Google Apps Education Certified Trainer
Today I received the e-mail that I was accepted as a Google Apps Certified Trainer. 
The qualifications to earn this certification are:
- Receive a passing score (80 or above) on 6, 90 minute Google Apps exams
- Complete the online application including a 2 minute video
- Demonstrate a proven background in professional development or technology training
- Demonstrate areas of expertise in educational technology
The requirements for maintaining certification include:
- Acting on behalf of Google
- Log training events (3/quarter) – attendance, topics, dates
- Stay up to date with all the latest features/releases
- Participate in the community
- Contribute resources
- Maintain qualification (additional exams)
I’m excited to bring this to the Center and to New Jersey. I hope that being connected to this new community of learners will give me new ideas, inspire me to stay current, and open the door to additional collaborations.
Become an Apps Certified Trainer by visiting the Training Center.
A Non-Techie Resource: Bucket Fillers
If you Google “Bucket Fillers”, as I did when my 2nd grader came home talking about it last fall, the first link that you will most likely click on will be the Bucket Fillers 101 site. It was here that I first read about the book by Carol McCloud and learned that this was about spreading love and good feelings towards others. For my daughter, at first, it was also about boosting her self esteem. She was coming home with little slips of paper (from her bucket) that said she was a good reader, that someone liked her shirt, that she had a nice smile. This did amazing things for her social well being as she was the new kid in her class and feeling very shy.
I asked Emma’s teacher if we could work on a project together documenting how the students used the buckets. The students would write the script for an Animoto, I would take the pictures, but they would creatively design poses that didn’t include any faces as we wanted to be able to share the video on YouTube.
This did amazing things for her social well being as she was the new kid in her class and feeling very shy.
In the meantime, I came to find that Bucket Filling was not such a unique concept. I heard Lisa Parisi and Maria Knee talking about it on Conversations. I saw that Scholastic had a post about it. I even found that countless educators had posted their lessons plans and resources using buckets in their classrooms.
So Mrs. Skaar from Evergreen Elementary School in Scotch Plains and I forged ahead. We set aside two blocks of time that I would work in the classroom with the students. She work ahead of time with them writing the script and then her student teacher and I helped them type everything into the computer. (They only had one computer in the classroom, so between my laptop and that one, we typed as fast as we could.)
You might ask why all of this?
I wanted to make sure that my daughter always remembered the lessons she learned in Mrs. Skaar’s class about being a Bucket Filler and not a Bucket Dipper. I saw the impact that it had on her and I wanted to create the video with the students so that they could look back and remember how it felt to read the little slips of paper. I also wanted them to share the experience with their families, so Mrs. Skaar sent the link to the Animoto to all the parents after we were finished.
Lastly, I encouraged Mrs. Skaar to share the project with her peers and I hoped that the video would encourage other teachers in the district to adopt Bucket Filling, or something similar, in their classrooms. Many of the students in the class expressed an interest in continuing with the program the next year, and I certainly could imagine both my children benefiting from boosts in self esteem and lessons in non-bullying behavior. Please watch their video and consider looking into their program if you don’t already do something similar with your students.
What My Droid Does – Part 7
There have been two things that I have wanted my Droid to be able to do in the last month or so that it hasn’t been able to. It’s not really my Droid though. See the cases in point:
- ISTE released an app for the iPhone. As I went to the conference this year, I would have liked an app for my Android phone as well. I made due with the mobile app, but I am hoping that next year they play “equal time” as my grandfather used to call it.
- I want to be able to tether my Droid to my iPad as I do to my laptop and my netbook for Internet access where there is no wifi. It’s physically impossible as there is no connection that will run from a Droid to an iPad. But I did see while I was at ISTE a link to this resource go by in the Twitter stream. I re-Tweeted How to: WiFi Tether a Motorola Droid to an iPad and was asked by Chris Craft whether I was willing to root my phone. I’ve read up on Rooting quite a bit and have not yet taken the plunge. When and if I do decide to root my Droid, I will then be able to use it as wifi for my iPad.
I looked back at the previous six posts I have written about what my Droid does for me and I have some updates to make on a few of the apps.
First of all, there are so many apps for Twitter. Find one you like and be happy. I have been happy since they updated the Twitter for Android app and then I found TweetCaster.
In addition to the standard Twitter functions, TweetCaster features:
- Multiple Twitter account support
- Integrated retweets
- Integrated Twitter lists
- Notifications
- Offline tweet caching
- URL shortening (and previews)
- Photo attachment
- Threaded direct messages
- Font/Theme customization
- Landscape support
- Profile editing
- Tweet filtering
WordPress for Android
WordPress for Android made some major updates to their app earlier this month.
With the recent version 1.3 you can now:
- see your page views
- see your post views
- see your referrers
- check out your search terms
- and view your number of clicks
I have also been happy that I can now moderate multiple comments at once using their new “bulk edit” feature
and should I choose to post from my phone, I can really format my text using their visual editor.
QR Code for Open Spot
There are a few new things that I wanted to mention.
Open Spot – http://openspot.googlelabs.com/
So over time, the concept behind Open Spot is pretty cool. To save time, gas, and to reduce pollution, Google released this app to help users find open parking spaces easily.
It will only find the open spaces of Open Spot users, so until lots of people are using it, the app is not going to be effective, but to make it work, all you so it place a pin on a map within the Android app to share the space you are abandoning. The pins are left color coded as empty to fellow users for 20 minutes until they expire.
Source http://www.slashgear.com
I installed Barnes and Noble’s new Nook app for the Droid today. I received an e-mail from B&N yesterday and was easily able to browse for it in the Android Market and download and install the free app. Once launched, I logged in using the B&N credentials I signed up with for my free iPad books (but that expired a while ago) and there they were on my Droid. Awesome.
I’m waiting for Android 2.2
I’m talking about Froyo – the next update to the Android operating system. If you have one of the newer Droids, you already have it. I have one of the older ones (I bought it waaaaaay back in November 2009) so I have to wait until Verizon pushes the update down to me. I’ll be writing about that and my top 10 apps as well as my experience using my Droid in the UK in my next post.
Reinventing Yourself
Would you want to?
If you could stay exactly who you are in the physical world, but reinvent your digital identity, would you?
- What would I do if I could go to a new school and reinvent myself?
- Would I erase everything from the Cloud?
- Would I include pictures of my children, family and friends online?
- Would I share all of my lessons, presentations and my blog?
BLC10 25 Ed Tech Leaders To Follow
Whether your PLN is overflowing or just starting to grow, this list may help you to refine your network to best suit your learning needs. Today I will be sharing the slidedeck with some folks at BLC10.
These leaders will challenge your assumptions, answer your questions and make you think. If you are not sure where to look for the right people, or you just want to learn about some fresh voices. These ed-tech leaders write blogs, maintain wikis, UStream their keynotes and publish their podcasts. You can find them all over the cloud. (This list will not include any of the presenters at BLC10 as attendees can meet them face-to-face.)
Flickr/lthumann
Facebook/Lisa G Thumann
Linkedin/LisaThumann
Twitter/lthumann
YouTube/lisathumann
Delicious/lthumann
GMail/lisa.thumann
