Jeff Utecht – Educator, Consultant, Author
Jeff Utecht
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Homepage: http://www.thethinkingstick.com
Posts by Jeff Utecht
The Social You vs The Professional You
Aug 23rd
The last couple of working days and the rest of this week I’ve been talking with high school students about why we (ISB) have given them a blog to start building their ‘Professional You‘.
When I put it in terms of Facebook is the ‘Social You’…the you with your friends, and the you while hanging out. Then your blog is and should become the ‘Professional You’. The place you mold who you are, what you are interested in, and where you want to go. The you you want colleges and universities to know about, that you want your employers to know about. The More >
Picnik.com launches back to school ideas
Aug 22nd
A friend of mine who now works for Picnik (or should I say Google seeing that Picnik was recently purchased by them), the online photo editing website passed along these little suggestions this week.
New for Back to School We just launched some handy tools that make it easy to create photo-personalized blog headers, newsletters, desk name tags, and class photo frames. It’s as easy as dragging photos into our back to school templates. Really, it’s that easy–and these back to school templates are free. Learn more.
Get and share ideas about Picnik in class Thanks to suggestions from teachers around the world, we’ve More >
Aug 21st
- Facebook is the new Google
- It has become both a noun and a verb
- With over 400 million users it is the largest social-network on the web
- Everyone, including parents and teachers are already using it
- Parents are getting younger……they get it
- Facebook has replaced e-mail for many people
- Facebook has more privacy settings then most Internet sites
- Not using Facebook to communicate with your school/class community is like not using Google to search
- It is the future
- It is the now
- For every negative reason to block Facebook there is a positive reason as well.
- It’s mobile
- It’s always on
- Students are already using it (ISB HS More >
Tracking Independent Reading in high school
Aug 20th
As I started talking about in my last post, we’re in the process of setting every high school student up with a blog to use as an e-portfolio. To help you wrap your head around why we’re using blogs as our container for this, I suggest downloading and reading the Free PDF I produced at the end of last year.
Once you wrap your head around the idea that these blogs are just a container that we can link into and out of then we can build our portfolio taking advantage of all the Web 2.0 world has to offer.
You’ll be able to find More >
At the speed of a click
Aug 20th
(Scribefire, my blogging platform finally updated to work with Firefox Beta 4 so now I’m back!)
I had the most incredible experience today. First of all I’m loving working with the high school kids. They just ‘get it’. I don’t have to explain things at a very deep level and we can just fly through the technology stuff and get down to business.
And when I mean fly….I mean…..at the speed of a click.
Today in a 45 minute session with eighteen 9th graders we:
Using Search Stories to Teach Search Skills
Aug 13th
Last year one of the best ads released during the SuperBowl was this simple ad by Google
Shortly after the release of this video Google asked you to make your own search stories.
Simply go to http://www.youtube.com/searchstories and start creating your story.
What a great way to teach students search skills.
Give students and start and end point. For example in 3rd Grade I might give students: Rocks and Volcanos. Start with Rocks and create a search story that gets you to end your search story with how Rocks and Volcanos are related.
Or in High School how about finding a connection between two random books: The Odyssey and More >
A New School Year Begins!
Aug 8th
Tomorrow marks the start of a new school year. My job title might have changed but the focus remains the same. How do we prepare student for today’s digital world?
I had a chance last week to introduce myself to the high school staff. It happened to be right after a discussion on cell phones in the classroom. A discussion that our new Dean of Students Dennis Harter gave loud and clear. Tell kids to turn them off, or use them for learning.
During his introduction to the high school I counted no less than three cell phones going off. Teachers who hate having More >
Finding Common Ground
Aug 7th
One of my biggest challenges this year is going to help the High School as a whole find some common ground on expectations for class work and interaction using our Moodle site. We use Moodle as an extension of the classroom. A place to handout work, to turn in assignments, and to have discussions via forms and chats.
This will be our third year using Moodle at ISB. Up until this year teachers had the option how they set up their course, if they used Moodle at all, what type of documents and resources they places there, and how they interacted More >
