LED Web site created by CVU student

CVU senior Julien Vandal has created an excellent web site (using Weebly) to promote LED usage in Shelburne.  He states, "I'm doing this project for a class Money, Energy, and Power, but I hope to continue my impact on the community after the class ends this semester. I'm really passionate about LEDs, and I have already installed some in my room and around the house."  Thanks to Glenn Fay for sharing.
Check it out:

 http://ledshelburne.weebly.com/index.html

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Using a blog to prompt student discussion

For his wellness classes, Troy created a blog with links to articles about recent events that he wants his students to discuss.  Students post comments anonymously.  Take a look:

http://troysnewsofnote.blogspot.com/

I was in the room as students were reading and reacting to some of these articles and the engagement was high. 

Having students create and update their own blogs is also a powerful way to make writing meaningful for them.  Teachers whose students blog report improvement in both their writing and their engagement.

There are many tools available for blogging.  Probably the easiest to get started with is Blogger (or Blogspot), which is part of Google Apps for Education (this is what Troy used).  You can find Blogger by clicking "More" while in gMail. 

Here are a few articles if you'd like to read some more:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/blogging-in-21st-century-classroom-michelle-lampinen

http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/3721

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Record audio on a smartphone

Teachers and students,
Need to create an audio recording-- perhaps to record to an interview, or practice a speech?  If you have a smartphone, then you have all the equipment you need! You can use the installed app or choose from many others to record audio.  You can then share the audio recording (e.g. by e-mail).  If desired, you can even edit the audio (on a computer, or on the phone itself-- with the appropriate app).
Don't have a smartphone?  CVU Media Services has digital handheld recorders to loan, or you can record yourself on any CVU computer, using Audacity.
If you haven't explored recording your voice on the phone, give it a try.

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Summer 2013 Tech Integration Professional Development Opportunities

Teachers,
The summer can be a great time to get charged up on technology integration ideas.  You may be interested in the course I will be offering here at CVU.  Or here is a calendar of other workshops and courses taking place around the state.  I'm happy to assist you in choosing a course that meets your needs.

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Google Plus

Google Plus is now available through our CVU Google domain.  Rather than switching it on for everyone, we have decided to let people choose if this is something they want to try.  Please read on for more information:

Q: What is Google Plus?
A: Google Plus is often compared to Facebook, in that is a social network that allows you to share things with people you choose.  It is tied into other Google services (such as YouTube and Picasa photo albums).

Q: How is Google Plus different than Facebook?  
A: The biggest difference is that in Google Plus, you place your "friends" in circles, so that when you post, you don't have to share with everyone.  You might post a video to your "VT colleagues" circle and an article link to your "CVU" circle, for example.

Q: What else can I do with Google Plus?
A: To me, the best feature in Google Plus is Hangouts, which are video conferences-- similar to Skype. Hangouts have several advantages over Skype-- for example, you can have multiple participants and you can work collaboratively on a Google Doc while conferencing.

Q: Why would I set up a Google Plus account at CVU?
A: While some educators use Facebook professionally, it does tend to be centered around personal stuff.  The same could be said of a Google Plus account you set up on your own (non-CVU) Google account.  Setting up an account at school offers the opportunity to use it exclusively for professional purposes.  Note that if you have already set up a personal account outside of CVU, there may be some initial confusion about your new CVU account and the personal one (which you can solve be re-adding people to your new circles).

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CVU Learns getting the message out

CVU Learns (aka Stan and Emily) are doing great things with technology to collect and share resources.  They have an active Twitter account at https://twitter.com/CVULearns, through which they connect with educators from all over the world.  They have now started a Paper.li publication, as well.  Paper.li is one of many tools that is used to aggregate data from the web.  Anyone use Paper.li to create an online "magazine"  by choosing information sources (Twitter, Google Plus, RSS feeds, etc.) and applying filters and layouts to those sources. Check out the latest edition here.

Speaking of Twitter, here are two more CVU-related feeds:

https://twitter.com/CVUBeat (the Beat, our student newspaper)
https://twitter.com/csmacf (your friendly technology integration specialist)

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