Tammy's Technology Timesavers

Chelsie reporting here. My first session of the conference was with Tammy Worcester:

I actually had gone to some of her sessions last year in Portland and loved the bits and pieces of technology tips she shared.

You may just want to save a link to her main profile, but I am going to highlight the top five I liked from this session.

Tammy's Main Website

1. Vocaroo

I know we have garage band to record voices...but I thought this was a pretty neat free website to make audio files...and perhaps be friendly than garageband for its simplicity. This site allows you to record yourself for unlimited amount of time. You can then download it, email it to someone, or embed it into a blog.

An idea for use:

Have students record themselves reading. They can send an email/upload to a class blog and have their parents hear them. A cool way to link technology and reading--really would motivate students.

2. Evernote

This is a free website that allows you to make an account to store information. This information can be a website link, pictures, notes, a sound clip and more. The site also allows you to organize it and access it from another device that has internet.

An idea for use:

You run into someone that tells you that you should check out Johnnie's Math Page for great manipulatives for Smartboard use. You have no pen...but you do have a cell phone. If you are like me, there are high chances you forget the name of the site. Text the note to the site and bam--saved. I feel it is similar to Delicious but not limited to just websites.

3. Kick You Tube

This hasn't been a problem for us yet...but maybe someday it will be. Youtube is often blocked at school. There are times though, that you may find an awesome video to enrich a lesson you have for your class. This is a trick to help you take that video and download it to your computer as a file. You just find a video you want and then type the word "kick" before the words youtube in the web address and hit return.

Here is a video I a made to make it a bit more clear (I wanted to play with an free app called Jing for video/picture directions on computers):

Click Here for Example Video

4. Stop Watch

Just a neat free tool for having a stop watch or a count down.

I use the Smart Notebook tools normally for this, but if I had a web page up, I could quickly click on my book mark for this and start a count down for cleaning up the room.

5. Fur.ly

This is a free site that allows you to take multiple web pages and link them together. I have trained my first graders to get links off my Delicious account, but this makes it one step easier. For instance, I did a penguin research project (like a web quest) where students used different links to find out information. To go to the different links though, they had to keep going back to Delicious. I could just make one link on Delicious and then link the rest of the sites together. Here is an example I did of the websites I have given you in this blog:

Fur.ly

This picture below is a small screen shot of what it looks like. I realize you can't read the text, but the red arrows are where you can click to toggle between the linked-together webpages.

Hope you enjoyed. I know I did.

Signing off.

-Chelsie