Best Apps for Setting Goals in the New Year

It's a new year full of new resolutions. Now, we all know the likelihood of keeping New Year Resolutions are slight at best, unless we have a strategy in place to attain our goals. Here are some of our tried and true mobile apps that will get you there.

Change Your Life with Habit Maker Habit Breaker

Habits are at first cobwebs, and then cables. -Spanish Proverb
This handy app helps you track your progress towards making changes in your daily habits. Like they say, you are the sum of your habits, and habits are created by doing small things over and over. The process here is simple.
1) define a target action you would like to become a habit
2) input how often you want to perform the action per day, week, or month
3) begin tracking!
The app also allows you to track your success at breaking habits. The process here is similar.
1) define a target habit you would like to break
2) decide your target frequency (you can ween yourself off of the habit gradually, i.e. from five times a week to three, to two and eventually none)
3) begin tracking!
You can track up to three habits in the free version, and allows access to many different app features, such as notifications, level of mastery, and rewards tracking to name a few. It takes 60 days to make a habit stick, download this application to help you get there!


Get Your Workout on with My Fitness Pal

This lovely app is designed to help you reach your fitness goals. It easily allows you to create goals for yourself, and track your progress towards those goals. With My Fitness Pal you can also connect to a network of friends and family who are also using the application. Your home screen lets you share your progress and your success with your 'pals', and also helps motivate you to continue working towards your goals.

What is wonderful about the tracking process is the sheer number of options available to accurately track your nutrition and calorie intake. Options include products from Trader Joe's to ethnic dishes that make this application quick and easy to use. 
You can track your progress on your handheld, or online. Highly recommended, and app that does the job.


Balance Your Budget with Mint.com

Mint is an application that provides a way for you to create savings goals, budget your expenses, and streamline your investments in one place. By connecting to your online accounts, Mint also automatically updates all of your activity, balances, deposits, and changes to your accounts. It provides a real-time snapshot of your financial standing at any given time.
A handy feature is the hints and tips Mint provides. The financial advice is catered to your financial profile, and alerts you to low interest options, or investments that would improve your progress towards your goals and help you save money.
It takes a bit of a time investment to set up (at least a couple of hours) but the clarity that results from using this application is well worth the effort. Just like My Fitness Pal, Mint is available for your handheld and desktop or laptop.
For more information, here's an in-depth review of Mint.

Integrating Google Docs

One of the best uses for google docs is the ability for teachers to view and comment on documents in real time. It allows teachers to easily see what students are accomplishing during class time, and also provides instant feedback to improve student writing.

Examples from a co-taught class of struggling readers. To provide efficient feedback during class time, as well as monitor student progress, my co-teacher and I will split up the class, and work with them in circle 'teams'. 

When students work on assignments outside of class, they can alert you via email when they've made changes. Students also receive alerts when teachers make comments on their documents outside of class. Students love it when they catch you on their documents outside of class time!

You can ask students to print out the document and hand in a paper copy, or, grade the document directly online, which is my preference for a few different reasons. I can provide more valuable feedback with much more information if I am typing out my response to their writing. I remember my junior year in high school, my English teacher used to type out his feedback for all his students, then cut them into strips and staple it to our papers. In the current digital age, we can take advantage of technology's ability to streamline our housekeeping  tasks.

Another compelling reason is that students can choose to continue to revise their work to improve their grade. When students finish activities, they can work on revising these assignments. Students' writing benefits from this process, and it is a meaningful use of time. After students complete another level of revision, they send an email alert, and continue the dialogue about the topic and their writing.

As with any other classroom activity, it can be time consuming without efficient protocols and implementation strategies. Here are some hints and tips for how I streamline this process in my classroom.

1. At the beginning of the year I create folders for each class. When I assign an essay or other activity that I want students to complete using google docs, I create sub folders for those assignments, and drag student documents into the folder as I receive them.

2. Since students will be sharing their documents via email, I post my email address in the classroom so students have easy access to that information. I also post my email address on my class website so that students can copy and paste my email address rather than having to copy it by hand. This works well for my students with disabilities who may have problems typing in all the characters correctly.

3. When I grade assignments I post the grade in the title of the document. When it comes time to input grades I don't have to open up the document in order to access the grade.

Please share your experiences with google docs in your classrooms, any tips to add or questions to ask!

Digital Literacy: Researching Using Evernote on the WWW

Yesterday, I did an overview of Evernote with my students and had them set up accounts. Today, I will be rolling out the first step in researching the WWW using a bookmarking and sharing (cloud-like) tool called Evernote.

I discovered Evernote along with other bookmarking type of applications a few months ago while shopping for productivity applications on my Galaxy Tab. I found two that I loved, Evernote and Spring Pad. Both store your information virtually so you can access it anywhere you have an internet connection.   That is the most important component to me because it enables freedom. Freedom of movement and ease of access. I use both applications for different reasons. I store most of my personal notes on Spring Pad, especially on lifestyle type of topics such as restaurants, recipes, books I want to read, movies I want to see etc. For research that involves work related topics, I use Evernote. The reason why is the visual layout of the Evernote window once I log in. Here is a sample of my homepage on Evernote.

The topic that I am having my students research today is the history of the Taino's of Hispanola to prepare them for a lesson I found at Zinn Education called The People Vs. Columbus. Here is the description of the lesson on our classroom website: Using Evernote for Research. I will let you know how it goes :-).

Facebook Opens WIndows to the World

A few weeks ago I was browsing my Facebook page when I came across a post by commondreams.org on the case of Troy Davis along with a lesson plan exploring resources, both primary and secondary, regarding the case. For those that don't know, Troy Davis was executed on Death Row in Georgia 8 days ago from today. There was no physical evidence and considerable doubt with 7 out of 9 witness' recanting their testimonies.

When teaching about current events, my main goal is to have my students understand that they must derive their own conclusions based on what they learned in class. Their response to the lesson was inspiring. Not only were they engaged in the classroom (my history courses are designed to provide reading support to students, and one of the struggles is engagement and motivation) but they went home and did research on their own. They went home and talked about the case with their families and came back to the classroom with updates on what they heard about the case or what they read about the death penalty and lethal injection.

A big part of the lesson became an introduction into different uses for social media. There seems to be a fear in the world of education about Social Media, as is the case with most things new. I like to take the stand that we can teach our students how to navigate social media in a way that empowers them. In a class of Freshmen, only 2 students do not have a Facebook account, those that do have one engage with Facebook daily...often times on their phones throughout the school day.

What I show my students (incrementally and through example) is the types of information I find by following news pages, public figures and interest groups on Facebook. As a teacher, I often get very relevant news immediately without having to search in multiple locations. I can create a page for my different interests and follow other pages in the same category if I choose, and it all happens on one platform.

A student came to me with a letter she had typed out to Troy Davis' mother, it was thoughtfully written, formatted perfectly and she assured me she had spell checked the whole thing and edited it twice for mistakes. Because of Facebook I was able to deliver the lesson in a timely fashion, allowing my students to follow the case and come to their own conclusions about it, and address a social issue in a meaningful and authentic way. View the online lesson by clicking here.

Just Enough Tech

On the first day of school my true love gave to me...a tablet synced to my pc...

On the second day of school my true love gave to me...an ipad and an iphone...

On the third day of school, my true love gave to me...

Well, you get the picture...

An important question to ask yourself at the beginning of a school year is:

What devices and software will be most advantageous for my students to learn and use in the classroom, AND advantageous to me as a teacher in streamlining my classroom routines and helping me to manage paperwork and grading?

Sometimes technology can seem intimidating because there are so many software programs out there all geared for educators and the classroom. What I tell myself is that unless it is open source (free), I will not use it in my curriculum. Why? Because I want to use programs that are accessible to all of my students. If they are not accessible to my students, it is because it is technology that will assist me in enhancing the development of skills in my classroom such as clickers.

This week we rolled out our website: wemakinhistory.com, google apps, email and Voki .

Going Paperless: The Art of Letting Go

The days prior to the first institute day before students arrive are busy days. Teachers abound in the building, preparing for the first day of school. Most of the time is spent meeting with teams and planning the first few weeks of lessons, and the other 'most of the time' is spent getting our classrooms ready for the onslaught of teenage feet, teenage laughter, teenage everything.

I spent these days throwing all my paper into recycling bins.

I'm going paperless this year, and the clearing out process was slow going at times as I struggled to figure out if it would be 'useful to me to keep this'...the answer is 'no' the 'usefulness' of any item turns null and void when the energy it takes to keep it keeps you stagnant and growth challenged.

Are you having a hard time letting go? If so you can scan your papers that you are having a hard time letting go of, and put it all in a general folder. I use a scanning app on my android called Portable Scanner to create PDF versions of papers that I need to keep, and this just doesn't go for the classroom. I scan my important personal papers as well as I'm slowly transitioning to a paperless (and clutter-free) world. Try some different scanning apps on your smart phone, tablet or IPad. BUT don't forget to backup your materials either online or on a backup or thumb drive. My preference is to use my google documents. I simply scan and email the pdfs to myself and download them onto google docs. I will create a webinar on how to do this. Going paperless is freeing and make organization simple and easy. You will never lose another important document. Take the first step and clear out that clutter.

Starting the year in a Classy Tech Classroom

I've always been what you would call a tech geek. I love my gadgets, I love technology and the way it can be utilized to enhance the effectiveness of any endeavor...especially in a Classy Tech classroom. Just because you have technology, doesn't mean that it's Classy Tech. What I mean by that is that technology is at its best when it is integrated into a curriculum in a way that enhances and streamlines what you already have going within those four walls, and if you're lucky, some windows ;-).

Last year was what I would call my 'set up' year, during the course of the year I worked to outfit my classroom with: Mac and PC computers, student laptops, clickers, Smartboard and an extra printer. In addition I made myself familiar with a number of open source programs and applications that would be easily accessible to my students without costing an arm and a leg. In addition to exploring these applications and their uses here, I will also be logging my experiences as I turn my classroom into a Classy Tech classroom. A classroom that honors the direction our increasingly technology dependent world is headed, and is determined to keep up with the task given to us as educators: to prepare our students for the world.

I have been thinking of the Classy Tech skills that I want my students to have at the end of the year as they are leaving my History classroom. I narrowed it down to the following:

1. research using the Internet safely, knowledgeably and effectively
2. become familiar with the uses of social media in politics and society today while being able to consciously and appropriately communicate via social networks
3. understand the changing role of the media and the difference between traditional and new media forms
4. be able to navigate new platforms for digital expression independently
5. be able to use the Internet to gain and disseminate knowledge, ideas and perspectives
6. utilize technology as a tool to support their learning and education in and out of the classroom

Only six? Most of us who have begun to tackle number one understand how complex it is to teach students how to research using the Internet. In order to be able to do this research effectively students need to know how to:

1. Differentiate between the various roles that different media forms play from blogging, to newspaper sites
2. Know how to conduct an effective search on different search engines
3. Understand how to collect and organize the information they find
4. Navigate different websites for content
5. Cite sources correctly
6. Understand the different uses for the sources they found relevant to their topic.
7. Be able to read at a level that will allow them to access the literature found online, or how to find sources that they can access

Now of course, each one of these will have to be broken down into their respective parts. How to teach all of this to students at diverse skill-levels who learn at varying paces and possess different background knowledge and interests? How can a single teacher do all of that? Well...leverage technology of course ;-). So in addition to integrating technology into your classroom pedagogy, I will also be sharing ways to use technology to streamline your workload and use tech tools as that extra set of hands (or two) that we know we need, and also add those extra hours in the day that we've been begging for.

Interested in joining me? Stay tuned...

Miss Ess.

Classroom Website: www.wemakinhistory.com