Thinkfinity Texas » thinkfinity

WOW – Shape Poems!

thinkfinitytexas — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:42:05 +0000

Karen Horn, Thinkfinity Trainer, encouraged educators undergoing Thinkfinity Field Trainer professional learning in Texas to pick out which of the web sites they discovered via Thinkfinity caused them to say, “Wow!”

In this inaugural post, and I sincerely hope other Thinkfinity facilitators will join me, I’d like to share one of my “Wow!” Thinkfinity sites.

To begin my search, I decided to pursue an interactive that matches this screenshot below:

As a writer, I’m always looking forward to sharing writing tools–interactives according to Thinkfinity–with those I work with a class of grade 3-5 students. Shape poetry is fun to do!

Shape poems, or poems that look like the things they describe, are a fun way to introduce children to poetry. In this activity from ReadWriteThink, everyone can be a poet using the online Shape Poems tool.

When you get to the resource, you’ll find some specific suggestions…here’s what that looks like:

You’ll find a link to the Shape Poem Tool. That will take you to something that looks like this:

There are a few steps to go through, but it’s clear that children are guided through the process of developing a Shape Poem. Some reminders from the lesson:

You can use the child’s senses to help come up with words. What does the object look like? What does it feel like? How does it sound? How does it smell?
It can be helpful to type in phrases if the child has come up with words that rhyme or start with the same letter to see how the words look on the same line.
You can type only 20 characters in each of the fields, so do not use words like a or the. You can use these words later in the poem itself if you choose.
If you run out of space but not ideas, use a piece of paper to write down extra words.
Source: Shape Poem

At the end of the process (gee, I’d forgotten how hard it is to write poetry), you can print something like this:

Or, what I think is really neat, maybe take it and drop it into a VoiceThread and have your kids read it aloud and then ask folks to give you comments…like this:

(I’m hosting my pictures via Skitch, but you could just upload the screenshot).

For fun, I took the picture generated by Read-Write-Think and dropped it into a new VoiceThread. Then, I recorded my poem and it looks like this…drop by and leave a comment!

And that’s it! A quick lesson combining ONE Thinkfinity Interactive–Shape Poems Maker–with VoiceThread.com to create an interactive poetry book. How would you revise this?

COSN Conference 2009

thinkfinitytexas — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:17:37 +0000

Marguerite Cahill and Miguel Guhlin are partnering on their proposal to present at the COSN Conference in 2009. Keep your fingers crossed that it is accepted!

1.	Title of Presentation: 5 Steps to Successful Professional Learning for Teachers
2.	Track/Subject Area (Select ONLY one): Content and Integration
3.	Identify which framework of CoSN’s Essential Skills this presentation/topic best relates to. Education and Training
4.	Short summary of presentation in narrative form. This summary should state what the audience will learn/benefit by attending the presentation (300 words or less): This presentation shares 5 strategies for enhancing the learning environment at both school and home for students, their parents, and teachers. Often, educators and students lack access to high quality online resources they can use. Thinkfinity.org–and affiliate organizations–provide no-cost, unlimited access to resources. Learn 5 ways on how you and your teachers can blend Thinkfinity resources to enhance teaching and learning at school and home.
5.	Provide 3 learning objectives for the presentation. Use verbs that are clearly behavioral and measurable, such as describe, discuss, explain and recite. Do not use terms, such as understand better or have a clear appreciation for: Participants will explore 5 professional learning strategies to ensure successful technology integration for teachers. Participants will discuss how Thinkfinity.org and specific interactives it offers can expand what teachers and students can do at no additional cost. Participants will learn how to blend high quality web-based resources with social bookmarking tools like Diigo and/or Del.icio.us.
6.	Provide a concise description/abstract of your proposed presentation in narrative form (450 words or less). Please, do not use bullets: Facilitating successful professional learning opportunities that result in transforming teaching and learning is difficult. In this session, the facilitators will share 5 research-derived strategies for structuring professional learning that is successful. The five strategies to be shared (adapted from the work of the TLT Group) are 1) Begin with a long-term focus on a few selected outcomes and the educational activities needed to improve them; 2) Choose technology that can contribute incrementally and cumulatively over time; 3) Emphasize forms of instructional material that most faculty members find quick and easy to create, adapt and share; 4) Track the progress of the strategy needed to stay on course; and 5) Tap into online learning communities to sustain professional learning. Recognizing that ensuring access to quality learning resources online is critical, as well as knowing how to interact with those resources, the facilitators will share Thinkfinity.com and how it can be utilized in a variety of learning settings, including small group, large group, and individual. Participants will also be introduced to social bookmarking tools–such as Delicious and Diigo–that enhance participants’ ability to organize online learning resources.

Slide Thinkfinity into the Curriculum with Diigo Slides

thinkfinitytexas — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:01:43 +0000

by Miguel Guhlin

Available: June 21, 2008

by Miguel Guhlin – mguhlin@gmail.com

DRAFT – STILL IN PROGRESS

New to Diigo? You might want to read this article introducing Diigo PRIOR to reading this one.’‘’

TexasThinkfinity

A Diigo group for sharing Thinkfinity Stuff!

Diigo Groups

Introduction

“Thinkfinity?” said one Gifted and Talented Coordinator as I stumbled over the term, “What’s that?” To be honest, I wasn’t sure myself. It has only been a few weeks since I first heard of Thinkfinity, a rich library of resources that teachers, students and after-school programs can use. I had stumbled across the Thinkfinity brochure, discovering that this was the next iteration of MarcoPolo. But, what a difference!

Thinkfinity boasts access to a host of 50,000+ educational cross-content lesson plans, interactive tools that work well for math, science, and literacy development at multiple grade levels. But what quickly becomes apparent is that there are so many awesome resources available via Thinkfinity that, well, you’re overwhelmed. As one of the participants in a June, 2008 Thinkfinity—facilitated by Karen Horn, Thinkfinity Certified Trainer—asked, is there one place in Thinkfinity that will organize my bookmarks and favorite resources?

The answer is, “No, not yet.” However, those who are using social bookmarking tools like Diigo.com don’t have to wait for added functionality. Instead, you can get your free Diigo.com account and get going bookmarking and tagging your favorite sites.

How can we organize those? Use Diigo, the social bookmarking and annotation tool, to help organize your bookmarks, and then use the slides feature of Diigo to present the web pages to students, colleagues and friends. This article addresses how to accomplish this and responds to these key questions:

What is Thinkfinity?
How can you use Diigo to store your favorite bookmarks, annotations (highlights and comments) for Thinkfinity?
How can you use the List and Slide features of Diigo to present Thinkfinity resources to others?
How can you enhance your Diigo Slide with audio?

WHAT IS THINKFINITY?

In June, 2008, I attended Thinkfinity training and decided that this is a tremendous resource! It is actually a collection of lesson plans, interactive web tools that allow you to manipulate numbers, images, data, and much more. Looking for interactive games that are age appropriate? Thinkfinity has them with appropriate lesson plans and web resources. Best of all, Thinkfinity has 4 portals—Educators, Parents, Students, and Afterschool—that allow easy access to select resources that are available at no cost.

The Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) has launched a Thinkfinity Partner Program to bring Thinkfinity to Texas schools. Are you interested in becoming a Thinkfinity Trainer? Find out more!

How can you track all Thinkfinity resources?

Using Diigo.com—read a description of this here—you are able to easily create lists of bookmarked resources and activities you want your students to use, or that you want to share with other educators.

For example, here is a list of Thinkfinity resources that I think are phenomenal for teaching poetry writing (although there is tons of stuff for math and science).

Bookmark, highlight key portions of the Thinkfinity resource pages, add comments to them sites and then share them via the Web. Instead of having to click your way—or having your students click—through multiple web pages, you can save instructional time by going directly using the Slides feature of Diigo.

How can you use the List and Slide features of Diigo to present Thinkfinity resources to others?

The List feature is described in this way by Diigo:

“List” is a great way to organize, share and display specific collections of bookmarks. Once you add bookmarks to your list, you can easily drag and drop items to arrange the order in any sequence that you’d like to present.

Best of all, once you create a list, when you click the button, you can browse, play and annotate any list of URLs as a slide show! It’s great for content browsing, sharing, and creating unique presentations based on web content.

Source: http://help.diigo.com/How-To_Guide/Lists

Once you’ve created your list in Diigo, you are actually able to add new bookmarks to your list, then turn that list into a slideshow. To begin, let’s follow these steps:

1. Create a list in Diigo.com.

2. Bookmark links to your Diigo.com and add to the list you’ve created.

and bookmarks show up in your My Bookmarks section of Diigo:

3. Go back to My Lists on Diigo and click on the Web Slides button

This Web Slide button appears on the MyLists page of your Diigo.com account and looks like this:

4. Once you do that, you’ll be able to play your Web page-based slide show using Diigo for your students and/or colleagues. To share your web slideshow, simply send them the web address that appears while viewing your WebSlide: http://slides.diigo.com/list/mguhlin/tpoetry

5. How can you enhance your Diigo Web Slide show with audio?

One of the aspects of Diigo Web Slides that is captivating is the fact you can add audio narration, or music, to your Web Slides show. Be sure to either Turn off auto play, unless you change the timings on each of your slides (they are set to 10 seconds each) or indicate in your audio narration when you are switching to the next slide in your web slide show.

Once you click on that button, you’ll see this screen:

Your next step is record the audio for your Diigo WebSlide…then upload it. When you click the UPLOAD button above, you’ll see this window pop up:

Note that at the time of this writing (June, 2008), Diigo WebSlides were still not working properly in adding audio. So, you may encounter some false starts depending on the web browser you use while uploading your MP3 audio file. If the audio does not work, try using a different browser (e.g. Opera instead of Firefox/Flock, or in lieu of Internet Explorer 6).

Sample WebSlides

Below are three examples of Diigo WebSlides I have created for use with Thinkfinity, a way of introducing Thinkfinity to folks in your school.

Example 1 – An Introduction to Thinkfinity’s Content Partners
Example 2 – Exploring the Thinkfinity Interactive Sites
Example 3 – Connecting with Others Using Thinkfinity

and, of course, there are other uses of Diigo WebSlides, such as this one for sixth grade from Alice Mercer.

To plan out my WebSlides above, I followed this process:

Wrote a short narrative for the introduction
Created a List in Diigo so that I could save my bookmarks to it while bookmarking the web pages I would use.
Actually Bookmarked the web pages that I would use, making sure to highlight and add comments about parts I wanted to call attention to, as well as check the box that said ADD TO LIST and choosing the list I wanted to save bookmarks to.
Recorded my audio using Audacity (free audio recorder that works on Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux computers)
Viewed the MyList page and clicked on WebSlides, then clicked on the preferences to upload my audio.
Adjusted the duration of the slides to match my narration.
Relaxed and enjoyed the audio narrated WebSlide.

Be sure to share your examples of educational Diigo WebSlides!

Conclusion

You can use the power of Diigo to quickly bookmark sites to a list of resources—such as from Thinkfinity—you want to share with your students or colleagues, then use those to create a slide show—with audio narration—of that content. And, the beauty of this is that you can easily use Thinkfinity for free and share it with others using Diigo.