#EdcampHome Promo

On Saturday, July 20th from 12-3 pm EST, the very first EdcampHome will be held.  You DO NOT want to miss this FREE professional development event.

You can attend in your PJ's, bathing suit, or other attire via Google Hangouts and/or watching the live action on the EdcampHOME site. Everyone can participate via the backchannel following #EdcampHOME on Twitter.

For those of you not familiar with the Edcamp Foundation...

About the Edcamp Foundation 

The Edcamp Foundation is a Delaware non-profit, which was started to promote organic, participant-driven professional development for K-12 educators worldwide. The foundation’s mission is to support free edcamp unconferences for educators to exchange ideas and learn together. Edcamps offer educators the opportunity to share their experiences and their professional expertise in a collaborative, interactive learning environment. 

Edcamps are organized and attended by passionate, tech-savvy educators who are eager to explore, discover and share new teaching strategies, tools and education technologies. From eight Edcamps in year one, Edcamps now number over 200 a year, in cities all around the nation and the world. One of the staple features of an Edcamp is the “Web2.0 Smackdown,” a lightning round of resource sharing among attendees.

I've had the pleasure of attending EdcampNJ 2012 and attending/presenting at EdcampPhilly 2013. Tomorrow, for EdcampHOME, I'll be one of many to help moderate a session and get in on the action. Major accolades need to be given to the EdcampHome organizers, David Theriault, Kelly Kermode, Shawn White, and Karl Lindgren-Streicher for their forward thinking and innovative design. I'm awed by the work they've put into this so far.

From building the session board to the concluding smackdown, this organic "homemade" professional development is created by educators for educators. So set up camp, stoke your fire, and fill your cup for learning with EdcampHome.

Enough Time for Two

So it is summer time and I'm supposed to have lots of time to do lots of things: blog, write content, create presentations, read, catch up on laundry, organize closets, clean those not regularly cleaned areas, watch movies, go on vacation...   As I'm sure for many of us, there is struggle between devoting enough time to work, home, and self.  So rather than wallowing in not enough time (here's a conundrum: how can I wallow when there is no time to wallow?), here are two tools to help organize our time while on the computer--whether it be at home or work.

Task Timer

This nifty tool can be found in the Chrome Web Store and allows users to create a list of tasks with time goals in hours.  Create your list and set your time, then hit the icon to start recording the time spent completing the task.  For those of us who multi-task, multiple tasks can be timed at the same time (say that 10 times fast). Current features include task descriptions, progress bars, desktop notifications, pie charts, and CSV exporting. This tool could be used by teachers for in-class monitoring of time spent on aspects of a lesson as well as keeping track of how much time spent on housework at home. Just type in the task, click start, do what you have to do, then hit stop when done. By taking inventory of how long tasks take, we may find that certain tasks can be truncated to free up time for others.

Web Timer

Web Timer is aptly named for this Chrome extension keeps track of the time spent on the tab you are actively using. Features include a pie chart for visualizing data, stops counting if idle for more than 30 seconds, easily share stats with others. For time management, students and teachers could use this in class for keeping track of time spent on a particular website, and for those of you who are Pinners, this extension can track your time spent on Pinterest--although ignorance may be bliss in this case. Wanting to keep to a schedule while working online, this extension is very useful.

Out of Time 

While I would have liked to find and post more tools, I'm out of time! I only had 30 minutes to get a post out and both of these tools kept me to my schedule by allowing me to see how much time I wanted to spend and actually spent. Time to log off and get outside! 

Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.

Roger Babson

What are your favorite time management tips, apps, and extensions?

Edcanvas: The Art of Curating

One of my favorite tools for curating resources is Edcanvas. Over the summer, I've started creating "canvases" for each of the novels and topics I teach organizing links, documents, videos, and pictures as tiles on a grid.  Edcanvas has a very versatile free version and a paid version for collaboration and audio features. In addition, users can search the gallery for canvases created by others.

Blank Canvas

Edcanvas makes it ridiculously easy to find content by having search features as part of their interface, and by a simple click and drag, content is added to or moved around on the canvas.  The search features are easy to use for finding resources on the web, and with connections to Dropbox, Google Drive, Flickr, YouTube, Educreations, Gooru, adding your already created content to a canvas requires no artistic talent. Simple as finger painting!

Visual Appeal

As a visual learner and one who forgets I have things when they are put away out of sight,  Edcanvas is more appealing than LiveBinders for curation.  Choosing either color coding or plain black, each tile has a heading and brief description that is customizable.  Users can also choose from five layout templates for the canvas. While I can hide, I mean store, tons of content in the tabs of a LiveBinder, I think quality is more important than quantity in terms of how much I store. Canvases can be expanded and could have an infinite layout, but there isn't a need to go that big.  Items are embedded in the canvas and open when clicked on without having to go to a separate page. With YouTube videos automatically embedded, viewers can get away from the distractions and possible-inappropriateness in the YouTube comments. Each of my canvases are titled specifically for the content, and I like seeing everything cleanly laid out and can click on a tile to open.

Educational Uses

While I haven't used it yet since school is out of session, Edcanvas also has a quiz feature that can be added as a tile to each canvas.  I like the idea of using this as a formative assessment to check for understanding of the content.



Teachers can share resources or students could create projects on a topic. With multiple options for sharing via social media and QR codes and embedding in Edmodo and created webpages, Edcanvas is ideal for sharing with other educators and students in 1:1 and BYOD classrooms.

Sample Canvases

Demonstrating the options for sharing, take a look at three I've created... I got more in my gallery, and so will you, too. Once you start using Edcanvas, you will be an artist of visual curation!


Inspired by Romeo & Juliet


Odyssey Review

Reading Strategies

Edmodocon 2013

I am so thrilled to share this news!

My best buddy and partner in crime, Liz Calderwood, and I are presenting at Edmodocon 2013 this summer!  We are one of 15 presenters chosen for this global, virtual and free conference.

Our session is titled Classroom Gymnastics: How to Use Edmodo for BYOD, 1:1 (When you can be), Paperless, and Flipped Learning. I hope you will join us online on August 7th, 2013 and view all the presentations.

Registration is now OPEN, so please reserve your spot! Did I mention it is FREE????

THANKS!