Post #9 STARS • Common Core • Word Salad

I had the pleasure this last week to work with 4 great school assets that work with 4 of our Region IX Schools as STARS Coordinators!  They invited me to come work with them to share some technology tips on working smarter.  We followed an outline based on saving at least 1,000 mouse clicks over the next year.  Topics included were:  using the application switcher on PC or Mac, using highlight duplicates in Excel, use of sorting & subtotaling and count functions in Excel, then we moved on to fun things in email like accessing themes, using signatures & right sided chat.

My utmost respect goes out to these ladies for the job they do for their schools with highly important task.

1. Karen Seely - Corona STARS Coordinator (1 of many hats she wears)
2. Teresa Woodard - Capitan STARS Coordinator (1 of many hats she wears)
3. Kathy Saenz - Hondo STARS Coordinator (1 of many hats she wears)
4. Kathy Weinman - Ruidoso STARS Coordinator (1 of many hats she wears)

This weeks app of the week is very timely with Common Core on everyones mind these days:
Common Core Quest currently contains activities for every middle school and high school Common Core math and language arts standard. Coverage of elementary school standards is being added (currently about half of the standards are included). A student can invite his or her teacher to view the progress that he or she is making toward each goal in Common Core Quest. Students can invite teacher either by email or by class code if the teacher has created a class account on OpenEd.io.

Web Site of the week is a follow up from last week and Word Salad.   I had a lot of inquiries about Word Salad last week and if I knew of a alternative for people that didn't have an iPad.  This is a good free web based alternative: Wordle which can be accessed at http://www.wordle.net/

Here's a simple word salad to get you motivated. 

Post your comments or share you ideas - I'd love to share them as we move forward.

Post #8 - Academic Language

NM Teach places emphasis in Domain 1 element B states: The sequence of learning experiences is aligned to NM adopted standards, instructional learning targets and is differentiated by scaffolding content and academic language for diverse learners.
and again in element 1E: Teacher demonstrates solid knowledge of students’ backgrounds, cultures, skills, academic language development, interests, and special needs.

So this weeks App of the week addresses the ability to scaffold academic language as well as academic language development through a fun engaging app called Word Salad.

App of the week:  Word Salad
Ideas for use in the classroom:

• Create a topic in google docs or even on the white board in the room - have your students brain storm the topic with discussion either in the classroom or online.
• Create your vocabulary lists here through student collaboration in small workgroups.
• Create academic vocabulary clouds through reading activities to promote comprehension
• Assign individual student activity to capture important ideas from a video or a discussion.
• Create a class wide word cloud to capture class reactions to a topic or question
• Build individual word clouds to capture student definitions of a vocabulary word.
• Capture a student survey and display as a word cloud.
• Have whole class or small groups create word clouds to show class expectations
• Have a fun activity and do a collaborative project by using students first names.

Click here for a web resource with 170 different ways to use word clouds in your classroom:  Subject specific ideas as well.

My web resource of the week is a library of Creative Commons Images.  This is a fantastic site that allows you to cite reference graphic images and use them for no charge.  What a great way to teach students about appropriate use as well as a nice resource for a library of graphics.  Tie a graphic into your word salad and create a writing project with your students that they can visualize by using a quality image.
Click Here to access the library

Engage those young minds & empower your users this week

Do you have students in grades K-12?  Here's a great app to get your students started with Coding and not have to know anything about Coding to be effective.   Sign up with a free teacher account by visiting their website: http://www.kodable.com/  App is available in the Itunes store for free.
Visit their blog at  for some interesting ideas on using their App and allowing technology into the classroom.


This weeks Web Resource is a great tool for school administrators or staff that are involved in developing the schools authorized user policy (AUP) on how to convert it into a "Empowered User Policy" - If you're considering updating the schools AUP this is definitely worth a look:  Click Here 

Week 1 September 2014

Web site of the week is a great game show style quiz called kahoot.

Set up your free account today and get your students started now.  https://getkahoot.com/

App of the week: elements 4D

This amazing App allows you to combine 2 elements together and see how they react including the catalyst, resulting compound and chemical equation.  

You simply install the app - follow the link to a page to print the blocks from Daqri.com and use your ipad to see it all happen.

Have a great week, your comments about the websites and apps are appreciated