10-Rep Learning ~ Teague's Tech Treks

Learning Technology & Tech Observations by Dr. Helen Teague

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Warmup Prompts Week of April 14

Here are this week’s Warmups. Have a great week!
Week of April 14th

1.) This is tax week. List at least 10 things (not people, just things) that you find taxing.
2.) Not everything we buy has a tax on it. Find and key what items are nontaxable and what items usually are.
3.) This is a week where finding something free would be nice. Find the free throw stats on a basketball player, NBA, WNBA, college, high school. Name the player, list the free throw statistic and then find the probability that the player will make the next 3 free throws attempted.
4.) Find what year Americans began paying taxes. Key the words in the acronym IRS. Do other countries pay taxes too? List at least four country names and the link from your research.
5.) Tax week is over! YAY! But some people did not pay on time. They procrastinated. Find and key the definition of procrastination. What kinds of situations cause you to procrastinate?

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25 or 6 to 14: Short Attention Spans Meets Its Match

Found myself stranded last night coming home from Portales b/c of storms. Catching up on email, I read a notice about a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure by Larry Smith.Based loosely on the literary legend of Hemingway, challenged to write a story in six words, supposedly composed “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Smith gives this challenge a non-fiction twist, inviting people to tell their life story in six words.

What would you write? What’s your six-word-life-summary?

Here are my attempts–Send me yours!

Smiled, laughed, surfed, copied, pasted, uploaded
Labeled ADD, ADHD, MEd, TODO, OLD
Smiled, laughed, twirled in flip flops
Deciding whether to answer the phone
Waited for pendulum to swing back
Short Attention Span Meets Its Match

How about giving your students your best 6-Word Advice?

“Whatever” is not a great answer.
The Key to possibilities: just begin
Don’t Try: Forge. Don’t Wait: Act.
Fail Here, Fail Big, Begin Again
Get Plan B, For Technology and Life

Invite your students to join you. Then, up the ante: tell them they must include 1-2 of your latest unit vocabulary words.

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Author’s Websites Article Snags Cover

 Author’s Websites Liven Up Literature Lessons, is the cover choice for the April, 2008 edition of Connected Newsletter. This article wrote itself ( almost) after a delightful lunch in Roma, Texas with author Terry Trueman and Leticia Cadena, RISD Instructional Technology Director.

Connected Newsletter, a magazine under the editorship and nurturing of Paige Meredith and Sharon Wheeler will be sorely missed when it goes on hiatus this summer. Thank you Paige and Sharon for all of your many, many hours of service and extremely hard work.

Click Here to read the article.

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Tech BFF: There’s Snow Flake Like PageFlakes!

BFF is an acronym for “Best Friend Forever.” These websites and tips are so good that they will become your technology BFFs!

Pleasantly stunned is an accurate description to describe the joy of finding PageFlakes unblocked on the school filters of our 4OOPS LinkClickers.

PageFlakes is a free, interactive webpage authorship portal. Simply create a free account and begin your page by choosing from interactive modules called “flakes.” There are thousands of flakes available that make it easy for anyone to aggregate content, RSS feeds, and widgets for many practical applications. There is even an “Anything Flake” which is pretty self-explanatory.

Publish your page by creating a “Pagecast” with a personalized link. Pagecasts may be either public, private, and/or shared. Students love the dynamic collaborative interactivity and message board options for immediate feedback with teachers. One student remarked that PageFlakes was more fun than MySpace. Pleasantly stunned again!

See samples: on Plate tectonics and Searching

P.S. If you would like to become an “official” 4OOPS LinkClicker, leave a comment here.

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Warmup Prompts Week of April 7

oopslady.jpg  Here are this week’s Warmup Prompts. Have a great week!

Week of April 7

1.) Key at 4 things that are great about the month of April
2.) Compute how many days are left until the end of our school year.
3.) Read a story @ Happy News Summarize using one sentence
4.) Create, Compute, Key 4 math problems using only the number
5.) Search to Find a map from your home to your school. Give the link

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The Blogger Wears Prada

bloggerweardpradalogo.jpg

… Or wants to. Educators on a budget still yearn for Prada-esque apparel on a miniscule budget (or ideas for what to buy their special girl someone). On selected Fridays, when I am home because the airlines decided not to stir the flight delay cauldron, I will spotlight the best stores, products, and websites for all things In-Digital-Style.

fluffieflipflops.JPGfluffieflipflops.JPGMy last flight arrived at Gate B26 and connected to a flight at A12. You don’t need a calculator to do that walk-a-thon math! My feet are thanking me for UGG’s “Fluffie” Flip Flops. Yes, that is cozy fur there. fluffieflipflops.JPG These are also great for dashing from one desktop machine in your lab to the next as you update, backup, and download. Order at Bloomies.

If you are in or nearby Portales, New Mexico, visit “NoWhere Else” a great shop with free giftwrap and unique teacher gifts (or gifts for anyone). After shopping, have a sandwich at the Do Drop In right behind NoWhereElse.

Flip Flops Picture courtesy of Bloomies

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Digital Spring Cleaning

hazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpghazel.jpg  Digital Spring Cleaning
The closest I come to becoming “the doctor is in” is to listen to calls, read emails, offer tissues in F2F to those who have “forgotten” (neglected) “meant to” (neglected), and “thought our IT guys did it” (the blame version of neglected) to back up their

Files, Class Notes, Lesson Plans, Bookmarks/Favorites, MP3 songs, iTunes songs , iTunes media , iPod songs, Blog Entries, Webpage files, Pictures, Email (don’t fall for the ‘AutoArchive’ scam) Recipes (?) (I know but I am trying to be inclusive), TAX records/ spreadsheets, IRS hatemail.

What else have I forgotten?

Windows, Apple’s Time Capsule , Anti-Virus programs all have have automatic backups and Time Capsule has a way to back-up wirelessly.

My favorite backup is the portable hard drive, a 40GB model will run only $169.

There are also some swell online tools for this purpose: Data Deposit Box, IDrive, and XDrive (the old FreeDrive now owned by AOL).

Each costs around $5/month or $60/year, less than a session on the psych couch (although, it you are a fan of “In Treatment” the price may be well worth it to spend an hour with Gabriel Byrne)

Anywho, please put on your weekend “TOO-DO” list or “Honey-DO” list to back up ALL your files. Please,

Pretty please with a post-it on top. 🙂

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#153 With A Bullet! No April Fools!

Dateline, UK: It’s the “British Invasion” backwards!

My Top 10 Tools were included in Jane’s Top 100 Tools for Learning, a roster collected from worldwide contributors. I am #153-a supremely great number! (she even included a picture without Photoshopping it!)

Jane’s blog is one of the best and first in the blogsphere. Add it to your blogroll!

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