Teaching Technology to 21st Century Parents

We must remember that in order for our students to acquire 21st century skills we must also assist their parents with acquiring those skills as well.  There are parents who do not necessarily keep abreast of current technology trends and subsequently are not comfortable or even able when it comes to assisting their child with at home assignments and projects.Google has come to the rescue!  According to Google's Jason Toff, "TeachParentsTech.org lets you select from more than 50 basic how-to videos to send to mom, dad, your old college roommate, your neighbor, or anyone else who could use a little help with tech tasks – whether it's how to copy and paste or how to share a big file."  Educators or students can select various videos on a formatted note, send them to a recipient of choice, and post about it on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Buzz.  Hopefully, we can help parents so they can help their children.

Rubrics with Rubistar

Project-based learning is an instructional method centered on the learner. Authentic, performance-based learning is a great way to make learning meaningful to students and to encourage them to be creative, innovative, and constructive.  Educators will find that the best way to assess students are by using rubrics.  Most rubrics consist of objectives, performance characteristics, and points or scores that indicate the degree to which the objectives were met.  Rubrics should be introduced to the students at the very beginning of a project unit -- either present the rubric to the class or collaborate with the students to structure the rubric.   Rubrics allow students to understand the criteria for assessment before they start the project. Rubrics also help to make the evaluation of the project more objective and consistent by listing the criteria, or what counts, and describing levels of quality from excellent to poor.

 I have found a great site to help teachers with designing rubrics.  This website is RubiStar.  This is a free tool to help teachers create quality rubrics.  RubiStar is a tool to help the teacher who wants to use rubrics, but does not have time to develop them from scratch. RubiStar provides generic rubrics that can simply be printed and used for many typical projects and research assignments. These generic rubrics can also be customized to fit your specific needs and saved online. Once you have used the rubric for your classroom project, you will be able to analyze the performance of your whole class, and insure that the
subject was clearly understood.  If you are not already using rubrics, you may want to start using Rubistar.

Toondoo

ToonDoo is a comic-creating tool that allows you to create your own comic strips with just a few drag, drops and mouse clicks! Toondoo has been extensively used as an educational tool with children and is the a tool used by many educators.  Once you have an account, you will first probably want to create a fun avatar for yourself using Traitr. Later you can use your character in comics.  You can then create a Toon Doo cartoon, publish your cartoon on your blog or elsewhere, add a Toon Doo widget to your blog and/or create a ToonDoo book of cartoons.The best way to learn is by just playing with the program.

You will be surprised how quickly you can make a toon you like. As they say, “Some people are born with a natural ability to draw cartoons, for everyone else, there’s ToonDoo!”   It is very user friendly and they even have created a very helpful ToonDoo Wiki.  Here is a link to guide you through making your first cartoon.