edcanvas is a different way to present lessons and material to your class.  If you have groups working on several different activities and they will need different material for each this can place it all in one location, or maybe you need to provide detail steps to a process or project.  Rubrics, presentations, or whatever your classroom need put it all on one canvas for you or your students to access.  edcanvas allows you to search for youtube videos, google images or web searches, your google drive, or to upload any material from your computer.  Whatever students need or teachers need for a lesson can be in one location with plenty of room for standards and notes to also be posted.  Check out how easy it is today to set up your account using your google account and create your first edcanvas.  Here is a screen shot of my first canvas on Big6 research skills.

I just have 3 boxes but mutliple boxes can be created!  Get started now on yours for your next lesson!

Muzy.com is a photobox collage site that is really cool.  Actually students do not even have to have an account to use the site but would need to be able to screenshot their work and then they could use it wherever they needed in projects or just alone for an assignments that revolves around pictures. Without even setting up an account I created two pictures.  The first one using the templates under photobox where you just select pictures and edit simple text.

The next example is using photo collage where you create your own collage and text.

I can see some many quick uses of this tool in the classroom to get students to think in terms of pictures and outside of the box.  It is super simple and easy to use.  Give it a try!

I loved picnik and miss it dearly and although nothing seems to have replaced it for me the best site I have found that is simple to use is picmonkey.  I used it for my e-Christmas Cards this year and was pretty happy with the site overall and I used a few before I decided this was my favorite and easiest to use.  This can be used without an account so students could decorate pics before using in something like Muzy.

1. Students must not begin with Google.  We must teach students the better databases and search engines to use.

2.  When using a search engine even Google, students need to know how to use Advanced Boolean search tips such as using and, or, not, and using keywords and phrases placing “phrases” in quotation marks.  I am linking here to Edudemic and an article titled 50 Search Engines You Probably Don’t Use Yet.

3.  As students are searching the Internet and using various search engines they must learn and know how to evaluate websites.  Here is a link to a mini-poster from Kathy Schrock titled The 5 W’s of Website Evaluation.

3.Teach students a process to their research.  The Big6 is one I advocate for but their are many different ways but teach and model a way to do research.  Here is a link to Kathy Schrock Information Literacy Page where you can find some different models and much more!

4.  By all means everyone must site their sources.  Here are links to just a few sites where students can easily create citations, but I always tell students databases are the best these have citations already created for the user.

OSLIS

CiteThisForMe

Citation Machine

The big issue is first as teachers we must model these research methods to ensure our students know we are serious when we teach these skills.  One last great research site I want to share is well done by the Upper School of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas.  My advice to educators let’s use all these resources to help our students to become stewards of information literacy.  Now I am stepping down.

Just read yesterday and DEN connect with Discovery Education.  This initiative sound so exciting and I can’t wait to see teachers here at MMS getting connected around the country and around the world with others.  What a great move Discovery!  If you missed the blog post from yesterday here is the link again.  Direct Link to the new website is DEN Connect

1. symbaloo- a great visual bookmarking site!

2. penzu-journaling website.  Looks just like notebook paper. 

3. mentor mob – a presentation/playlist tool

4. meograph – a sequencing and timeline creation website

Check them out and put them to work in your classroom this fall.

Book Blog ( I have had this one for a really long time): http://mmselibrarian.blogspot.com/

MMS Media Tip Blog ( This is brand new for teachers this year and I will dual post to the DE blog):  http://mmsmediatips.blogspot.com/

Enjoy blogging it is a great tool for sharing both personally and professionally your ideas, etc.  Also I want to be a better tweeter so more to come on working on that.

   Many of you reading this post know all about Discovery Education but for those that don’t and just in case….. I want to really encourage EVERYONE!  to take some time and look around in Discovery Education.  I am doing the Rising Star program right now encouraged by Roseann Burklow, Laura Miller and the great Discovery Ed trip 7 of us took in June.

A great place with some great resources is found on the Disovery login page before you log in across the top under Teacher/Parents/Students so check it out sometime….

http://www.discoveryeducation.com/

Another great use of Discovery Education is to subscribe and search the Discovery Ed Youtube Channel.  Lots of great videos can be found here.   One video gives teachers some great ideas about how to use Discovery Education in the classroom.  Take about an hour and watch this video