Glad that you were able to join us for the third annual Orange Ya’ Glad it’s a Blog Hop! I am the fourth stop! If you have hopped with us in the past, some things will be familiar, and some things will be new! This year, all of our bloggers are focusing on free tips or ideas that they can share with you to get your school year off to a great start. Some ideas will have a freebie, others might just be a stand alone concept. The idea is to try and share things that will solve problems and create a happy and stress free first few weeks! Let’s talk about Feature Friday. This year, I really want my students to take ownership of their writing. I want them to be engaged and to interact with each other throughout the process. My hope is that Feature Friday will make this happen. What is Feature Friday? Feature Friday is an interactive way to integrate technology and writing. Students take photos throughout the week on iPads, iPhones, or with cameras (whichever you have access to!) of any classroom happening, activity, or student that interests them. Then, on Friday, you pick one photograph Continue Reading
Hey! I am so excited to share my brand new game show idea with you! I have some third graders who are quite low. They struggle with vocabulary and basic sentence structure. I decided that I needed to think of a way to engage them, but still teach hard-core vocabulary before our state assessment. So, I began working on this game show product a few weeks ago. Since then, it has been played by my kiddos and edited by many other teachers to make sure that there are no kinks. I am happy to announce that my first digital game show is posted and ready to be enjoyed by many students! Keep reading to hear more about it, and scroll down for a link to the product. What is a digital game show? Basically, it is like playing Jeopardy! The game is created in PowerPoint and has clickable links throughout. You MUST have PowerPoint to play it. As you click, new pages appear. The kids were amazed that the answers were instantly given to them! Why do I need a digital game show? First of all, who doesn’t love a game show?!?! 🙂 Digital game shows are engaging to all learners Continue Reading
Today, I must cut right to the chase because I am beyond excited about this new find! I was at a conference in Jacksonville, Florida right before Thanksgiving listening to a 2nd grade teacher talk about differentiation. It was a great presentation, but to be honest, I was thinking “I do most of these things in my own classroom”. That was until I heard her mention “this new DATA COLLECTION APP”. My ears perked up! My eyes flew from my notebook to her face. We are in the age of data, data, data. This is perfection! Really? I can just add my students into this app and log all of my annotations right on my iPhone? NO WAY. Wait what? I can take pictures of their work and add them to each student’s personalized file? This was too good to be true. But it IS true! It’s called Confer. I may seem a little too excited about this, but let me tell you – It is worth it! It’s available in the iTunes App Store or through Google Play for Android. There are currently two versions of Confer. Confer (regular) is the full price version. It is $24.99, which may be Continue Reading
For the longest time, I thought I was securing my PDFs correctly. Only recently did I realize I was only HALF correct. When you save a PowerPoint or Keynote file as a PDF with a password so that others cannot copy and paste or drag your fonts and clipart off of the page, the hyperlinks do not always stay. What happens? The PDF secures everything. Therefore, when PDFs are posted for buyers, they see tons of buttons, but no links. Also, many clipart artists have written in their Terms of Use that a link to their store must be provided. How can you do this if your link isn’t working in the secured file??? I had no idea. I searched for hours on the TeachersPayTeachers Seller Forum and finally discovered the answer. I have taken screen shots of each step, in the hopes of clarifying what I was completely confused about. ***Before you begin, you will need Adobe Acrobat. The free Adobe Reader that is usually on computers is not the same. Adobe Acrobat is NOT free. It’s about $20 a month or $120 for the year (educator discount). However, there is a free trial. I am using the free Continue Reading