EdCamp MSP

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Do you live in central Minnesota and want to get together with other educational colleagues and educational technology advocates to build a collaborative, constructivist unconference schedule?

Sign up for EdCampMSP hosted by Osseo on October 11.

Tapping Into The Experience Of ISTE Attendees

Crowdsourcing power

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ISTE conferences that I have attended.

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Seven Days Until ISTE 2013

 I found this handy free embeddable countdown timer for websites and blogs from timeanddate.com (http://www.timeanddate.com/clocks/freecountdown.html).  The countdown timer is also available as a website-based timer (http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/create).

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The countdown to any date timer has an easy-to-use simple interface. Simply choose the countdown design, enter the timer title, select the date and time, and time zone of the event and click the Create Countdown button.  Simple as that!

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The website-based countdown to any date timer produces an easy-to-read countdown that stays active as long as you keep the webpage open.

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Timeanddate.com also offers a free online timer with a easy-to-use interface interface as well.  You can assign a name to the time, enter the amount of time, and select a sound to play when time runs out.

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The timer interface produced is easy to read and with the ability to create additional timer would enable a teacher to use this timer for station rotations without needing to reset and restart a timer.

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The third free online tool available at timeanddate.com is a stopwatch timer.

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The stopwatch timer even saves splits, which can be labeled onscreen. This could be handy if 

you want to time several students doing the same task and compare elapsed time or speed.

Overall, there are many handy tools available at this website for teachers to use in multiple ways in the classroom,  on a mobile device at their favorite sporting event, and maybe even to remind them of an anniversary or birthday coming up!

Google Translate Makes Blog Content Language-Friendly

Have you ever wanted to be fluent in a foreign language?  Well now you can be!

Not by spending  hours listening to self-paced Rosetta Stone language lessons or by living in a foreign country with a host family.  Thanks to a Google widget you can install in your blog layout, you can instantly become fluent in multiple foreign languages with the click of a simple drop-down menu widget that makes it quick and simple to translate the text content of your blog post on Google Blogger to another language.

You can quickly revert to the original language of your blog, especially if you're not as fluent as you used to be in the translated language and don't quite remember the original content of your blog, by simply clicking the X at the top right corner of your blog.

Imagine having a collaborating classroom partner in another country with students who speak an entirely different language than your own students do.  Now your students can easily use Google Blogger to create a blog of classroom writing and connections that can become instantly multi-lingual with a click of the Google Translate button, making the experience much more personalized for the collaborating classroom students while enabling global connections.

Tracking Derecho Winds With Wind Map

Last night's unusual derecho weather produced strong winds and rain. If you're like most people, you're probably wondering what a derecho is.  I certainly was when I heard my local weather forecaster Dave Dahl mention derecho-like weather predictions yesterday.

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A derecho is a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a land-based, fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms. Derechos can carry hurranic or tornadic force and often deliver torrential rains and perhaps flash floods as well as strong winds. Winds convection-induced take on a bow echo(backward "C") form of squall line, forming in an area of wind divergence in upper levels of the troposphere, within a region of low-level warm air advection and rich low-level moisture. They travel quickly in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to an outflow boundary (gust front), except that the wind is sustained and increases in strength behind the front, generally exceeding hurricane-force. ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho

What a great opportunity to take advantage of an interesting and fun Web 2.0 website called Wind Map. http://hint.fm/wind/

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Wind Map is a personal art project created off hourly updates to surface wind data from the National Weather Service National Digital Forecast Database (http://ndfd.weather.gov/technical.htm).

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The site also includes of gallery of "Snapshots of Winds Past" (http://hint.fm/wind/gallery/).  One the past wind snapshots is of Hurricane Sandy's (http://hint.fm/wind/gallery/oct-30.js.html) near 40 mph winds.

Some of the great features of the wind maps include being able to hover over a region and get a pop-up of the wind speed at a particular latitude and longitude.  Clicking on a area of the map creates a zoomed in view, which can produce some great visuals for teaching meteorological concepts.

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A great classroom use of this website might be to take a screenshot of the site at relatively the same time every day use the thumbnails as part of a morning meeting activity or to create a table or spreadsheet of weather-related data comparisons of the wind, temperature, etc.

Almost 1000 Hits!

Tonight I logged into Blogger to write a blog post in an renewed effort to keep up with blogging, especially since listing my blog on the ISTE Blog Registration.   Amazingly, my blog has received 999 hits!  Wow! So somebody out there is reading...

I'm not quite sure that I understand the ClustrMap though since it lists only 32 visitors since April 7.  From the ClustrMap "notes" section, it seems that counts are only being added each time a unique computer IP address accesses the blog as opposed to Bloggers "Visits" widget which tallies every time the blog is accessed.  This would imply that 32 people have visited my blog a total of 999 times all together, resulting in maybe 30 visits per person or a handful of
the 32 people accessing the blog many more times and others only a few times.

However, when I looked at the list of locations of the "Recent" visitors and the Current Country Totals, I realized that this thinking is flawed because last week I noticed that there were visitors listed on the location list from France, Germany, Norway, and Finland, and those do not appear on either list now.   The ClustrMap widget is listed as updating every day, so I'm guessing then that the "Recent" location list is purged every 24 hours, but I'm not sure why the countries are not all represented on the Current Country Totals chart.


When I checked the Blogger Stats section, I noticed that the Pageviews chart does not equal up to 999.

I find these disparities in data between and within counters frustrating.  I love data - really love it, seriously.  But I want it to add up, to make sense, and without fully understanding the algorithm behind either counter, I am unsure how the data totals are derived and question whether or not they are accurate and why they do not list the same countries.

Hmm.  And I was so excited when I first began this post!  I think my takeaway is going to be that I have 999 hits (somehow) and I need to raise the bar for myself in terms of keeping up with posting and finishing all of the half-finished (or half-started if your glass is half-full) posts that are still sitting in the Blogger post queue as drafts.

I'm hoping someone reads this blog post in the morning, or overnight too I guess since a handful of European countries more than seven hours ahead of me on the international time line are listed as having readers who are checking my blog (Does that really make it overnight if it is really already tomorrow for them?), so that at least I can start my day off tomorrow morning with 1000 hits!

ISTE13 Sessions

Spending today working on presentations for the two sessions that I am doing at ISTE this year.

Learning Station Session: 30 Plus Ways To Use Your iPad For Professional Development

Take a whirlwind tour of 30+ ways to use your iPad to build your professional learning network, engage in personalized professional development, and transform your learning. Explore apps and resources that you can use to improve and enhance your own teaching. Learn how the iPad just may be the most versatile transformative tool in the educational world that can bring personalized learning to your fingertips 24/7 and just in time for your professional learning needs.

Mini Workshop: Animated Video To Liven Up Your Curriculum And Enhance Student Learning

The purpose of the workshop is to share information with participants on a variety of free and low-cost software programs that can be used with K-8 students to create short animated videos that focus on the academic content that students are learning and to focus on demonstrating how to use just one to step through a project. The videos can be used to engage and motivate struggling students in reviewing and learning content covered in class, and as a way for older students to share informational text with younger students. Animation projects allow students to review content material while meeting new Common Core multimedia standards.
*Recommended by ISTE SIGDS 
*Requires registration.

If either of these topics interests you, please come to the sessions to learn more and share ideas and resources.