Digital Bytes – May 29th 2017

Podcast – WOW in the World Hot off the press is a podcast by NPR is aiming to be “a new way for families to connect, look up and discover the wonders in the world around them.” Scientifically based, WOW in the World is sure to be a winner for your classroom and beyond. Data…

Learning How to Focus

Take a look at the photo below. What does it tell you? What do you notice? It tells me that with close to 60 tabs open, this student was so distracted by the extension that he/she wasted a significant amount of time being off task. The worrying thing is that if this student continues these patterns…

Visual Note-taking: High School Applications

I read the last post about visual note-taking…but I’m not sure it would work in a high school classroom… This post is for you. Thank you to one of our Tech Mentor’s: Georgina, for walking us through her first trials of sketchnotes: If you are interested in support with these techniques, contact a DLC for…

#teacherbookclub roundup for November

Has Twitter become a virtual staff room for teachers everywhere? #teacherbookclub is a monthly online discussion of books relevant to today’s educator.  Past guest authors have been Bill and Ochan Powell,  George Couros, Angela Maiers, and John Spencer. This weekend #teacherbookclub discussed a multi-touch free book focused on visual note taking.  This book was co-authored…

Digital Bytes 7th November 2016

The iPad Conference over the weekend was an action-packed 2 days of fun and learning. We have decided to make this edition of the Digital Bytes have an iPad focus. Enjoy! Visual Thinking Two great apps we love for visual thinking are Adobe Capture & Adobe Illustrator Draw (both free). Create illustrations out of your…

Digital Bytes – 16 November 2015

How to Provide kids Screen Time that Supports Learning Kids are now spending more time on devices like iPads than watching television. “Children not only need to learn how to decode the letters and words they read, but also to gain an understanding of what goes into creating information and stories of all kinds.” This…

Designing Effective Presentations

Every educator today needs to learn how to present effectively. But how much do they know about what makes an effective presentation? Garr Reynolds, author of the popular book Presentation Zen Design, notes: “For many of us, there is a hole in our education when it comes to visual communication… In the past, the tools…

Grade 5 Exhibition – Printed Display Boards

This year at East we are lucky to have access to a large format printer. I say large, and I mean HUGE! It is about the size of a piano (see the door in the picture as a frame of reference!). The Grade 5 students were given the option of printing their display boards in…

A Question of Colour

The Grade 5 team was lucky enough to have Noah Katz (Digital Literacy Coach at Dover) speak to them about Visual Literacy last week. He spoke about the elements of Graphic Design, referring to the acronym:CRABContrastRepetitionAlignmentBalance Before Students had the opportunity to design a poster, then give it a makeover. We saw some really interesting…