Waffle Bytes

MDE in collaboration with MeL has put together some sample activities to "encourage reading month activities that go beyond reading contests and encourages purposeful reading for all Michiganders."  Check out this site which has some sample activities that tie into Michigan Electronic Library databases - resources that available for FREE to all Michigan educators and students.

Being public supported, PBS provides many videos that are available for teachers to use in their classrooms. But did you know some of their series provides teaching resources free for your use?  Check out the series Nature .  If you go to the Classroom section, they have provided video clips from episodes, along with teaching resources and relationship to educational standards.  Notice on the example below they list the grade levels that the resource is appropriate for along with the permitted use of the materials - A great free resource to bring in actual video related to your teaching!

One of my favorite template pages provided on Google Sites is the File Cabinet.  This type of page allows you to share a plethora of resources in a nice organized way. To add a File cabinet page, first click on the icon to add a new page to your site - To create the new page, you will give it a name and set its location in your site hierarchy - in addition, you will need to change the template to use to File cabinet - This will create a page that looks like this - note the icons across the top for page editors & owners - You can add resources in various ways.  One is by adding a file.  Selecting that option will bring up a file selection window (similar to how you attach files elsewhere) -  Another is by adding a link with the URL - Another is by adding a file that is in your Google Drive - As you add items, they will display on your page.  If you want to organize them, you can create folders to sort the files in - Once the fold...

#CISD Inspire Workshops on Relevant topics that involve Education & Technology Our next #CISD Inspire workshop will be May 19 on the topic of educational records.   This workshop will focus on many aspects of educational records - what they are, the laws about them, and protection & retention practices.  One portion of the workshop will be a refresher on FERPA.  We encourage REMC12E districts to send a team to this workshop as this topic impacts so many district roles. For more information, please refer to this flyer .  This workshop is free for educators from REMC12E School Districts (in Branch and Calhoun counties).

Whenever you are working with a website, there is definitely a better way to make formatting changes that involve fonts & colors.  And this way does NOT involve using the little icons on the formatting toolbar - which is the obvious way since it is there visible when you are editing your pages! The proper way is to make those changes so they will set them for the entire site.  With Google Sites, it means making them in the Manage Site area.  When in the Manage Site screen, in the menu on the left is the option Themes, Colors and Fonts - this is what you want to select. Once there, you will see the following: Here's what all these areas are: Theme - you can see which theme you currently have selected, and change to another theme Page Areas - you can select which area of the page you would like to modify Page Parts - this list the various parts/options that can be changed Format - this shows the formatting that you can modify Preview - a preview windo...

In a prior post (from 2 years ago!), I shared how you can add an event to your calendar from email . Today I noticed a nifty little change in a calendar event that I had added this way.  It now has a Source link that links back to the the originating email the date was in.  I don't know how long it has been there, but it sure is a nice piece of information to have!

Recently I was looking for a way to schedule tweets for my work Twitter account without using an application (such as TweetDeck).  I was on a device that was not my own, and had a need for this.  Enter twuffer - I stumbled across this (ok - really got it as a result of a Google search), and after exploring it found it to be the near-perfect tool for the job. To use twuffer , you first need to sign in using your Twitter account - if you are already logged into Twitter, simply clicking on the box will do it as it uses Twitter's API Then you need to authorize twuffer for use with your Twitter account- The first time you authorized it, you will need to establish 1 setting - your timezone.  That's it for setup!  It is now ready to use.  Just 1. enter your tweet, 2. set the date you want it to go out, 3. set the time, and 4. click Schedule Tweet.  That's it! It keeps a nice list of scheduled tweets, set tweets and failed tweets you can refer...