Back to School

 

For today I have some Back 2 School tips.  First and foremost my thoughts behind today's post was to organize some websites from Pintrest.  Love Pintrest--one, it's a great time waster when you don't feel like doing the things you should be doing.  Two, there are some fabulous ideas for lots of walks of life on there--including classroom ideas!  But...there's only one small problem--my county blocks just about all social networking sites.  So all those great ideas that I pinned at home...I can't access while at school.  So, I created a sqworl bookmark category for my favorite Pintrest topics.  Being an ITRT (Instructional Technology Resource Teacher)  my Sqworl folder is all related to techy items for the classroom, but you could easily create one for any subject you teach.  That way you can more easily access the sites from school if your county blocks Pintrest, as mine does.  Now not everything I pinned is on here, because as mentioned social networking is largely blocked, therefore pretty much any website with the word "blog" in it won't get through our filters (Thankfully kidblog does though--which is a great blog site to use with classroom students).  So, here's the Sqworl link for my Techy Pintrest items.



Going through mu pinned items, there were a couple of  I wanted to share for back to school:

REMIND101

Remind101 is a great way to stay in contact with parents.  I heard a presenter talking about it at the Arlington Technology Symposium this summer, and also had it pinned from Pintrest.  It's a free computer website that allows you to text parents to their phones in a way that keeps your phone number private.  It's super easy to sign up for an account, and even includes printable tutorials to give to the parents to sign up for your notifications (also super easy for them to sign up).  It really is just a notification system though, so parents will not be able to text back or ask questions--that will need to be done through other means.  It is a great tool to remind about paperwork that needs to come back, picture day, field trips, wearing sneakers for gym etc.

QR CODES FOR TEACHER INFO

This next idea came from a pinned item from Pencils and Paper Blogspot.  On open house or back to school night create a QR code of all your information such as your name, e-mail address, school phone number, and address.  You could even include items such as your schedule.  Just post it on your door.  Any parent with a Smart phone can scan it, and that way they have all pertinent information handy.  You can create a QR code using a site such as QRStuff.


TUBECHOP

Sometimes you find a great You tube video  (Yea!! a site that was unblocked by my county last year!) that you want to show to your class or use for a presentation.  The Shift Happens video (there are multiple different variations) is one I like to use at the beginning of the year.  If you decided to watch the whole video above you may have noticed it is eight minutes long.  Some people may pay attention through the whole video, but chances are you will lose many.  If you use  tubechop, you can cut just the most important part of the video, which will shorten the play time.  This can also be very useful in the classroom.  I remember there was a video on pronouns I wanted to use with a fourth grade class last year.  The video was created by preteens and something the students certainly could have related to but...some of the language they used in parts of the video wasn't exactly school appropriate.  With tubechop you could select parts of the video and leave the questionable parts out.  Here is a selection from the above video using tubechop. So instead of an eight minute video, I have 52 seconds of what I deemed most important.