Bill Sheskey Blog » teacher resources

iPad 2’s Impact on Digital Literacy

Bill Sheskey — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:43:44 +0000

iPad 2 will be another game changer in the classroom! The cameras, iMovie, iPhoto and GarageBand additions are going to be very valuable tools in digital literacy and active literacy projects. I see student documentaries, visual books, and PBL media production as immediate applications.

Here are three links to review:

CNET Review with Steve Job’s presentation from today: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20038297-266.html?tag=rtcol

The Apple Store video has great visuals and demos the iMove and GagareBand applications nicely…

http://www.apple.com/

The engadget.com live blog from the iPad 2 announcement:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/02/live-from-apples-ipad-2-event/

Conference Announcement, Videos, and a Cool Tool for School

Bill Sheskey — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:10:20 +0000

In the next 2 weeks you will receive an announcement for another Digital Literacy Conference at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina on June 11 & 12, 2010. There will be ESOL, digital literacy and curriculum mapping strands.

Take a look inside a recent Sheskey Learning Solutions keynote presentation and inside an actual workshop. The picture on left is linked to the keynote presentation. Click here to view the various digital literacy, student engagement and assessment activities.

The Sheskey Learning team of presenters will be in Greenwood School District 50 in Greenwood, South Carolina on Friday February 19, 2010 working and learning with the teacher on their professional development day.

As always, I am sharing with you a classroom learning tool that you will find effective with students. Today’s Meet is a safe and user friendly site that provides a web based student/audience response system that can engage learners in computer lab, laptop, or Internet phone setting. There are no advertisements or learning curve with this tool, just open it, ask your questions and let responses flow. It is a wonderful for creating authentic conversations.

Enjoy, and I look forward to seeing all of you soon!

Google Custom Search

Bill Sheskey — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:23:53 +0000

Today I have the opportunity to share Google’s Custom Search tool with media specialist and teachers in the Beaufort County Schools in South Carolina. In the search bar, type in search terms for anything related to the Haiti earthquake. Then type in any thing not related to the Haiti earthquake and see what happens. You can build your own search engines for specific research that you want students to do and reduce the risk of them getting away from the specific search task that they are assigned. See this and other powerful tools at the Google for Educators resource site

New XtraNormal Application

Bill Sheskey — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:57:00 +0000

Those of you that have participated in a workshop with me in the last 6 months have seen my demonstration of the XtraNormal web tool to create fun cartoon style videos by just writing a script. We shared it to introduce yourself, new topics or new units. XtraNormal has now released a new tool called “State”. It takes their web based video application that you can now download and create videos without being connected to the Internet. There aren’t as many free characters and avatars as before but you can do much more animation with the characters in the new application. Plus it exports the video nicely to your computer. Those of you who like XtraNormal now will love this tool. Check it out and let me know how you like it.

XtraNormal’s new application called “State”. Read more… Your students will enjoy expressing themselves with this fun and easy tool, so will you!

2010 and Beyond

Bill Sheskey — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:27:47 +0000

I arrived home from a family holiday visit and there was FedEx package on my doorstep. It contained 2 copies of the the book Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World and sure enough Chapter 12 had my name on it. I can’t wait to read the rest of the book. Dr. Jacobs and our Curriculum 21 team are building various conferencing and online resources that are centered around the book. You will be receiving more information shortly. Those of you that are ASCD members will be receiving it in the mail as your next member book. ASCD tells me that there are over 100,000 members that will receive the book. All I can says is, wow…

Be looking for an announcement this month about a June ESOL and Digital Literacy Conference somewhere in the coastal region of South Carolina. The interest following the Digital Literacy Conference in Greenville in November has been great and we will let you know about the next one…

This weeks web based learning tool comes from NASA. Science, math and social studies instructional leaders will love this archive of NASA videos, images and audio recordings. It is the best archive of our space program that I have seen to date.

One last tidbit for those of you who have SmartBoards, if you like to use the calendars that are in the gallery you may have trouble finding 2010 and beyond there. Go to the search line in the gallery and type in “calendar generator” and there is a tool that will make a calendar for any month you want in the coming years.

Can you believe that it is 2010? What are the next 5 years going to be like in the classroom?

Your conference resources!

Bill Sheskey — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:05:54 +0000

We have organized many of the conference web based resources from last Saturday and linked them on to the conference site for you. Many of these sites were shared by the presenters and they have all been reviewed for instructional value by our team. Click here for the direct link and add them to your browser “favorites”…

These resources will be updated regularly for you. Enjoy and engage your students!

Free Technology for Teachers

Bill Sheskey — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:51:37 +0000

Richard Byrne is an educator in Maine and an EDuBlogs award winning blogger. He is sharing tremendous tools and we will be reviewing his site at the 11/14 conference. It is just amazing how much you can find on teachers blogs. Do some searching and see what you can find. Remember, it is not the tool but how the tool is used for student success. Richard does a nice job in his descriptions of the learning tools.