ed-tech Archives - THOM GIBSON

03 Oct 2016

Visme – A New Presentation Software I Actually Like

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a company called Visme. They wanted to give me a premium account on their website and just asked if I could write about my experience with the platform. I said sure! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbtT2jcmQ1s Visme is a presentation tool that I think iss sheeker than Powerpoint or Google Slides. They offer slides but also templates to make banners on social media and infographics. So far, I've spent more time on the slides and infographic. THINGS I REALLY DUG: It's a super clean user interface for starters. Tools you need appear whenever you click…

12 Mar 2014

4 Tools To Organize Your Teaching LIfe

Here are 4 organizational tools that I’ve found super useful in the past year that perhaps you may find a use for in your classroom. Padlet WHAT PROBLEMS DOES IT SOLVE? I used to write instructions on the board, and in a pinch, I would open up Microsoft Word and type up the instructions for an assignment. When I was done, I never saved the Word files. A few days later, a student or parent would ask me to clarify some things on an assignment, and I would have to rehash it all out again. But not with Padlet! HOW…

08 Nov 2013

Ambiance, Decibels, and Dancing in The Classroom

Studying sound recording technology in college wasn’t necessarily the best preparation for an aspiring teacher, but I've tried to find ways to incorporate the things I learned and enjoyed from the world of sound engineering into education. Here’s three audio related tools and tips I’ve found helpful in my classroom. Bloom I enjoy having calming music playing during times of quiet or silent work, but I don’t like the idea of having only a couple CD’s or tracks of calming music. Playing them over and over gets old. I’ve tried online radio, but the advertisements that come up on Pandora,…

07 Aug 2013

How I Made A Database of Lesson Ideas With Evernote

I finally downloaded Evernote this past June. I knew it was an organization tool but I wasn't really sure exactly what it did. My goal was to try and solve a few problems I found myself running into as an educator. Resources Everywhere One issue I kept running into as a teacher was having resources all over the place. If I remembered that I saw a great idea for a geography lesson, I didn't remember if I pinned it on Pinterest, read it in an email, favorited it on Twitter, bookmarked the website, saw it on a worksheet, read it…

22 Jul 2013

Parent Communication Tech

When I received my teacher evaluation last year, one area that I didn't score as high as anticipated was in the area of parent communication, which sort of confused me. I had BCCed my AP each time I sent out an email to parents, which was fairly frequent. There was the sort of mini-newsletter each week discussing the things we were covering that week, there were the notifications about positive behavior I was seeing in some students, as well as the communiques about any inappropriate behavior that needed to be addressed. But through the midsts of all of that, there…