Steve Kinney

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Jott can help students with disabilities (both physical and learning) get a jump on the writing process. Basically, Jott takes short voice messages and transcribes it into text. It’s a great tool for helping students who have difficulty getting started writing.

Recently, Jott added a feature that allows it to work in the other direction. You can have your feeds read to you (or a special student in your life). If you can roll your own feed (I suggest Tumblr; it’s quick and deceptively simple), then you can create a Jott Feed.

Jott Feeds has a lot of potential uses: parent news for homes without computers, homework assignments for students who tend to forget to record their homework, and homework readings for students that might need the text read to them.

Jott Feeds makes it easy to create readings for students so that they can access the curriculum. Instead of slaving away for hours in front of Audacity, you can simply copy and past text into Tumblr. You can take it a step further and use an OCR scanner to scan in text from books.

Guy Kawasaki won. I was trying not to fall for Alltop, but he won. What is Alltop? Excellent question; I’m glad you asked. Alltop is a website that collects RSS feeds from all of the top website in any given subject matter. Instead of signing up for every influential blog in a particular field and checking up regularly, you can have Alltop do the dirty work for you. More importantly, you can use Guy Kawasaki’s judgment to find new and interesting blogs. As a fan of Guy’s, I trust his judgment.

Since this is an education blog, I feel it’s appropriate to draw your attention to education.alltop.com, if for no other reason than to highlight his comment on educators – “By educators, for educators. Because educators are the purest form of evangelism.”

Disclaimer: This site is not on Alltop. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t love to have this site on Alltop. Futhermore, I wrote this post to get on Alltop. That being said, Guy, if you stumble upon this site in your travels, feel free to add it. This site has been added to Alltop since I originally drafted it. Funny how that works.

Julie Thompson has scoured the web in search of great SMARTboard lessons that you can download and use in your classroom. It should be noted, that Julie’s list is targeted at the kindergarten to third grade demographic. If you teach middle school, I still highly recommend this site as it will provide you with inspiration for your own SMARTboard endeavors.

Photo by algona81.

This is currently a work-in-progress, but I’m trying to compile a list of useful web tools over at Squidoo. Currently, there are a few reworked (meaning shorter) versions of some of the posts I’ve written about in this blog. I hope to expand it when finals are over. If you have any suggestions or if there is something that you’d like me to expound upon, please do not hesitate to let me know.

You’ll notice that there are some Google AdWords campaigns on the side and a Amazon affiliate module in the middle. 100% of any profit made through this lens goes to charity. Currently, I’ve selected DonorsChoose.org. I may also dedicate a portion to Room to Read in the future. Currently, the lens has made $0.07, so it’s not an issue.

Photo courtesy of Wade from Oklahoma.

Tags: squidoo, charity, resources, roomtoread, donorschoose

A few weeks ago, I posted a teacher’s guide to PowerPoint. In that article, I focused on stylistic decisions rather than the finer points on how to work PowerPoint. In my travels, I came across a great resource for PowerPoint templates that make use of advance features — such as custom shows.

Vicki Blackwell’s PowerPoint Templates for Teachers

Personally, I am a fan of the Jeopardy template. Sure, the graphics and sounds are a bit cheesy but I’ve been meaning for a while now to create a Jeopardy game; this just saved me a good hour or two. Enjoy!

Sometimes, developing goals is difficult. You may know the student extremely well, but you have difficulty finding the right wording. A while back, one of my colleagues sent me a link to this resource. Since I’m sitting here right now writing goals for three of my students, I thought I’d share.

IEP Goal Bank

I’m always on the lookout for new data on education. Here is the 2007 Brown Center Report on American Education, courtesy of the Brookings Institute.

This is the seventh edition of the Brown Center Report on American Education. As in the past, the report consists of three sections. The first section examines the latest test score data on math and reading achievement.This year the analysis focuses primarily on results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), including a discussion of NAEP achievement levels.

You can access the report here.

I haven’t checked this site out personally yet, but I intend to when I get back from running errands. In the mean time, here’s an excerpt from article in today’s issue of the New York Sun:

With American schools spending billions of dollars a year buying textbooks, a Brooklyn-based company is offering a new Web site that gives kindergarten teachers full lesson plans — at no charge.

The site, which is called Free-Reading. net, works like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Teachers can sort through hundreds of lesson plans, searching through subjects that include “Letter Sounds” and “Word-Form Recognition.” After registering, they can add their own lessons.

Over the summer, I took a few professional development courses with the New York City Department of Education’s iTeach/iLearn program. Each training course introduced a unit of study that integrated technology (blogs, documentary films, etc.). Luckily for everyone who was not lucky enough to attend - and get paid for - these training courses, the program has posted their complete units of study online.

The Office of Instructional Technology has embarked on a professional development effort designed to provide the instructional community with technology-rich tools and resources to enhance teaching and learning across the curriculum while improving student achievement. This is the result of a collaborative effort of the Office of Instructional Technology with the Departments of Math, Science, Social Studies, Literacy, School Library Services, English Language Learners, Intervention, and Special Education.

Exemplar materials, lesson plans, and ideas for differentiated are included with each unit. There are also materials that cover internet safety and other fun topics.

Explore for yourself: iTeach/iLearn.

This is one of my favorite Malcolm Gladwell talks. Your assignment this winter break is to figure out how this lecture relates to differentiation of instruction.