Goodreads for book lovers

Just found Goodreads, and selected some of the books that I've read through the years, and wrote some reviews on a few of them. I also read some review from other members. It's pretty good stuff. Below is a review I wrote about a coaching book that I have read and re-read several times.

Coaching Team Basketball by Tom Crean

My review

  rating: 5 of 5 stars
I felt like I was a pretty good basketball coach before I read this book. However, this book completely changed the way I coach. Period.

If you have ever had poor team chemistry, selfish players, selfish parents, or a team that wasn't focused on a single goal, then read this book and do what it says.

Don't justify skipping over (not doing) some of the things in the book based on your own expertise. Institute every team component explained in the book. There are a couple of them that I wondered whether middle schoolers would buy into. But I figured, If I want my players to be coachable, then I should be coachable, too.

What I found was that middle schoolers need this stuff more than anyone (and high schoolers), because a vast majority of them don't know how to be a great teammate or how to be a positive verbal leader. Plus, they really like being on a team where everyone likes each other, works hard, and puts the team first--oh, and wins, too.

The players have bought in, they believe in the system, in each other, and in the direction we're going. I can tell you that you should do it all--every bit of it--as each piece complements the whole concept of team play. You'll be glad you invested the time and energy in a proactive manner to build your team.

View all my reviews.

Where's my Green Jacket?

Well, after completing my Master's Degree in Curriculum and Instruction last weekend, I am starting to get a little restless already. I really enjoyed my experience at Grand Canyon University, and I learned a ton about designing curriculum!

Animoto

Animoto is a very innovative website that allows users to upload photos and select music to create some eye candy slideshows. I can't profess to knowing the exact educational ramifications at this time, but it sure is fun!! Here is a slideshow of our dog, Zane, which I was able to post directly to YouTube and this site from Animoto.

Balanced Literacy

Balanced Literacy is the focus of our staff development this afternoon. To me, balanced literacy in my computer literacy allows students to utilize their literacy skills in a variety way through multiple media. I think it's important for my students to work in online environments as well as in more traditional environments, like word processing and localized documents.

Cross-curricular literacy characteristics, I believe, begin and end with critical thinking. Students need to be challenged to evaluate, synthesize, and analyze situations surrounding technology use. That means they need to read, write, and publish in computer literacy.

VoiceThread. The next big thing in collaborative education

VoiceThread lets users create online multimedia-rich presentations that other users can view, comment on, and even edit. I'll let the VoiceThread site itself give a more specific description of its features below...

"A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world."
--VoiceThread website, About Voicethread

At the bottom of this post is the example that I created on VoiceThread. It is the most powerful piece of multimedia that you will ever see in your life, so brace yourself.

Actually, it's just pictures, commentary, and text of our dog, Zane. But imagine if you used this in your classroom...Imagine what you could do with your content, front-loading background knowledge, questions and inference...

Since I don't have anyone to comment within the voicethread, it doesn't show the full spectrum of its instructional potential. Maybe you would like to comment within the voicethread itself. Feel free to do so if you desire.

To comment on the voicethread, you need to establish an account, which is free and easy. In fact, as a K-12 educator, you get a free version of their PRO Account which gives you unlimited everything (this is a good thing). All you have to do after you have established an account is to click on the GO PRO! account tab in the upper right corner of the page.

Anyhow, there are several tutorials available at the site to check out. There is even a Classroom category (top, middle of the home page) that addresses the educational uses that VoiceThread utilizes. They're definitely worth a look. I learned a lot from them.

So, here it is...

Snipshot: Great Photo Web-Editor

Snipshot is a simple, but great, web-based photo editor. It has basic tools like resize, crop, rotate, enhance, and adjust (saturation, sharpness, etc.). It also has a Firefox Add-on. Best of all, there's no registration.

It receives the prestigious 0 Manuals (the lower, the better) on our DUH! Scale.

Viva Basecamp!

I've been slowly (no kidding, really?) integrating Basecamp into my Computer Literacy classes to build an online learning environment for my students. I believe it's important to give them exposure to how instruction can be delivered in an online environment because it's only going to become more prevalent in the coming years. Soon, I'm going to do a full review of the the project management tool (still free for teachers! I think.) and lend some insight as to how I'm using Basecamp in my instruction. I'll include the set-up and infrastructure of how I use the many features offered by Basecamp.