Have you Tried to Draw Like Picasso?

 

Picassohead is a lovely digital tool that allows users to create their own masterpieces using famous features drawn by Picasso. Teachers can use such an amazing website to unleash their students' creativity and bring the magic of arts into their classes. 

Humanizing Your Online Class

This title completely captured my attention when I first saw the announcement of the webinar by Michelle Pacansky-Brock. I always stress the importance of the socio-affective touch between students and their instructors. In this digital era, it is considered the key behind any successful learning. Knowing more about students, what, how, and why they learn inevitably lead to an enjoyable and memorable experience. Students also want to know more about their instructors and connect with them for extended interaction. The question is "How to use digital tools to humanize this relationship?

Let Pictures Speak!

Blabberize is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to upload a picture, draw a "mouth" on that picture, and then record or upload a sound clip to make it speak or sing along with the sound. 

Chat on the Fly using TLK.io

Thanks to Kaushalya Mandaliya, I managed to embed a live chatroom on my blog. You can create your own using TLK.io [talk·eeo]. It  is a web chat that is open to anyone and channels are owner-free. It seems so easy to use and embed into websites and blogs. I love to use it with my students.They always need instant feedback when working on new projects. However, the public feature is not secure. Anyone can join the discussion and write their messages. The only way to create a little bit private chatrooms is to choose complex names using numbers, letters and character, so spammers can't see them easily. This tool is a little bit new and of course they will add more features in the future. Let's wait and hope!

Check THREE Promising Courses by Coursera

Coursera launches many courses on September 2013. There are just three courses that catch my attention. My only criterion of choice is watching the instructors' introductory videos. You will not believe it. I know that these short videos are not enough to judge the quality of the whole experience, but they have a very great impact on learners before starting their journey of learning. Please check this great article by Sarah Linden to know more about the reasons behind using video introductions rather than text-based ones when creating your online courses.

Kindly explore each course info and choose what you need and add to your expertise:

Give Students a Voice by Audioboo

listen to ‘Give Students a Voice by Audioboo’ on Audioboo

As I said in my boo above, Audioboo is a free tool that allows users to create podcasts or audio files up to 3 minutes in length using the website directly or the mobile app. There are a lot of features that make me choose this tool to use with my students:

Cool FREE Site 4 Creating Cool Logos

I'm working on a new blog for my students. I'd prefer to build it from scratch. That's why I search for some tools and codes to add more features and touches. I always choose free and  simple tools, so students can use them easily without any problems. Cool Text is one of these tools that helped me create a simple, but an impressive logo. It is a FREE graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need a logo without a lot of design work. 

Please follow these simple steps below to create your first logo: 

2nd Round of DLT MOOC-Ed 4 Educators

DLT MOOC-Ed Introduction from The Friday Institute on Vimeo.

 

Audience:

Digital Learning Transition in K-12 Schools massive online open course for educators (DLT MOOC-Ed) is designed for school and district leaders, such as superintendents, principals, curriculum directors, technology directors, financial officers, instructional coaches, library media specialists, and lead teachers, as well as university faculty, consultants, parents and any others involved in planning and implementing K-12 digital learning initiatives. 

Have you found your blog work COPIED somewhere?

Thanks to Hafeez Khan, I managed to disable RIGHT CLICK feature to protect my blog content today. I'm so sorry to use this trick. But, you know it is so annoying to find your work copied somewhere without your permission or referring to your name. If you want to prevent others from copying and pasting your work, please follow the steps below:

Moodle MOOC 4 Teachers: Basics

 

 Course launch: September 1, 2013, 15:00 UTC

  
Teaching with Moodle: An introduction course is designed for anybody who wants to use the Moodle learning platform for teaching, whether it be in a school, a university, a company or just personal interest. The four-week course is also a great opportunity to connect with the vibrant Moodle community dedicated to sharing resources, ideas and anything that could help inspire better teaching practices everywhere.  

Course Details:

• Starts: Sunday, September 1, 2013; 15:00 UTC
• Duration: 4 weeks; expect to spend 2 to 3 hours a week
• Facilitators: Mary Cooch and Helen Foster
• Fees: None - Thanks to the support of certified Moodle Partners

5 Great Canvas MOOCs for Teachers

Canvas Network is an open online platform which provides lifelong learners with many chances and learning experiences. As a teacher, I always search for such opportunities to update my knowledge and find new people to follow and interact with. Here are some of the courses that can help teachers to develop their teaching skills and refresh their classroom practices.

Welcome to Canvas Network from Instructure on Vimeo.

Global 2013 STEMx Education Conference

Retrieved Aug. 19, 2013

Global 2013 STEMx Education Conference  is the world’s first massively open online conference for educators focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and more. The conference will be held over the course of three days, September 19-21, 2013, and will be free to attend. STEMxCon will be a highly inclusive event that will engage students and educators around the globe and will encourage primary, secondary, and tertiary (K-16) educators around the world to share and learn about innovative approaches to STEMx learning and teaching.

Prezi Webinars for FREE

Prezi is a virtual whiteboard that transforms presentations from monologues into conversations enabling people to see, understand, and remember ideas. To understand complexity, one must zoom out to see the big picture and in to see the details. Prezi’s 3-dimensional canvas is a virtual space where users can delve deeper and pan wider to broaden the conversation. To know more about this tool potential, please visit this link. Prezi team members always do their best to share their idea among a large audience of users. In this month, they will offer some live online training designed to help users gain a better understanding of getting started with Prezi. Register now and learn the basics on how to create beautiful Prezis from old PowerPoint presentations.

Glogster Summit August 28, 2013

Retrieved Aug. 9, 2013

Glogster EDU is a social network that allows users to create free interactive posters, or Glogs. A "Glog", short for "graphics blog", is an interactive multimedia image. It looks like a poster, but readers can interact with the content. Glogster EDU provides an online environment to design interactive posters. The user inserts text, images, photos, audio files, videos, special effects and other elements into their glogs to generate a multimedia online creation. Posters can be shared with other users on the site, embedded in external wikis or blogs, and shared via many social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Glogs can also be exported and saved to computer-compatible formats (see more here). To hear more stories about how to use this tool effectively in your classrooms, please register for Glogster Educational Technology Summit: Tech, Tools, and Teaching. This summit will focus on the fully functional Mobile glog editor. VIP support program, Glog assessment, PD Trainings and many more things.

Find out the American English Treasures

Retrieved Aug. 9, 2013

American English is a resource center for teaching and learning about American English language and culture. This website provides a variety of engaging materials and resources for teachers' professional development and for students in the classrooms. Both teachers and students will find new ways to practice English. They can find classroom activities, audiobooks, MP3s, videos and pedagogical materials to assist in learning and teaching English as a second/foreign language. One can create his/her resource list to add favorite links and email or share it with others. Users can also add their suggestions and stay up-to-date by following the website calendar.

Here are some sections you can find in American English website: