Education: Go Get It! Week @ CeVMS

The students of CeVMS focused on getting an education during Education: Go Get It! Week and told us where they were thinking about, planning on, dreaming of, hoping to attending college one day. During advisory or on their own, students visited the Cedar Valley home page and placed their vote in the Answer Garden widget. Here's what it looked like on the Cedar Valley Homepage:

The cool thing about this application is that it is free, it doesn't require a log in (unless you'd like to have some administrative rights), and it creates a great word cloud (interactive and print)!

After polling was closed, the answers were exported easily to Tagxedo to create this great image:

Another cool part of EGGI Week was seeing all the places that Cedar Valley Staff and Faculty members attended college. A map of all of these post-secondary institutions was created and shared through Batchgeo.com. With this site, one can easily copy and paste a spreadsheet of information into the site and create a map. The map can then be exported as a Google Earth file. Check out our map:

Education: Go Get It!

TechKNOWLEDGEy Tips: Remind 101

The RRISD Middle school ITSs have teamed up to provide Tuesday Tips to our campuses. Check out this great tip about Remind 101. Click on the picture to visit the tutorial.

Some additional advantages:

• Subscribers can un-enroll in a class/group by sending a text reply with "STOP" to the number.
• It can be used with text or with email;
• can have multiple classes/groups;
• from what we have used, it is unlimited subscribers;
• it keeps phone numbers and emails private; there's an app for iOS devices.

We also encourage you to get with the whole administrative team, department, horizontal team, or campus to discuss possibilities, time schedules, etc. so that parents and students are not unintentionally bombarded with the same message repetitively.

Want to know more or use it in your classroom, contact your friendly neighborhood ITS for a small-group or 1-on-1 training opportunity.

QR Codes in Math

Ms. Johnson's 6th Grade Math class integrated QR codes easily into their Order of Operations lesson this week. Here's Ms. Johnson's description of the activity:

"...the kids used dry erase boards to solve a problem (each child did a part of each problem), the one that wrote the answer then came to me with their dry erase board and used a phone (theirs, table mates, mine) to scan the code...I asked them if they got that answer on their board--if so, they did the next problem---if not, I had them scan a 2nd code that reminded them of what they should have done and they went back to their table to do it again correctly."

Here's a photo taken by one of our Photo Journalism students, M. Russell, of Ms. Johnson's class in action:

Photo taken by M. Russell

Great Job, Jags!

Monster Mash!

The Cedar Valley Foreign Language classes are making a "monstrous" splash into technology this year already! Check out this assignment from Ms. Ruiz de Chavez's classroom and how the students combined speaking, listening, recording, writing, and technology all in one lesson---and it's in a different language!!! Can you believe it? 


Here's the correspondence from Ms. Ruiz de Chavez explaining the lesson: 


Hola!, 

I just thought I'd share a technology lesson that I'm doing with my students this week. They made a bunch of really cool monsters & today they are recording descriptions using vocaroo & posting them on wall wisher. Tomorrow, they will listen to their classmate's description of their monsters & try to recreate them.

If you want to see what they've come up with, here are the links to their wall wisher sites:

http://wallwisher.com/wall/mi_monstruo-p2

http://wallwisher.com/wall/mi_monstruo-p3

http://wallwisher.com/wall/mi_monstruo-p4

http://wallwisher.com/wall/mi_monstruo-p7

http://wallwisher.com/wall/mi_monstruo-p8

http://wallwisher.com/wall/mi_monstruo-p9

-- 

Cordialmente,

Nelly Ruiz de Chavez

Español 1A

Cedar Valley Middle School

Thank you Ms. Ruiz de Chavez for sharing your class with us! Here are links to the resources this class used: http://vocaroo.com/ and http://wallwisher.com/