Technology Tips for the Classroom

If you're like me, you're torn when it comes to taking summer staff development classes.  On the one hand you could learn more and grow yourself as a teacher, thereby benefiting your students.  On the other hand it's summer!  You're on vacation!  Now come clean . . . sometimes we're more inclined to say yes to summer staff development when a stipend is involved.  But what about when there is no stipend?  Do you take it anyways?

Today was my 1st day of 2 in a technology staff development aimed at preparing our school cluster for the technology we are about to pilot.  Technology is a big push, and this new system is supposed to be all encompassing.  While quite a bit of today wasn't a big revelation (or anything new) for my friends and myself since we're already big on technology, I did get some great new websites!  Lucky for you I'm going to share some of them with you (without you having to sit through 2 days worth of sessions)!

Here's the 1st technology tip I'm going to share with you:

The following 2 websites can be used for the same purpose.

As a 1st grade teacher I find it hard to get all my students on the same webpage in a timely manner.  It's not always possible to go into the computer lab and load every computer with the same website you intend to use with the students.  It's also very time consuming.  (Trust me!  I've done this!)  While bookmarking the pages can help, you still have to bookmark the page on every computer and then walk the students through the process of finding the bookmark when it's time to use it!  That's where these 2 sites come in handy!  They are:

www.tinyurl.com

and

www.linkyy.com

You can use either site to take a long url and shorten it to something much easier and/or more memorable!

For example:

Here is an online magnet experiment I like to use with my students from the bbc website.

Notice the long url. (Not the longest, but still pretty long for a 1st grader!  Plenty of room for mistake.)

Copy the url, go to either website, and paste it into the text box provided.

Click the shorten url button, and it will shorten it for you.  Click the "Show advanced options" text below and you can specify the rest of the url after the "http://linkyy.com/" or "http://tinyurl.com/" address.  In my example I ended the url with "magnets1".  In my classroom I would probably use my name since they will either remember the spelling or the spelling would be easily accessible.

Once this new, shortened url is used it will take your students directly to the intended website.  You now have a new, shorter, and permanent url to use!

My suggestion - keep a list of all the shortened urls you've made.

OR do as one of my presenters did - create a website with a list of the hyperlinks you will be using so that you will only have to create one shortened, memorable url!  (I may just do this and create the url "http://linkyy.com/wilcox"!