Podcast: Get the word out - netTrekker d.i.
We receive many requests from our customers for suggestions on how best to communicate the features of netTrekker d.i. to students, teachers and parents. Traditionally, schools and districts have used print and electronic media to get this information out. netTrekker d.i. provides an online tour and training videos, customizable parent letters and school newsletter articles, instructions on establishing netTrekker d.i. browser, desktop, and website links, and access to printable Quick Reference Guides, and Bookmarks.
One customer took this a step further and created a podcast to explain netTrekker d.i. and its benefits to its community of users. GrantWood Area Education Agency is one of 10 agencies established by the state of Iowa to work with the public and private schools districts to ensure all students reach their potential by providing resources, services, and educational programs. In the fall of 2008, Grant Wood AEA purchased a netTrekker d.i. subscription for the schools in its service area. This large subscription provided netTrekker d.i. access to over 180 schools and over 75,000 students and teachers. The implementation began with emails sent to the netTrekker administrators in each building to bring awareness and instructions on accessing netTrekker d.i. This was followed up by an onsite netTrekker d.i. Train the Trainer workshop attended by Grant Wood AEA staff and some district administrators. Finally, to help these individuals get the word out about netTrekker d.i. to this large community - a podcast was created.
The podcast was facilitated by Kay Rewarts, Grant Wood AEA consultant, as she asked the following questions of Marci Campbell, netTrekker d.i. Customer Support & Training Specialist.
- Explain what netTrekker d.i. is and it’s benefits to teachers
- How can netTrekker d.i. help teachers align their curriculum with 21st century learning skills?
- What are some of the advantages of netTrekker d.i. compared to some of your competitors?
- Can netTrekker d.i. be used by students and parents? How can parents use it effectively to reinforce learning at home?
TO HEAR MARCI’S ANSWERS … check out the netTrekker d.i. podcast!
What Are You Searching?
netTrekker d.i. just released the top searches this fall, sharing what our students are searching. Here’s a break down of the top 15 keyword searches:
- Dogs
- Games
- Barack Obama
- Animals
- Halloween
- Football
- Civil War
- Christopher Columbus
- John McCain
- Weather
- Frogs
- Plants
- Native Americans
- Cats
- Cells
I’m curious though, why search for dogs in school? How are you using games in the classroom, and how is netTrekker d.i. helping you find games? Football - does it have an academic search purpose? (I actually had a complete unit for geography and math using hockey, so I’m not knocking sports in the classroom. I just want to hear your responses on how football is used in the classroom.) Cats, those mysterious creatures, are also quite popular for keyword searches. Are they on the list for the same reason dogs are, or is there another reason cats appear on this list.
Please share your comments below on how you or your students are using these key words in their studies.
By the way, there were over 1,087,610 unique search terms for the fall quarter. That’s a lot of key words!
Register for NT101 Today!
We’ve had a great response to our last week’s December Did You Know? e-mail. 19 people have already pre-registered for our NT101 online course. We hope you will make plans now to join us for our first netTrekker d.i. online course on January 21st. Please read the information below.
…pre-registration is now open for the new NT101 online course that begins Jan 21st. Be sure to take advantage of $99 introductory pricing; regular price is $125.
- NT101 is a 20-hour online professional development course for educators. The format is designed for educators who are dedicated to understanding and incorporating netTrekker d.i.’s key features and functions into the context of teaching and learning. Participants will be guided to gain experience and build expertise using a variety of 21st Century learning resources, including Moodle, interactive tutorials, educational blogs, podcasts, electronic surveys, and other web tools. The course provides a collaborative online learning community promoting opportunities for interaction among participants and instructors as they explore netTrekker d.i. content and functionality.
- Upon completion, participants will receive a certificate for 20 contact hours.
- Pre-register now or contact your Customer Relationship Specialist at 877-517-1125 with questions.
Snowy Days
I found this picture in Pics4Learning, one of the websites we link to in the Reference Section.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a great snowfall, or had a white Christmas. I loved snow days growing up, building snowmen and igloos (which I really did try to sleep in one night), snow angels, sledding, snowball fights, and then the nice warm hot chocolate with marshmallows overflowing. Those were the best days!
Living in coastal Florida, I don’t believe I’ll be seeing a lot of snow anytime soon. I haven’t had much luck in making it to a snowy place either. Every time I get there, the snow melts and starts back up when I leave. But snowflakes can still be apart of my life, and classroom lessons, this season. With netTrekker d.i., snow can “warmly” be part of your sponge activities and lessons for the remaining few days before winter break. Let me share with you my discoveries.
I started my search in Elementary and decided to look up “snowman” and refined my search for interactive media. It took me some time to get back to this post as I practiced my mouse skills while building a snowman. Next, I searched Middle School for “snowflake” and then used the refinement menu to narrow my search for interactive games. There are two websites which help you to create your own snowflakes, without any of the cold. My last stop was high school, where I did a search for snow. Again, my trusty refinement menu came in handy as I narrowed my searches down by subject. I used Language Arts and Writing and Grammar as my refinement selection and found a lesson plan from the New York Times for students to write riddles about their favorite season. I tried my hand at a few, then went back to the snowflake site to illustrate.
Did you do a winter search in netTrekker d.i.? Care to share with us one of your great finds and how you plan to use those sites in your classroom? Just leave a comment below!
(Image citation: Irish, kelley. dsc00265.jpg. 2008. Pics4Learning. 15 Dec 2008 http://pics.tech4learning.com)
Research Review
We’ve been noticing great postings out there about netTrekker d.i. on various blogs. I’ve done a little digging on some recent postings and it looks like the blogs are coming from students at La Conner School District in Washington State. I have yet located the teacher’s blog with the assignment, but the students have done a fantastic job of detailing their research results and strategies.
Here are a few of the links for you to check out:
• http://fohnjared.blogspot.com/
• http://zoriak.blogspot.com/
• http://classworklc.blogspot.com/
• http://guitarhero2012.blogspot.com/
I love how these students took to the time to compare and contrast the features of netTrekker d.i. and Google. We know Google is a great search engine, but when you’re working in a school setting, time is of the essence, and you need to reach students with different needs. netTrekker d.i. clearly triumphs according to these students! They mention the readability, the dictionary hot key, and the website ratings. Here’s a quote from the first blog:
“I think that Nettrekker is the better search engine over Google. Google might come up with more results but Nettrekker is better because it helps you narrow your results and it gives you ratings which help you to find better sites faster. Nettrekker was the site that returned more relevant information to me than Google did. Nettrekker is way easier to use because you are in a more refined site and you aren’t out on the World Wide Web. I tried all the things suggested like the dictionary and the subject headings and they prove that Nettrekker is better than Google because it helps you to refine your research and find more relevant information.”
What a great quote, especially from a student!
Edit the description of a website to keep notes for research projects.
My Portfolio within netTrekker d.i. provides a great way to record your research information. Remember those index cards that we all used for each resource with the details from each periodical, including notes to use in our paper? I always lost mine. With netTrekker d.i., if you find a website that you want to use as a resource, you can save it to My Portfolio. The default setting includes the date you saved the search. You’ll now have this information for your bibliography. Then once in the My Portfolio area, you can edit each website and change the description with your notes. (This description will only be seen by you.) You can also add a template and add all sorts of information there, including a note to yourself of what type of information you are still looking for, printed resource information you are using such as a journal or periodical, or even a rough draft of your paper.
Look for our upcoming series, 5 Days of My Portfolio in January. This blog collection will definitely be of use to the teachers creating project based learning units and to students conducting research.
And to the teacher of these fine students, thank you! Keep up the great work. If you don’t mind, I’d love to interview you for a future blog on how you are using netTrekker d.i. Please e-mail me your contact information.
If you are using netTrekker d.i. with your students, leave a comment below telling us how.
Time for a Theme
‘Tis the time of year where kids are getting excited about the holidays, whether it’s because they believe in Santa, are expecting gifts, or just because they will enjoy two weeks off from school. I remember my days in the classroom of planning lessons around the theme of the winter holidays to keep my students interested and on task. netTrekker d.i. has some wonderful resources if you are planning lessons for this multicultural season.
netTrekker d.i. Elementary Theme Search
We’ll start our exploration in the Elementary Tab. How many of you knew that you could do a search by theme in netTrekker d.i.? If you scroll to the bottom of the Elementary page, there is a section to either type in a keyword or to browse themes. With over 100 themes, we’re sure to have a topic for you. If you have a multi-cultural classroom, or are teaching on a multi-cultural theme, you can find resources on Hanukah, Kwanza, and Christmas. There are other holidays to explore too, for later.
Mutlicultural Pavillion in ELL Channel
When I taught middle school, I used the holidays to teach technology skills. We created spreadsheets on how to celebrate the three major winter holidays, a team PowerPoint on a selected holiday, and other computer activities centered around the holidays. We even divided Christmas up with regions because Christmas is celebrated different all over the world, and within our own country. With netTrekker d.i., your students can click on the ELL Channel and explore the holidays in the Multicultural area. This is a perfect starting place.
Happy holidays, and may this season of cultural celebration exploration be even more engaging and enlightening with netTrekker d.i. Share with us how you plan to teach with the holiday season by leaving a comment below.
A Byte of News
Did you know that netTrekker d.i. publishes a newsletter every two months with great articles about how to use netTrekker d.i., implementation tips, and news from our partners? If you haven’t already, you can subscribe here.
Our last newsletter was published and sent out earlier this month. You can check the archives for any newsletter you missed.
Yes, or no, to Wikipedia
During our implementation calls, the Customer Relationship Specialists cover the Admin Tools, including the netTrekker d.i. settings. Here the administrator can block the 1200 plus Wikipedia resources from showing up in the search results. On one of my calls yesterday, the district administrator asked me why netTrekker d.i. included Wikipedia in the first place.
That’s a great 21st Century question! Recently I attended a session on Literacy and Learning in the 21st Century presented by David Warlick. He addressed the use of Wikipedia in schools. He pointed out how Capital Hill aides were busy mutilating opponent articles in the days leading up to the 2006 election and how articles now have warnings of potential inaccuracy. He then said he’ll just go back to the good old days of “accurate textbooks”, but then pointed out that not all textbooks are accurate or unbiased and can quickly become out of date. Using Wikipedia is more than teaching fact and opinion. This resource serves as a working skill of evaluating a source and validating the information found on those pages. (This is my summarized understanding from what I learned attending this session.) You can find a copy of David Warlick’s presentation in podcast form from GAETC here. http://podcast.ksuettc.org/
This morning on Twitter I found another great blog entry on the use of Wikipedia at Dangerously Irrelevant. Check it out if you have time. The blog is written by Dr. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University.
So while Wikipedia is a great 21st Century resource, we also understand that many schools are reluctant to allow students to have access, and netTrekker d.i. respects that decision. That’s why we give our subscribers two ways to filter out the search results. The first one is through the Advanced Search Options and the second one is by having the ADMIN setting this filter for the school level. To learn more about Wikipedia in netTrekker d.i., check out our HELP section.
And if you do choose to use a Wikipedia article in a project, consider adding the Digital Literacy Template that is wonderful for getting students to learn how to evaluate a source before using it. It’s perfect not only for Wikipedia entries, but all websites.
How many of you use Wikipedia in your classrooms? If you don’t mind, leave a comment below on how you use it.
Layering Time
High School Globalization netTrekker d.i. Timeline
I just got off the phone with a teacher in Georgia. She’s a science teacher that attended GAETC last week, and when she stopped by the booth, we played around with the Timeline Feature in netTrekker d.i. She didn’t realize that the timeline feature could do layers and was simply amazed. So at 7:30 this morning she called to go through the steps again and make sure she had all the facts.
She’s a high school teacher, so we started by going to the high school tab and clicking on the Timeline link found in the Features box on the right. We decided to use the World History timeline as our base and then selected the Globalization Era (eras are found in the black section) by clicking on the timeline icon next to the era. This pulled up the major general events, art related events, discoveries and innovations, and famous people who lived during this time period.
Next we went to the layering option, found in the right hand corner. You can add up to five layers to a timeline, and the topics range from science to art to literature. Each layer will have a different icon, as identified in the legend. You can collapse or expand sections by clicking on the up and down triangles and save the timeline for students to use in projects. Students love making connections on how one event or discovery might have influenced another.
I can learn more about Seaborgium, a discovery during this time frame for chemistry, by clicking on the
Innovations and Discoveries during the Globalization Era
link in this Timeline. And trust me, I know nothing of Seabogium, so those eleven resources have a lot to teach me!
How do you use the Timeline Feature in your classroom? Share your ideas in the comment box below.
Look Who’s Talking
Georgia is one of three states that earned an A on their technology report card, and after attending some of the great sessions here at GAETC, I can see why! The last session I attended yesterday was by Tony Vincent (who’s not from GA, but definitely an “A” presenter). His “Ten Tools For Teachers” was fun and engaging. I was itching to get back to the hotel to play with one of the tools he showcased, Gizmoz.
I finally got to it this morning. Gizmoz is a tool that lets you animate yourself, or other images. I decided to do a Famous Person Search in netTrekker d.i. for famous males from the 18th Century, that were politicians and American. My results had 127 people and so I selected the most famous, George Washington. I used a Weekly Reader resource to learn more about our first president and then wrote a simple “who am I” type script. I found an image that used as much of Washington’s face in our image search and then headed over to Gizmoz. I loaded the image, added my text, selected a background, and then rendered the video by clicking save. Click here to see my example.
Give Gizmoz a try and let us know how you’re using it!
Danielle Abernethy
Customer Relationship and Training Specialist
Educator Blog Roll
- Backroom Educational Technology by Michelle Morely
- Cliotech, by Jennifer Dorman
- Educational Technology by Palm Beach
- Geeky Momma, by Lee Kolbert
- Moving at the Speed of Creativity, by Wes Fryer
- NCS-Tech! by Kevin Jarrett
- Randomly Speaking, by John Lien
- Southgate Technology Blog
- Teach 42 Blog by Steve Dembo
- Tinkerings, by Tim Childers