Twitter: Let's Do Lunch!

As I mentioned last week, it took me six months to compose my first tweet after opening my Twitter account. Good grief. I never considered Twitter as a way to connect and collaborate until Stacey's TWT post about trying out Pinterest and Twitter last November. Getting started with Pinterest felt easier although it took some trial and error. It has proved to be an excellent way to begin to connect with other speech therapists. With my transition back to speech this fall, I hoped that Twitter might also be a useful way to expand my hunt for other speech therapists like me. One problem is that I'm still so drawn to all the literacy tweets that I forget that I'm supposed to be looking for speech stuff. But I will keep at it. Like Pinterest and blogging, Twitter will take time and starting slow works fine with me. And right now, I am so excited when I see that someone I know from the TWT community posts a tweet. It feels like looking across a noisy crowded cafeteria on the first day of school and seeing a familiar face and being so relieved that I will have someone to eat lunch with. So if you are thinking about diving into Twitter but you are afraid of eating alone, don't worry. I'll look for you, if you'll look for me. Maybe we can eat lunch together. Seriously, if you are interested in Twitter, read Stacey's previously mentioned post and her recent post on microblogging. Also, check out the excellent LiveBinder below curated by Steven Anderson. It's filled with resources to help get you started with Twitter.



An Educators Guide To Twitter

Posted with Blogsy

Planning for Intervention and Enrichment

I recently had the amazing experience of working with members of my school's SIP team to create some tools to assist classroom teachers to make instructional decisions for students who are struggling as well as students who are excelling beyond developmental or grade level expectations. Collaborating and sharing with professionals so passionate about student achievement was a blast to say the least. We based our work on Richard Allington's Six T's of exemplary teaching and the Optimal Learning Model (Regie Routman's version). Further, we brought with us a belief that all students can achieve at high levels and all learners need instruction that engages higher level thinking. We visualized groups of teachers coming together monthly to examine their classroom formative and summative data, sharing ideas with peers, and walking away with a tier 1/tier 2 plan of action all in one hour. Yes, it may seem lofty, but why not try? And add to that, we wanted teachers and administrators to be able to access these tools with their iPads. Our pie-in-the-sky plan incorporates Google Docs and LiveBinders. The mind map below is an overview of the planning process.

 

Digital Conferring Notebook

Sometimes things just take time to figure out. I finally received my new iPad 2 right before my spring break. Prior to having an iPad in my hands, I began to play with the idea of creating a functional conferring notebook using a combination of apps. Initially, I created some forms in Google Docs and organized them in a virtual binder tool called LiveBinders. Since LiveBinders has quite a nifty iPad app, I combined the two with interesting results. It worked pretty well except that I couldn't view the far right hand regions of my spreadsheets, which didn't bother me much. Any serious examination of data collected on my spreadsheet would probably take place on my laptop anyway. Editing the form was quite buggy though and so I continued my quest for a better combination of apps. In the meantime, I checked out the Confer App, which was very cool but pretty pricey and not very visually appealing. My most recent version uses a combination of a document I created in Google Docs as my master grid. The grid contains the links to the conferring form, a spreadsheet to hold all the student data, an appointment calendar, and a student log sheet. I used an app called GoDocs to view and edit my documents on my iPad. I plan to play with it this week and continue to tweak as I go.

This is a screenshot of what my selection grid looks
like using GoDocs. As you can see, this is a work in
progress. 

21st Century Resume

Click the icon below and check out
 my latest LiveBinder. Ummm, no,
 I didn't get my resume done
yet . . . but I think the cover of
 my binder is cool.

I had a wonderful four-day break except for Tuesday totally snuck up on me. Today feels like it should be Monday. My goals for this past weekend were to work on my resume, learn about Twitter, clean the house, do laundry, see Jersey Boys, go out to dinner with my husband, go to the dentist, and a bunch of other stuff. I can say that I got all the fun activities checked off my to-do list. Half the cleaning was completed and I succeeded in avoiding the whole resume thing entirely.  Rather than write an actual resume, I created a LiveBinder filled with 21st century resume writing resources. It is an awesome binder, if I do say so myself.  Rather than getting something substantial down on the paper, I spent hours creating a resource about how to craft the very thing I have been avoiding. Seriously, Diana? Ridiculous. Truly. How the heck did I ever make it through graduate school for crying out loud?  In November, I wrote 50,000 words in 26 days.  One would think I could force myself to crank out a resume? Pathetic. I wonder if ice cream would help or maybe some nachos. Good grief.

Educator Resume Writing Resources

Digital Conferring Notebook

Thanks to Amy Platt who wrote an awesome post on Two Writing Teachers about her digital conferring notebook. And thanks to Stacey and Ruth for providing a place to have this important conversation. I've been playing with the idea myself using Google Docs together with LiveBinders. The notebook is far from finished but my thinking was to try to create a notebook that mirrored what some of my teachers were using in their classrooms. Many teachers liked The Sisters model of having an appointment calendar as well as a class list to track conferences. They also liked the idea of being able to look at the previous conference note prior to or at the time they were conferring with the student. That is why I placed the Google Doc spreadsheet first so they could look at previous notes before tabbing over to the actual Google form. My thinking was to create a tool that could be used not just for note taking but for planning as well. I was thinking about how cool it would be to be able to provide links to additional resources that could help teachers plan strategy groups for their students. LiveBinder does have an iPad App but I haven't played with that yet. In fact, I probably won't have an iPad to try it out until late in the school year. As I said before, my LiveBinder is a work in progress and far from complete but I am willing to share if you are interested. Click on the icon below to view the binder. Be sure to view the binder in Presentation mode which is a tab located in the lower right hand corner. Any and all ideas are appreciated!

Literacy LiveBinder for Conferring

Discover LiveBinders

If you haven't discovered LiveBinders, take some time today to investigate this powerful resource. Not only is LiveBinders a free and powerful tool for organizing resources, it is an amazing warehouse of curated information. They also provide excellent and exciting webinars, one of which I viewed just last night on STEM resources. Below are two binders that I have been working on. So many possibilities.

Literacy Challenges

Why Should Educators Blog?

Dabbling in Web 2.0 Tools

If you haven’t discovered LiveBinders yet, you need to check it out. The LiveBinders community explodes with educator resources and invites you to organize and collect anything you find in addition to your own resources into your own binder. If it has a URL, you can put it in a LiveBinder. And it is free! Please check out this outstanding LiveBinder that organizes web 2.0 tools according to Bloom’s Taxonomy.  

Blooms Taxonomy Web 2.0 Livebinder

Working at Learning Web Tools

I created the drawing in Google Docs,
saved it as a JPG, then edited it a 
little further using Picnik. 

I've been playing around with some web tools that have been keeping me up late, getting me up early, and I’m having a blast! I’ve been working on a conferring notebook using Google Docs and LiveBinders. I don’t have it all figured out but I am learning loads of new things. Are you using either of these tools? If so, I would love to hear what you think. Also, you have to check out my Voki. Too much fun.