My Favorite Chrome Extensions

Here are some of my favorite Chrome extensions.  What is a Chrome extension? It is a small program that adds new features to your Chrome browser.  I like to use them to make more browsing experience more efficient. Here are my top ten extensions that I like to use:

WiseStamp allows you to create a dynamic email signature in no time at all.  I get all I need with the free version.

Ever wanna tweet a great site you found, but ran out of 140 characters?  goo.gl URL Shortener will shorten up your URL, giving you a lot more room in your tweet.  This extension also offers a QR Code creator from the URL that you have in your browser.

Absolutely one of my favorite extensions!  Ever had a zillion tabs open that you would like to save?  TabCloud allows you to save the tabs that you have open. I find this particularly useful for when I am presenting.  Simply open all the tabs you want for your presentation/class, save them with TabCloud and then when it comes time to present or for your class open up TabCloud and click on the tabs you want to appear and they will all populate!

Have a student that is distracted by all of the ads on a website?  Install Evernote Clearly and eliminate all of the clutter on any given website, leaving just the content. This is a great extension!

Find a great article?  Wanna save it for future use?  Set up your Diigo account and save that article  to a specific folder you have created using the Diigo extension. 

I use this extension when teaching about privacy during our Digital Citizenship lessons.  Behavioral tracking is big business and Collusion allows you to see what websites are tracking you and allows you to optionally block the invisible websites that are tracking you.  Powerful extension to show students that the internet is not private at all. 

The Ginger extension is a nice add on for your Gmail.  This extension corrects your spelling and grammar. 

Watch Doc notifies you when your Google Docs have changed. 

I use it like the Diigo extension, but Evernote Web Clipper essentially lets you save anything you see on the web to your Evernote.

Docs Quickly allows you to quickly create a new Google Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet or Drawing. 

Reflecting on EdCamp Omaha...

Too many words come to mind when trying to describe my experience at EdCamp Omaha today, so I thought I would create a Wordle summarizing this amazing day.  A HUGE thanks to Josh Allen and Kristina Peters for organizing this wonderful day of learning!

World Read Aloud Day

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."

~Emilie Buchwald

Today, teachers and hundreds of Aurora Elementary students participated in World Read Aloud Day.  It was my second year of organizing this wonderful opportunity, and for the second year in a row I walked away with a huge smile on my face.

I love to read.

I love to share my passion of reading with students.

I love having others share their passion for reading with students.

That is what #WRAD13 is all about.  Finding others that are willing to read aloud to your students while sharing their passion for reading.  It never hurts to hear it from another source.  Too often our students' ears become numb from the things that teachers and parents continually tell them.  An idea coming from a new source can have an everlasting effect.

I have vivid memories of Mrs. Tilley reading aloud to my class in fourth grade.  My "imagination theater" as I like to call it, would take me to amazing places as she read to our class.  I didn't have to focus on, or process  the words on the pages.  I simply let my mind wander.  That is what we did today at Aurora elementary.  We let minds wander as we listened to some great storytellers.

I owe a debt of gratitude to @teacherdebra @morgetron @epaopao @lackeym @lanab03 @Swenson_N11 and @SrfWalkerStudio for sharing their passion of reading with us.  They left a very strong impression on our students.

I close with the following tweet from our last reader today in Rome, Italy.  Brian Koperski shared this advice with our fifth graders as he spoke to the, and I am so glad he tweeted it with our designated hashtag (#huskywrad13) later as a reminder.  It is quite powerful and true.

The Digital Citizenship Survival Kit

It's a simple little prop I use when teaching Digital Citizenship to our K-8 #aurorahuskies students.  I love utilizing props to try to get my point across to students.  To me, it helps a student retain the lesson better. 

Let me introduce you to Mr. Badura's "Digital Citizenship Survival Kit."  Each of the items has a purpose.  We spend a considerable amount of time addressing Digital Citizenship at Aurora Public Schools and I truly believe we are preparing students for their lives in the digital world. 

Here are the items I have in my "Digital Citizenship Survival Kit" and what each item represents:

Padlock

The padlock is to remind students to set strong passwords and to set up passcode locks on all of their digital devices.   "Lock 'em down" as we like to say in our Digital Citizenship lessons.  

Toothbrush

I tell students to think that passwords and toothbrushes are very similar in the fact that you NEVER want to share passwords.  (I do highly encourage/recommend that students to share passwords with parents) 

Permanent Marker

Everything that you put online is permanent....even if you hit the delete button after posting.  Odds are someone has retweeted, favorited,  or taken a screenshot of the material if it was questionable.  

Toothpaste

Imagine the information that you are putting online is like the toothpaste coming out of the tube.  Once it is out, it is almost impossible to get it all back in the tube!  (Thanks to @Mandery for that prop idea!)

The survival kit is very simple.   It has been a very effective prop in getting students to think about their online behavior.   

I would love to hear suggestions you might have to make my Digital Citizenship Survival Kit even better. 

It Doesn't Hurt to Ask

A couple of weeks ago, one of our Kindergarten teachers came to me and asked if I had any ideas on how to integrate some technology into a unit they were doing on Penguins.  It caught me off guard a little bit, but my response was something like, "Why don't we email the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha and see if someone would Skype with us about their Penguins?"
I sent the email, and within two hours we had a response from the official Penguin Keeper!  She agreed to Skype with us and answer the questions that our Kindergarteners had about Penguins.

What's holding you back from sending a simple email or making a phone call to a professional in your community? In your state?  In the United States?  In another country?   I have had great success when asking others to share knowledge of their profession with our students.                                                        
Go ahead, do it!  It will take you five minutes to compose that email.   Take a chance.  Shoot for the moon.  Think of the authentic experience you will be creating for your classroom! 

Enjoy, engage, and empower your students!

We Visited the Ocean today

I was having a conversation with one of our wonderful first grade teachers named Charis High a couple of weeks ago.  During our conversation, Mrs. High mentioned that her students would be studying Ocean habitats soon and that it would "cool"  to Skype with someone that lived near an ocean.  If I had had that conversation five years ago, I wouldn't have been able to help at all.  But thanks to my wonderful PLN on Twitter, I remembered that one of my members, Holly Clark, lives in California.  She had responded to a tweet I sent out earlier this year asking for PLN members to Skype in and explain to my second graders how they use Skype in their jobs.

Mrs. High contacted Ms. Clark, the gears started turning and before you knew it, we had planned to video chat with Ms. Clark via FaceTime while she stood on the beach in California!

Mrs. High and her students prepared for our virtual visit by brainstorming questions that they would like to ask Ms. Clark.  The students were so excited when Mrs. High unveiled the news to them. Especially when they realized that our call would take place on the 100th day of school!   A majority of the students in Mrs. High's class had never been to the ocean, so this was going to be a great experience for them.

We made the call this morning and it was AWESOME!  As soon as Ms. Clark answered her phone a student exclaimed, "I can hear the ocean!"  I will have to admit, I have only been to the ocean once and the first time I heard it, I was enthralled!  Think of all the students that heard the ocean for the first time while sitting in their classroom in Nebraska.  Ms. Clark did a wonderful job teaching and showing us several different things about the ocean as she stood along the Pacific Coast Highway answering our questions.

We had an authentic learning activity today utilizing a relatively simple technology tool.  Whether you use Skype, a Google Hangout our FaceTime you can literally take your class anywhere in the world.  It's not rocket science.  We didn't have a major project planned, we weren't using a cart of laptops or iPads, we simply tied what the students were doing in Science and made it "come to life."  Sure we could have just looked in their textbook.  We could have pulled up a video on YouTube or watched a documentary on oceans.  Instead we chose to let the students experience firsthand what it was like to be standing next to the Pacific Ocean.  Thank you Mrs. High and Ms. Clark for providing such a wonderful opportunity for our students!

Monsters on Twitter

I apologize if you were looking for real Monsters.  You won't find them here!   What you will find is an awesome project that we did with our 3rd graders that deals with writing about Monsters. And it all came about because of a connection I made on Twitter.
This summer I created a sign-up site for Mystery Skypes and was interested in giving credit to the original "founder" of the Mystery Skype idea.  I did a little digging and eventually found that person.  Her name is Caren MacConnell and she is an awesome Tech Coach in New Jersey.  Well, long story short, we exchanged a couple of emails and she told me about an awesome project that she had done in the past called the "Monster Project" and asked if I would be interested in participating.   It piqued my interest and I was all in!  
The "Monster Project" is a descriptive writing project.  Students from different locations are paired up, each student has to describe a monster in writing that they imagine, then draw it.  Teachers in each 3rd grade collected the descriptive writings and we "snail mailed" them to New Jersey.  Mrs. MacConnell's 3rd grade classes did the same.  Students then draw a picture based on their partners descriptive writing.  After each student finished their drawing,  Skype sessions were planned so that each student could share their Monster with their assigned partner to see how well they did with their descriptive writing.

Well, we had one major problem while trying to complete our project.   Hurricane Sandy got in the way!  Mrs. MacConnell's classes were affected by this disastrous storm and were out of school for two weeks!  Once they returned back to school, we had a hard time finding a time before Christmas break to share our drawings, so we kicked off the new year with some amazing Skype sessions!

The students were excited to see how well their partners followed their descriptive writings while drawing their Monsters.  Some of the Monster drawings could have passed for cousins, some could have passed for twins!
I love the fact that this project made students focus on the writing process and how they really needed to pay attention to details when writing.  Even better was the fact that we were able to integrate a very simple tool in Skype.  Students were not only working on their writing skills, but their speaking skills as well.

Go ahead, contact a teacher you know from another state and ask them if they would be interested in participating in a "Monster Project."  This is such an easy way to integrate a simple technology into your classroom while working on writing!

Comparing our Monsters