VSTE

Virginia Society for Technology in Education

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Big Deal Book, October 15, 2015

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Big Deal Book

VSTE partners with Big Deal Media to bring you the best in online resources, grant and competition opportunities and more. In this edition, you can  Take the Design Challenge, Make a Game Out of Learning & More.

Here are just a few highlights from this edition. Click the link below to find lots more:

Tomorrow: Collaborate to Increase a Grant’s Impact

At 5 p.m. (ET) on October 20, 2015, the GetEdFunding community on edWeb.net will host a webinar titled “How to Multiply the Impact of Your Grant: Divide the Work By Collaborating with Other Institutions,” sponsored by CDW•G. In this webinar, two grant writers who have won major grants to help fund “big ideas” for their institutions will share what they learned in the process. Teachers, district administrators, university faculty, nonprofit leaders, and others interested in collaborating on grants will benefit from the ideas and strategies in this session. The webinar will offer ideas for collaborating with educators in other institutions or nonprofits to increase the impact of a grant. Participants’ questions will be answered during this live, interactive session, and the webinar will be recorded and archived in the GetEdFunding community for members to access after the event.

Bring 3D Printing into the Classroom

Can your school use a 3D printer? K–12 and higher education campuses have an opportunity to win a 3D printer and a $5,000 grant, thanks to a new contest sponsored by Stratasys in partnership with Campus Technology and THE Journal. Schools interested in participating must submit a 500-word essay outlining what a 3D printer would mean to their campuses.
Deadline: November 30, 2015

Zoom into Pivotal Moments in History

Zoom In! helps students learn US history while also strengthening their literacy skills. Zoom In! was developed by EDC in collaboration with history educators at the American Social History Project, literacy experts, and media designers. Zoom In! complements existing US history curricula and helps students build literacy and historical thinking skills by using primary and secondary sources.

Big Deal Book, October 15, 2015

We're archiving the newsletters here.

Connected Educator Month Webinars

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VSTE will be hosting three webinars for Connected Educator Month.  All of them will be held in our Adobe Connect meeting room: http://vste.adobeconnect.com/vstelive.

Wednesday, October 21, 7 PM: Learning and Making
Join Meg Swecker and Tina Coffey from Roanoke County to learn how they are implementing engineering and design through makerspaces.

Missed It? You can listen to the archived recording here.

Monday, October 26, 8 PM: Minecrafting History: Iterative learning, virtual environments and you
Join educators from The Madeira School as they share how Minecraft can be used as a meaningful tool for curriculum and student engagement in the history classroom. It will also discuss the importance of virtual environments, world building and citizenship as part of a social sciences course. There will be classroom examples, lesson artifacts and student observations regarding their experiences in-game to help demonstrate why the Minecraft enabled classroom offers a safe, iterative environment as well as meaningful learning experiences for students of all levels of digital literacy.

Missed It? You can listen to the archived recording here and view the interactive Sway presentation here.

Wednesday, October 28, 7 PM: Coding for Students and Teachers
Join Marnie Hawk from Loudoun County and Charles Hinsch from Virginia Beach as they talk about how they are implementing coding programs for students and teachers. Marnie will describe the C.A.M.S. pilot program at Blue Ridge Middle School while Charlie discusses his work with teaching programming to adults as part of professional development.

Missed it? You can listen to the archived recording here.

VE PLN, Monday, October 5, 2015, 8 PM

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October 5 at 8 PM EDT VSTE VE PLN will visit VIBE, Virtual Islands for Better Education, to see an archaeology simulation built by Nova Saunders. Nova would love to have teachers bring students to her sim. Come and see if this content is something you can use instructionally! VIBE is an Open Sim, not connected to Second Life.
To reach Nova's sim in VIBE, follow these directions:

Complete directions are here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bxo7jBzK1BkwYUtfRl9iQS1HSDA/edit
Stephen Gasior wrote these for a Virtual Pioneers tour a while back.

Basically, you download a viewer that can access Open Sims. Firestorm has one.  Singularity is also a possiblity.
http://www.firestormviewer.org/downloads/
http://www.singularityviewer.org/

Install and launch the viewer.
Next you click Grid Manager at the bottom of the viewer window.
Type http://nova.bio-se.info:9000 into the Login URL
Click Apply and OK.

You will be directed to a place to register for an account.
Create an account.
Once you get the notice that it is set up, fill in the login name and password at the bottom of the viewer and login.

You will rez, or spawn, in Nova's sim. You may appear to be a cloud, but we can help you get an avatar body once you are there.

Start early! This process may take a few minutes.

 

Big Deal Book, October 1, 2015

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Big Deal Book

VSTE partners with Big Deal Media to bring you the best in online resources, grant and competition opportunities and more. In this edition, you can 5Move with Music, Turn Thoughts into Images, Go Inside the Brain & More.

Here are just a few highlights from this edition. Click the link below to find lots more:

Fuel Young Minds

Educators can enter the CITGO Fueling Education contest offering teachers, student teachers, and PTA/PTO members the chance to win $1,000 in school supplies for their classrooms. Deadline October 18, 2015.

Enhance Students’ Literacy and Technology Skills

On Tuesday, October 6, 2015, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. (ET), the Shutterfly community on edWeb.net will host a free webinar titled “Creating Multimedia Stories for Learning.” In this webinar, participants will explore ways for students of all ages and content areas to easily create a storybook with text, photos, audio clips, and Doodle drawings using the free Shutterfly Photo Story app for the iPad.

Join a Giant Sing-Along

Performer and teaching artist Dave Ruch from Buffalo, New York, is going all out to put the fun in the fundamentals of online connection during Connected Educator Month. He is setting up a worldwide sing-along for elementary students at 1:15 p.m.(ET) on October 30. Zoom is hosting and donating bandwidth. The lighthearted event, named Largest Online Gathering of K–5 Classrooms (ever!), will last 15 to 20 minutes as Ruch performs songs and asks students from Los Angeles to Zimbabwe to move and participate with him.

Big Deal Book, October 1, 2015

We're archiving the newsletters here.

Big Deal Book, September 15, 2015

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Big Deal Book

VSTE partners with Big Deal Media to bring you the best in online resources, grant and competition opportunities and more. In this edition, you can Deepen Thinking, Engage in Debate, Experience Augmented Reality & More.

Here are just a few highlights from this edition. Click the link below to find lots more:

Connect and Debate Around the World

The Virtual Debate project began as a way to infuse technology into an authentic argumentative writing experience by giving students an audience. To get started with the Virtual Debate, students in two classes agree to engage with one another and select a topic based on their interests and passions. Past topics have included police presence in schools, competitive sports, and digital detox, to name a few.

Grow Students’ Thinking

To help teachers ask questions that encourage student reflection and higher-order thinking, TeachThought has created a list ofquestion stems appropriate for each of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. The question stems can be used for any content area or discipline.

Make Thinking Visible

To help preschoolers develop a flexible understanding of number, researchers at Stanford University’s AAALab createdCritter Corral, a freely available iPad app. The child’s goal is to help return a Wild West town to its former glory by helping the town’s businesses.

Big Deal Book, September 15, 2015

We're archiving the newsletters here.