Bismarck Public Schools Instructional Technology

View the Glogster EDU Newsletter Online here

Glogster will be reducing the number of student accounts to only 100 for all new accounts starting March 1st! This will not affect existing accounts so hurry and sign up now before the February 28th deadline!

If you already have a teacher account, Glogster has just released their Educator Library for download.

“The Glogster EDU Educator Resource Library is a database of outstanding examples of Glogster lesson plans and rubrics, standards alignment activities, and Glog building media resources. It has been built by and for our community of educators!”

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The first session of The Classroom Websites Study Group will meet today from 3:30 to 5:00 in the Hughes Education Center Tech Lab 2.

Session setup and individual questions are from 3:30-3:45 with the formal session starting at 3:45. If you may be interested but are unsure, please attend the meeting this afternoon; you can still decide afterwards if you want to participate in the full study group.

If you have had previous training without earning a graduate credit for it and already have a teacher website but would like or need a graduate credit, this is a great way to refine your knowledge of the application AND earn a graduate credit. All information regarding the course can be found in the tracker and make sure you register!

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Animoto for Education - Bringing your classroom to live

I have been getting lots of questions lately regarding teachers’ animoto accounts expiring and whether or not they now need to purchase or how to get another classroom code.  Animoto has made it so easy; all you do is re-apply throught the educator sign up page with your same contact information and you will be sent your new classroom code and your account status will be extended another 6 months. 

You will want to make sure that you re-apply at least 2 weeks prior to your account expiring so that there is no laps in your service. Also, keep in mind that your account may be good for another 6 months but the classroom code will expire within a few weeks of receiving your new code; so sign your students up as soon as possible.  If you are unable to get students enrolled before your code expires, simply go through the education sign up page again to receive another code.

Animoto is continually updating their site and adding functionality.  I would love to see sample products of your’s or your students projects to showcase on the technology website.  Contact me for more information when you are ready.

Happy creating!

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UPDATE: http://www.freevideocoding.com/ is now back online!

If you were shown how to get the code needed to post your own videos (such as flip etc), the site is no longer active and so any videos you posted using this code will not play your videos.  Please delete those modules until another solution can be found.  Deleting the module will only remove the video from your site since the video is already uploaded into your library.

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Web 2.0 sites such as Delicious, Animoto, Google Apps and Glogster encourage you to embed their tools into your own website or blog.  You may have seen it done on our own district website and wondered how to do it yourself.

With the content management system that we use in the district, you can easily add html code to add enhancements to your website.  Luckily, you do not have to understand or even know html to embed their tools onto your website; it is as easy as copy and paste!

An added benefit to many of these web 2.0 tools that allow you to embed their tools onto your site is, once they are embeded, you never have to update the module on your website.  For example, if you embed a Google Calendar on your website, you only need to maintain the Google Calendar since the code makes sure that it is dynamically updated (synchronized) as soon as you make any changes!

So, how do you get these on your website.  The ‘hardest’ part may be finding the code from the web 2.0 application.  

Once you find it, you simply copy the code and paste it into the module text area of a content module; save, publish and voila!

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