Techno Fusion

How to Find Longitude and Latitude in Google Maps

2012-01-27T16:05:00.001-05:00

A conversation started earlier today where one of my co-workers asked about resources to help students find and figure out how to determine Latitude and Longitude. It made me think back about some conversations that I had with some Kindergarten teachers regarding Google Earth and it dawned on me. You can set Google Maps to show your Latitude and Longitude with just a few simple clicks on the

You Have Their Attention When This Happens...

2012-01-12T15:51:00.001-05:00

The other day I was having a training session with middle school teachers who are moving into their new building in a couple of days on the equipment they now have access to in their classrooms. We were talking about all of the new interactive tools they have in their classrooms that they can use with their students when I had a teacher speak up and say what is that? I was not sure what

A New Way to Study Geography

2012-01-12T14:26:00.000-05:00

I was looking through Promethean Planet recently and discovered that they have now joined forces with a new Partner resource called The Royal Geographical Society(RGS). "This group was established in the early 1800's to help support education, research and fieldwork in the study of world geography." The Royal Geographical Society offers a wide range of resources to help students in the

Embedding HTML into ActivInspire

2011-12-16T16:14:00.001-05:00

Recently Promethean's ActivInspire program has had a fairly significant update to the software to provide a lot more versatility to its users. The latest version of the software is 1.6.46087 and if you aren't sure what one you have you can click on Help in the Main Toolbar and then Click About to see which you are running. If you are not running the latest version you are missing out on a lot

Lumens DC 190 Part II

2011-12-16T15:07:00.002-05:00

In looking at the software for the new Lumens DC 190 document camera (doc cam), you do not see any changes to the 3 by 3 or 4 by 4 grid. The software itself has been updated to v.1.0.9 for Ladibug and there have been a few updates and improvements to it for use with your computer. Again the software is available on both PC and Mac, however I did not see on the website the availability for

Google Earth Timeline

2011-12-12T15:39:00.002-05:00

During a Planning meeting last week with one of my schools we were looking over some of the layers available on Google Earth and the information that you can get from them and we noticed something that was new to us. It may not be new to anyone else but we thought it was very interesting. What we noticed was that there was a date in the bottom left side of the window when we were viewing

My First Look at the Lumens DC190

2011-11-10T15:28:00.001-05:00

Finally I have recently gotten to really sit down and take a look at the new (well almost new) Lumens DC 190 document camera(doc cam) that has recently replaced the DC 166 that hit is EOL cycle.We have been using the DC 166 model for a couple of years in our school district and will now be transitioning over to the newer design model. At first glance you do not see anything different in

A New Take on History

2011-11-08T08:14:00.001-05:00

If you are a fourth grade teacher and have not been to the North Carolina History Project web page you might just be missing out on some new and interesting facts about North Carolina. You might be asking how can this site benefit me? Here is how they describe it. "... an edited, evolving, and free online encyclopedia of North Carolina that also includes commentaries, lesson plans, and a

Fun with Learning

2011-10-28T15:18:00.002-04:00

This week while I was researching some resources for one of my schools I came across a neat little game to help young students learn the Alphabet without having to sing it. Promethean Planet has an interactive resource to aid students in learning the Alphabet. It is an interactive puzzle where the students are able to come up to the board and interact by moving the puzzle pieces around so that

Re-Opening my Eyes to Instruction

2011-10-21T14:09:00.001-04:00

This week I had a great opportunity to be in Alpharetta and Atlanta Georgia. While in Atlanta I was fortunate enough to be able to go to the Ron Clark Academy and sit in on a class. This was the first time that I have ever been there and in my normal fashion was late getting to the school. As we came into the classroom I found a seat on the far side of the room and had walk through the room to

ActivEngage: A BYOD Solution?

2011-10-17T09:56:00.000-04:00

I recently had the opportunity to take a look at the new ActivEngage from Promethean Planet and have to say that I am very impressed. You may be asking yourself what is ActivEngage, in my own words it is an interactive way to deliver and receive content to and from students over multiple types of devices. The full description from Promethean is: "...a virtual learner response system that

Exploring New Territory

2011-10-14T08:21:00.001-04:00

While working in a school this week with different grade levels a Tech Facilitator told me about one of their Kindergarten teachers who was going to make their first Skype call with another school. Now I was thinking that they were going to make a Skype call here locally within the school district or maybe at the most here in North Carolina. I was surprised, and a bit excited, to hear that

ActivInspire Export Options

2011-09-20T13:31:00.008-04:00

In talking with someone recently about being able to export a flipchart to a pdf on a PC I decided to write up a quick blog about it and include that you can also export individual pages as image files as well.To export a flipchart as a pdf file you will, of course, need to make sure that the file is open inside of ActivInspire first. Once that is done you will need to just click on the File

Wonderopolis Categorizes its Wonders

2011-09-16T15:51:00.001-04:00

For a number of months I along with some of my colleagues have been talking, tweeting and blogging about the fun and interesting ways educators can use Wonderopolis in their classrooms. Some teachers are using the "Wonders" as their start up activity or as a ticket out the door.One way I had not thought about using the wonders was to have it tied to the subject material that teachers are

Making a Difference

2011-09-16T15:13:00.000-04:00

In the first week of school this year I received an email from a teacher who was a little frazzled because her classroom Interactive White Board (IWB) was not displaying the computer input correctly. I had a free moment before leaving to go to a workshop so I called over to the school to speak with the teacher. When I got the teacher on the phone they proceeded to describe to me what the problem

ActivInspire and Jigsaw Puzzles

2011-08-11T08:34:00.001-04:00

I have been running down my feed lists and social media outlets today and came across a neat little tool that I had to share out. When I saw the blurb about it I followed the link and found out that it came out of the Community and Blog Section of Promethean Planet's International site. It was a blog post from last year by Nigel Pearce on a neat little program called Jigflip that allows you to

What's in a Picture

2011-07-29T11:07:00.002-04:00

In our office today one of my colleagues, @web20classroom, decided that we were going to try something new with our Smartboard. He decided that we were going to live stream video from the beach to give us a new perspective on how to use the board. This has now become our window to the world.So I began to think a little bit of some ways that images can be used with your Interactive White Board (

Redefining Virtual Field Trips

2011-07-22T11:32:00.001-04:00

I watched an online seminar yesterday on Virtual Field Trips that made me rethink an earlier post that was written on our blog may need a refresher.So what is a Virtual Field Trip? In my reading I came up with this definition as to how I see it from my standpoint. It is a series of webpages that have been organized and grouped together to show students information, places, things that they

Recording your Lessons in ActivInspire

2011-07-15T13:40:00.001-04:00

I have to admit that I had been overlooking a tool in ActivInspire for a long time until just recently and now it is something that I use almost daily. That tool is the Screen Recorder.What the tool allows for is two different modes of capturing what you are doing on the computer at a time. You can choose the Fullscreen or Area screen Recorder. Fullscreen is obvious but the Area screen

Kickin' it QR Style with your Document Camera

2011-07-08T13:29:00.006-04:00

I have been talking about all of the things you can do with your Document Camera (doc cam) lately and have something new to show you and talk about that I had not even considered until a few days ago. I have talked about a doc cam being able to be used as a digital camera, camcorder, webcam but I did not think to mention that it can also be a scanner. You might be saying, Evan how in the

Document Cameras in your Science Class

2011-06-29T09:57:00.000-04:00

Now that I have been discussing uses of Document Cameras (doc cams) in your 21st Century classroom a co-worker suggested that I give out some specific advice for teachers to use them. So what I will be doing is to provide some general topic ideas for teachers to integrate the use of their doc cams into everyday instruction.My first installment will cover some ways to use your doc cam in your

The Document Camera AHA! Moment

2011-06-23T10:16:00.001-04:00

Recently I spent a day at a school working with teachers on ways to integrate Document Cameras(doc cams) into their instructional day more so that just as an expensive overhead. While you can still use your overhead resources, a doc cam offers teachers so much more. As I have talked about in other blog posts our school district has put a lot of time and effort into designing a 21st Century

Spark your Climate Curiosity

2011-06-22T15:03:00.001-04:00

This morning I was reading through some Tweets and came across one that had a link to a website that I had not seen before.The website is WeatherSpark which when I went to it really blew me away at the amount of information that was available on it. When you go to the homepage for the site you just enter in the city you live in or one that you want to see the weather for and click Get

Social Networking for Students with a Twist

2011-06-22T13:40:00.001-04:00

I recently held a workshop for teachers in our district on a widely known but lightly used web resource within our district. The site is set up so that both students and teachers can have an arena for which to learn, collaborate and share information both in and outside of the confines of the four walls of your everyday classroom. There are two things that I really like about this site.

When Does Learning End?

2011-06-14T10:44:00.005-04:00