Educational Diigo accounts

Dear teachers and students,

Do you use Diigo? Are you interested in using Diigo?  It's pretty awesome!

Diigo is a bookmarking and annotation tool.  It lets you annotate web pages and pdf files (by highlighting and adding sticky notes).  The page is then saved in your library-- along with the annotations.  You can share your bookmarks in a group for collaborative research, as well.

Last year we had an educational plan for Diigo.  We are looking into doing that again this year (given the cvuhs --> cssu.org name change, we had to re-apply). To answer a question I've gotten, it's OK to go ahead and log in with your cssu.org address.

Please let me know if you'd like me to get you started with it.

Literacies for the Digital Age Virtual Conference

This is last minute...but Discovery Education is hosting a conference today on digital age literacies that you can attend virtually.

The link will bring you to a schedule for the conference.
http://www.discoveryeducation.com/what-we-offer/community/events/fall-virtcon-2015.cfm

Tech grant opportunities

Looking to innovate with tech in your classroom?  Here are 5 grant opportunities that could help:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/10/23/grants-schools-022/

Vignettes using WeVideo

Jeanne McCormack's class recently wrote vignettes.  To bring them to life, students used images and music to accompany their narration of the vignettes.  The tool they used is WeVideo.  I've mentioned WeVideo before-- it's a great web-based video editor that connects to Google Drive for easy access from anywhere.  WeVideo has lots of capabilities for editing video, but in this case, students used WeVideo to create simple, elegant slide shows to which they added narration and music.

Here is a set of instructions I created for the class (with editing help from Jennifer Lucey!).  And here is what two students created:

Rainy by Sage

We Climb Together by Devon

This kind of project can be done with other tools, as well.  In the past, PhotoStory was a popular choice.  One big disadvantage to using PhotoStory, however, was that students had to use the exact same computer to access files they created.  With WeVideo, they can work from any computer (or even use the app on their phones or tablets).

It's Digital Citizenship Week!

Dear Teachers,

Welcome to Digital Citizenship Week.  It's a good reminder to keep talking about digital citizenship issues with your students.

Even a simple discussion around responsible technology use, including online identity and etiquette, cyberbullying and intellectual Property can go a long way.

Looking for resources?  Check out these from Common Sense Media.  Or follow the hashtag #HaveTheTalk on Twitter and Facebook.

Google Workshop Screencast

For those of you unable to attend the Google Workshops last week, I've put together a screencast of the presentation.
Here's a table of contents so you can skip ahead (that I created using a tool called Videonot.es thanks to Sarah Strack for the tip!):

0:40 Part 1- Using Templates in Google Slides and Docs
3:35 Part 2- Migration to cssu.org-- remaining issues (YouTube, Google Plus and Chrome logins)
4:27 Part 3- Using 3rd-party applications with Google Drive (it's more than Google Docs!)

I'd love to hear any questions or comments or to help you get started or move forward with any of this!
Thanks for reading,