Saturday, November 22, 2014

How to Use Padlet to Manage Tasks

Padlet is one of my favorite web tools because it can be used in many ways for many purposes. Today, I used it to have teachers share the things that they created during my workshop. In the classroom I have used it as a digital KWL chart. This afternoon I noticed that Padlet offers a wallpaper titled "My Tasks." If you select "My Tasks" as your Padlet wallpaper you can use Padlet to keep track of tasks on your to-do lists. The wallpaper has three columns; "to do," "in progress," and "done."
Click the image to view it in full size.
Applications for Education
Using the "My Tasks" wallpaper on Padlet could be a good way for students to organize tasks when they are working on group projects. On a shared wall students can move their to-do notes from one column to the next as they progress through their group projects.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good evening from Greensboro, North Carolina where I spent the day facilitating a workshop for an enthusiastic group of teachers. We spent the day creating multimedia collages, creating videos, creating audio recordings, and trying some student response systems. It was great to see so many teachers will to spend a Saturday learning about new things and developing new ideas to use in their classrooms.


Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Putting Art On the Map - A Google Maps and Earth Activity
2. Six Fun Games for Geography Awareness Week - And Tools To Make Your Own
3. Five Good Online Tools for Creating Infographics
4. Sqworl - A Simple Visual Bookmarking Tool for Teachers
5. ReadWorks Offers Thanksgiving-themed Articles and Questions for K-12 Classrooms
6. Handy New Features On Plickers
7. News in Levels - News Articles to Match Your Students' Reading Abilities

Would you like to have me speak at your school or conference? Click here to learn about my keynote and workshop offerings. 

Starting on November 24th I'll be offering another section of my Practical Ed Tech webinar series Getting Ready for GAFE. This webinar series has a graduate credit option, click here to learn more about it. 6 seats are left.

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
IXL offers a huge assortment of mathematics lesson activities.
ClassCharts provides a great way to record student behavior data.
Typing Club offers free typing lessons for students.
Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.
Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.
EdTechTeacher is offers professional development workshops in Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta.
StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.
BoomWriter and WordWriter are fantastic tools that help students develop their writing skills.

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A Round-up of Ten Thanksgiving Lesson Resources

Over the last month I've published reviews of various Thanksgiving lesson resources. As Thanksgiving is now less than one week away, it's time to put all of those resources into one list. Here they are...

When Is Thanksgiving? Colonizing America is an episode in John Green's Crash Course on US History. The video starts with the history of Jamestown before moving onto Plymouth. Green does a good job of illustrating the differences between why and how each colony was established. This is video is suitable for high school students, but Green's use of sarcasm (which I actually like) and the details would probably be lost on middle school students.


The History Channel's History of Thanksgiving provides a short overview of the history of American Thanksgiving. This video is suitable for middle school students.



And just for fun here's a video that explains the differences between American and Canadian Thanksgiving. This video is appropriate for high school students. (I would stop it before the credits roll at the end).



You Are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving is an interactive exploration of the facts and myths associated with the story of the First Thanksgiving. Students can explore the facts and myths through the eyes of a Native American child or through the eyes of a female Pilgrim. Through the eyes of each character students discover the culture of giving thanks in the Native American and English cultures. My favorite part of the investigation is "The Path to 1621" in which students hear the perspectives of Native Americans and Pilgrims about events prior to 1621.

Voyage on the Mayflower is a nice resource produced by Scholastic. Voyage on the Mayflower has two parts for students to explore. The first part is an interactive map of the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Students can click on placemarks on the map to read and hear about the journey. The second part of the Voyage on the Mayflower takes students "inside" the Mayflower to see and hear about the parts of the ship.

The First Thanksgiving: Daily Life is another online activity produced by Scholastic. Daily Life is comparison of the lifestyles of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. Students can click through each aspect of daily life to see a comparison of housing, clothing, food, chores, school, and games.

The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings tells the story of Thanksgiving 1939. In 1939 Thanksgiving was going to fall on the last day of November which caused merchants to be worried about a shortened shopping season. In response to this concern President Roosevelt proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be moved up one week. Some states chose to ignore this proclamation and celebrate Thanksgiving on the last day of the month anyway. The conflict was finally resolved in 1941 when Congress passed a law stating that Thanksgiving would always be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month. The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings is supported by ten primary source documents. Included in those documents are letters from merchants appealing to FDR to change the day of Thanksgiving and letters opposing the change.

Earlier this week Storyboard That made available an option for creating Thanksgiving cards. To create a card you use the same process as is you were creating a comic on Storyboard That. After creating your short story save it and select the option to print as a Thanksgiving card. I demonstrate that process in the video embedded below.


This month BoomWriter is offering a Thanksgiving-themed writing lesson plan that is appropriate for students in third through eighth grade. WordWriter (produced by BoomWriter) allows you to create vocabulary lists that you want your students to incorporate into a writing assignment. The new Thanksgiving-themed lesson plan includes a pre-made list of Thanksgiving-themed words for your students to use in the writing assignment that you distribute to them. Each step of the process is outline in the lesson plan. The lesson plan document also includes the Common Core standards addressed in the writing activity.

ReadWorks is a non-profit service that offers hundreds of lesson plans and more than two thousand reading non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. For the (American) Thanksgiving season ReadWorks is offering a set of non-fiction articles about Thanksgiving. The set includes articles appropriate for all K-12 students. Each article is accompanied by ten reading comprehension questions. Those questions are a mix of multiple choice and open-ended questions.

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