Learning in the Lou

What is TodaysMeet ? a backchannel providing a space for students and teachers to post messages How do students use TodaysMeet to get ready for finals? ask questions and seek clarification get answers from their teacher and other students read each other's questions and responses respond to support other students and reinforce important ideas How do teachers use TodaysMeet to get ready for finals? respond to individual student questions in a place where all students can see the discussion use the backchannel conversation to guide in-class review time pose/post questions to help students check their readiness print out and post the chat transcript for students to see Interested in learning more?  Check out our blog post for a step-by-step guide on how to set up your TodaysMeet backchannel in a matter of moments.

I shorten a ton of web addresses to make them much easier to find. The one tool that I loved was goo.gl because it would shorten the URL and create a QR code in one click. The Google URL shortener, goo.gl, is shutting down. No fear, there are plenty of URL tools out there. This post will show you how to use bit.ly to shorten the address in a snap. Start by visiting bit.ly  and clicking SIGNUP . I would recommend using your school Google account to sign up. To do that, just click the G . This message should appear at the top of your screen. The email was slow to arrive in my inbox so I just clicked the RESEND button and it appeared in about 1.2 seconds.  Find the bit.ly email in your inbox, then click the big orange button. To get started click the big orange button in the upper right corner of the bit.ly screen. I can tell that I am fully logged in by my name appearing in the same corner. Paste the URL you want to shorten...

Sound is pretty amazing. Play that one song on Spotify and it lifts your whole day. You hear the voice of a loved one and you feel comforted. Sound familiar? This idea was something we heard about at ChromeCamp this past weekend. Did you know that you can also use sound to help the student computers in your room find a website in a flash? As you see in this video the process is very simple. To get started there are just two things you need to do. ONE Install the G oogle Tone Chrome extension on your computer and the student laptops. The computer sending the signal, the teacher laptop, will need to have the sound turned on. The computers receiving the signal, the student laptops, will need to have the mics turned on so they can hear the signal. TWO Open the website you want all your students on. Click the little megaphone icon in the upper right corner. A tone will sound alerting the other computers to go to the site.  This will ap...

Where the two surfaces meet. While it was raining today we took a field trip to the parking lot at Dressel. In the image above you can see two different surfaces, one appearing wet and the other looks normal. RIGHT On the right side of the image, it is just regular concrete. You can see the water starting to pond a bit and is running off into some unseen drain. LEFT The water just disappears! The great thing is this area of the parking lot allows the water to drain slowly back into the ground. Check out this image that illustrates what is going on below the surface. If you showed this image to the kids, what would they think is happening? Would they know why MSD requires these parking lots? STEM is everywhere, even in the places we never notice. Where else do you see STEM in your classrooms? How might you help kids prepare for the world by showing them things like this parking lot?

Do you slowly collect tabs throughout the day? I know on any given day I might open twenty to thirty tabs. That many open tabs starts to slow the machine down and my battery appears to drain much faster. Here is a simple solution that allows you to open a million tabs and help your laptop run efficiently.  The Great Suspender The Great Suspender is a Chrome extension that puts your tabs to sleep after a set amount of time. To wake the tab, all you do is click.  Start by visiting The Great Suspender and clicking the big blue button in the right corner. Click Add extension . Click settings . 1. Adjust the time. We recommending choosing 30 minutes or 1 hour. 2. Scroll down. Whitelist - sites that are exempt, they won't be suspended. 1. I copy/pasted the addresses of the three tabs I use most often. If you use Pandora or Spotify in a tab, add that address here. 2. Click Save settings . This is what you see when ...

30 Day Doodle Challenge with Peter Reynolds and The KidLit Show from TheLivBits on Vimeo . A few weeks ago we had the awesome opportunity to meet Liv as she visited a few of our schools. She inspired so many of our kids with her keynote and classroom visits. Liv shared this video and has a new challenge for us, a 30 day doodle challenge ! Check out the padlet and start wondering, what doodles can you share with the world? This isn't just for kids, teachers why not add yours too! Note: Scroll down and check out Liv's post on the Padlet page. She lists a few guidelines to help everyone get started. 

Ikea Inspiration is everywhere. The other day we were at Ikea learning about their culture and something really caught my eye. What if we used our hallway spaces for something like this? What if we used the walls as places to show learning and inspire others? Ikea Hallway Ikea is just about seventy years old, seventy! Along one of the employee hallways, there is a very long timeline. Each section is dedicated to one year in the life of the company. School Hallway What if you created something like this? The topic could be a book. Each chapter or section the kids could create something that represented what they just heard or read. Each day or week the timeline grows.  What if you did this with social studies? A science concept? Ways to solve equations? What if you didn't do any of the work at all? What if the kids created every bit of the display? Missouri History Museum Last week we saw almost the same idea in a training room at the Missouri ...