Reeham's Blog

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This is a picture of Sadek who digitally visited my classroom…

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Hardware & Software Analysis Slideshow for Hayahacademy

Zeeyo is a website dedicated to help you organize your meetings on your online calendar.

• Why is Zeeyo Special?

• Zeeyo allows teachers and administrators as well as other people to easily and quickly decide on times to meet or get together. All you need is an online calendar that the website can synchronize with to plan a meeting time.

• You don’t need to start a calendar from scratch if you already have one. You can use your Google calendar or other online calendar to synchronize it with your Zeeyo Calendar. Zeeyo synchronize downloads are available  for both  PC and Mac platforms (for free).

• How to Plan a meeting time with Specific Co-workers/Students?
  • first you need to sign in (free)-only requests your e-mail and the website instantly sends you a link to your account.

• 5 quick Steps to Plan a Meeting Date

• Creating a new event poll and inviting people to the event (you need their e-mails)

• Determine a tentative time slot on your Zeeyo calendar

• Send invitations via e-mail by selecting participants

• Specify options for notifications

• Finally you get a summary and then you confirm and send.

• Where to go from there?
  • Check responses to your poll from the people you invited to the meeting through the cockpit.

• • Choose a date based on the responses you get from the poll
  • Confirm meeting date and send date confirmation notification (the website does this automatically when you click confirm)

• Features of Basic and Pro versions of Zeeya

https://www.zeeyoo.com/product

• Limitations/challenges I encountered

• A trick! I was not able to synchronize my Google calendar because synchronization is only possible through the pro-version which can only be purchased on line. This adds an extra cost and makes it more difficult to implement throughout a school setting if one /a group decides to buy it.
• E-mail is not fully reliable and accountability can become an issue. Participants may not check their e-mail regularly and may not meet the poll deadline. In this case deciding a meeting date becomes difficult. However, using Zeeyo application is definitely more efficient than to schedule a meeting by phone, manual poll or sign up sheets.
• It is a one way channel of communication. You have to create a new poll rather than have an open channel of communication with your participants to edit the date of the meeting. Therefore, this tool is helpful when planning meetings well ahead of time. However, I do not think it will be very effective for planning urgent meetings.
• It can be used by students, howwever the layout of the calendar is more adult than student friendly.

Rubistar is a free website that allows teachers to generate or download free rubrics. It is user friendly and can download into different formats to facilitate the assessment process. In a few minutes you can generate articulate rubrics that accurately measure student performance and allow them to plan well and complete their assignments more efficiently.

You can access rubistar tutorials by clicking here

RUBISTAR PRACTICE!

To search and access rubrics made by other teachers, click here

To create your own rubric (recommended)

Advantages of rubistar:

1. User friendly (you can choose assessment categories with correct wording, and you can also add or change the entries in each box manually)

3. Fairly accurate in representing the student’s grade (likert)

4. Can be saved in different formats (Excel Spreadsheet is recommended for easy calculations)

5. Rubrics can be printed per student if it is exported through Microsoft Excel

A challenge I encountered when using this website:

1. This website operates fairly well, however, many users fail to submit complete/viable rubrics.Therefore, it is quite time consuming to search for ready made rubrics that are accurate and fit the purpose of our assignment.

• Introduction to Widgetbox

Widgetbox is a website that allows you to download a variety of widgets. Many people use widgets. In education, both educators and students can utilize widgets on their websites or blogs. widgets bring life and animation to web content.

• What are widgets?

“Widgets are simple, fun, and useful applications that can be embedded on a webpage, blog, or social media page.”

“Widgets are great because they allow you to easily create customized content with no coding knowledge necessary.”

They make working on a class, school or personal site/blog much more fun and interactive.

• Who uses widgets?

Everybody! teachers and students are no exception. As educators, we can utilize some of the widgets depending on our subject area or need. Students can also make use of many of these widgets to help them with their learning.

• How to find ready made widgets on this Widgetbox?

The website allows you to browse the widgets in different ways (by category, by most popular..etc)

Screenshots of how the widgets are organized on the Widgetbox are shown below

• How to use the Widgetbox gallery?

The gallery includes around 183000 widgets that you can choose to install or imbed into your website/blog. Widgets related to education can be found in the education category. This category includes around 3000 widgets. You can choose widgets depending on your needs as an educator/student or by subject area.

Widgets in the gallery can easily be installed or embedded easily on your website/blog.

• How to add widgets to your website/blog from the Widgetbox gallery?

Widgebox allows you to embed the widgets to any website or blog and you can publish it to multiple users who visit your website or blog.

Here are some examples that I found interesting and were already available in the widget gallery. I have actually embedded them on this blog:

This is a Widget that can be used on a historyl website or a history teacher’s blog. It could also be used in the classroom as a warm-up at the beginning of the day/class or be made available to the students to look up on a daily basis and discuss in class.

You can also customize the events that appear and make them match a specific topic/unit you are currently teaching,  e.g. cold war.

Another interesting widget that directly connects you to a random current events front page of a news paper or magazine is shown below:

• How to create your own widget?

Widgetbox allows you to customize your widgets.

You can register for a widgetbox account and you can edit and save widgets you’ve created, view the widgets you’ve installed on widget-friendly sites such as YouTube, iGoogle, or your own blog and add it to the shared gallery.

In addition, you could also check how many people actually used it on their own websites or blogs.

Below are two examples of widgets that I have created through Widgetbox

Widgetbox Challenges/limitations:

1. Basic versions of creating widgets do not include a large list of options. Therefore, the personalized widgets are not so elaborate.  Pro versions are more elaborate and include more features but they are not for free.
2. It is impossible to censor or control the content of widgets available on the gallery. For example, the current events widget might automatically update a new magazine cover page that is  inappropriate or completely irrelevant. In addition, access to actual magazine required subscription.

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