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Using Your Noodle with Moodle - Megan Biller

As a teacher at an accelerated high school math and science program, I’m always trying to think of new ways to incorporate technology into my curriculum. Through my Master’s classes, we have utilized discussion boards. I thought this would be a great asset to my class as we rarely have time to discuss current events – especially those related to math, science and technology. Enter Moodle.
       
What is Moodle? It is a course management system where you can teach courses online. (A common online course management system in colleges is Blackboard.) Here I am able to create a forum for my students, where I pose a question to which they respond to not only the question, but each other as well! Through Moodle, I can also attach notes, assignments, videos, links and even a location for students to turn in assignments or projects.
    
Web 2.0 Conquering Technophobia - David Andrade



Many teachers are intimidated by Web 2.0 technologies, or just don't know how to get started using them.


Xtranormal: Text to Speech Video—A Few Uses - Kathy Niebuhr
As a .5 elementary media specialist, I was assigned the overflow prep time for two sections of 3rd and 4th grade—one a day. My assignment from my principal when this was created at the beginning of the year was “do technology.” We “did” lots of things during the year learning about and with technology.  One of our fun end-of-the-year projects involved books and the website Xtranormal.  I saw this posted at Digital Tools for Teachers and was intrigued.  At the same time, we had been watching the book reviews done on the McKillop Elementary Glog out of Melissa, TX. I didn’t have the time as a .5 nor the equipment to do some of the cool book reviews done at McKillop, but thought I could use Xtranormal to do something similar.

EDU Glogster and Social Studies - Dorene Bates
I had a workshop this past Monday afternoon for some Social Studies teachers. They wanted to know how they could use EDU Glogster in their class with students. They also wanted to know why they would want to use EDU Glogster in their classroom. So, I created a glog on Using Glogster in Social Studies. The workshop went well. We talked about ways to use EDU Glogster and I showed some examples of how other people have used it in their social studies classroom. One of the ways I use EDU Glogster is as a teaching tool. I usually show my glog to workshop participants and teach from the glog. EDU Glogster is a great introduction to a lesson also. In the Department of Instructional Technology, we are creating "About Us" glogs to post to our department's web page and on our department's blog.
Project PLN Contributors
A special thank you to all of the contributors that made the December issue of #projectpln possible! 


Editors:
Character Development Using Voki Speaking Avatars - Shelly Terrell
    
Recently, I participated in the I Heart EdTech Blog Swap from SimpleK12.com. This post about using Voki speaking avatars was originally posted in Kelli Erwin’s blog, which is full of great educational technology reviews!

Voki is an application that lets you create personalized avatars to use on your wikis, blogs or websites. You can also e-mail these wonderful characters. This free web 2.0 tool is a great way to motivate learners of any age, because they are very interactive and provide various options for students to customize them.

One of the best ways I like to use Voki avatars is to have students develop characters for digital storytelling projects.
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Read it Later - Steven Anderson


I admit it.

I am addicted to Twitter.

And I have admitted that before. I truly enjoy the people I am able to connect with and have conversations with. But I am most addicted to the resources because that is how I started. I spend lots of time finding stuff for my teachers. And I figure if it works for them, why not share with other educators.

There are tons of links, articles videos and other great stuff that come across my screen everyday. I can never keep up with it all. People ask me all the time how I have time to go through everything. The key is I don't do it the moment it comes up. If I see an interesting tweet with a link and I have time, I will dig deeper but most of the time I only glance, decide if it is something to look at and save it for later.


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Thoughts from Twitter - PLN
I have to say that may most useful and favourite web tool for my teaching is Google Docs. I use it for so many things in teaching. (grading, assignment tracking, journaling, note sharing, surveys, submission forms etc.)

But for giving presentations, Prezi.com is my current favourite.

--
Rod Corbett
Academic Development Centre
Mount Royal University


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