of the Pinterest layout. And I love Pinterest!



Searching within a site
Some websites have a custom search engine you can use to search within the site. If it doesn't, you can use the "site" operator to create your own custom search. In the search bar (also called the omnibox), use the site operator in front of the URL to create the search. After the URL, put a space and then the search term.  For example: site:www.pablopicasso.org paintings This will search the pablopicasso.org website with the search term "paintings."


You can see that all of these results are confined to the pablopicasso.org website.




Monday, May 19, 2014

#txgoo part I

Saturday I attended the 2014 Texas Google Summit in Brenham. Wow. There is so much to share. I decided to divide up the day into multiple posts.


Power searching in Google

Monica Martinez' session was all about getting better results from a Google search. Search operators are the key to narrowing down the number of hits.
  • File Type - Search for a specific file type. For example, if your lesson is about the Cold War, you could search for presentations that others have already created. You can change ppt to pdf, doc, jpg, etc. depending on the type of file you are looking for. If you're not sure what type of file or the extension of the file, here is a list of just about any file you can think of.


  • Image Search Options - Use the advanced search options for images to find what you really need. After the initial search, choose the images tab. Then click on the Search tools menu to get more options. You can filter by size, color, type, etc.  I especially like the Usage rights options. This enables you to narrow your search to copyright free images or images that you are allowed to use. 



Stay tuned for more greatness from #txgoo 2014!

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Region 5 Chat

Join other Region 5 teachers and administrators for a weekly chat Thursday, 8-9 pm, #reg5chat. This week's topic is RTI.  If you are new to Twitter chats this is a great place to start. Click here for an excellent guide to Twitter for new users. Check out this video created by fellow Tech Champion, Summer Diamond.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Professional Development Day - Office 365

Tomorrow is a professional development day in my district. It's our first phase of Office 365 deployment so I'm excited, nervous, and anxious to present this to my colleagues. I know change is scary, but one thing I'm looking forward to with Office 365 is the familiarity with the products they already use. O365 does look different but the functionality is basically the same. And, I can't wait to show them Lync. This will be a great feature for us that exceeds the capability of Skype. Ready or not, here we come!

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Remind 101

Remind 101 is one of my favorite tools. My students love getting the reminders and it takes very little effort on my part. I love being able to communicate with my students while privacy is preserved.

Welcome!

I have had a couple of blogs over the past 10 years and started, but never kept up with, many more. This is my first professional blog. No family posts, no pictures of my kids. Well, I can't promise that but I will be posting tutorials, tips, and tricks for integrating technology in the classroom. I hope you find something you can use, and if you do, please let me know.