Good Citizenship Awards

Thanks for your thoughtful comments nominating students for the Good Citizenship Awards.  The award is decided by number of nominations and the description. The decision was tough!

The majority of you nominated for the Tech Helper Award, describing how classmates help you with the many tech challenges you encounter.  Some of you mentioned various forms of communication such as:  Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, face-to-face, and phone calls.   Keep it up!

And the winners are...


Lauren - Community Builder

Lauren is always working very hard in this class, and is always contributing to the work at hand. She is always willing to help when she is needed, and puts a great positive spin on all the work done in and out of class.

Nova - Tech Helper

Nova was proactive in linking with classmates on twitter. She was also genuinely interested in the Tech Sandbox and that may have helped others get excited as well. 

She has been really helpful with assignments. She is always quick to respond to any questions I've had about specific assignments or skill checks.

Tech Sandbox Lite

Did you have fun in the Tech Sandbox?  Do you wish you could play with these tools at your leisure?  Now you can.  Here are some free (or cheap) tools that mimic the Tech Sandbox tools.

1.  3-D Printing

The 3-D printer is definitely cool!  They are all the rage in library world as part of the Maker Space trend.  TinkerCad is a free online software for making 3-D printing designs.  Try it out as one of your ILPs.  If you are so inclined, there are places that will print your design for you (not free but fun).

https://www.tinkercad.com/ 

2.   Oculus Rift

The 3-D virtual reality provided by the Oculus Rift offers many opportunities for instruction.  But you don't need the expensive equipment to play.  Google Cardboard is a 1.0 version that can be purchased affordably.  

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/

 3.  Sphero Robotic Ball

The Sphero ball is a great tool to introduce students to coding, a popular skill taught in many schools.  But you don't need the robotic ball to learn coding.  Here are two websites my Robotics Club students use to learn drag-and-drop coding.  The first one toggles to java coding as well.  Try your hand at coding for an ILP.

Hour of Code:  https://code.org/learn

Scratch:  https://scratch.mit.edu/ 

This bill just passed in Florida:

HB 0887  Computer Coding Instruction (Adkins) - credit in lieu of foreign language or math - passed, on House Calendar 

If you really like the robotic ball, Ozobot is a small version:

http://www.slj.com/2016/02/opinion/test-drive/tiny-ozobot-gets-kids-into-block-based-programming-test-drive#_

Coding is half the fun of the Robotics Club.  First, students build a robot with Legos.  Then they program the robot to perform certain tasks.  Here is a link to some sample projects.

http://www.nxtprograms.com/projects2.html 

And finally, here is a video of my son's group's last project, a striking viper.  They are beginners.  Advanced robot designers make very complex programs and compete.

That's What I Like...

Congratulations to Nova and Parker for receiving your votes as "Best in Show" for the newsletter assignment.  Here are some of your comments about what you liked in the any newsletter:

I really liked that each section was eye-catching but not messy or "too much". The graphics were all appropriate for the theme. I loved the organization of the spelling words and the borders around each section. Great job!

It was very colorful and bold. It drew my attention and made me actually want to read it. Very well done!

The pink hearts and little giraffe are the cutest things!!

I like the way she kept the color scheme the same.

I really liked the Valentine's day theme!

Great Quotes of the Week

I so enjoy reading your blog posts.  You are insightful and funny!  Here are some highlights from blog #2.

Nova:  " From .doc to .docx, I'd say Microsoft Word has always been an extension of myself in my educational career."


Savanah:  "Another thing I learned was how simple and educational Twitter can be (This kind of shocked me!). Within approximately ten minutes I connected with various educational and technology-related Twitter accounts." 

Oliviah:   "Twitter has been adding features such as polls which can be very beneficial in the classroom." - I'd love to see an example of this.  If you know how, please post to #FSUedtech

Kaitlyn:   "I would use copyrighted and fair use material in the appropriate manner. I'd probably be incorporating a lot of books, movies, internet sources, and pictures into my curriculum and course materials but as long as they benefit my objective goal and subject that I'm teaching I would be allowed to do that."

John:  " What is so convenient about personal learning networks is the ability to communicate on a national or even global network like twitter, to be able to communicate with teachers or companies or even future students over a network is revolutionary."

Chloe:  "I've used it in the past to make lesson plans for VBS and I use the notebooks layout to take notes everyday in my lecture style classes."  (The notebook feature is only on Mac.  In Windows, use OneNote.  Evernote is an online option).