Two new contests:
(for students ,classrooms, and Piedmont)

1- Remake a Music Video Deadline Oct 24th:  2 1/2 minute video and win a $70,000 tech makeover for your classroom! (Thanks to Ms. Newburger for the link) 
Winners judged on    
  •  Effectiveness of expressing how the use of technology enhances personalized learning in the classroom  (40%);
     •  Overall Creativity and spirit (40%); and
     •  Production Quality of the video (20%).

2- Cam Newton School Spirit- Please check the Piedmont bulletin and share with your students the classroom code to enter the Cam Newton School Spirit Video Contest. Piedmont can win big $ and your student can win dinner with Cam Newton. Ms. Lyttle will happily trade places with any winner who does not want to attend! 

Interested students can see the instructions for entering the contest at my StudentSpace page.

8 Steps to Self Control - The steps are at the bottom of the article but the article itself is an honest and irreverent look at all of us who are interested in increasing our own self control, plus it notes some seminal education issues of "grit" and why according to Dweck some of our students don't practice self control (it's because they don't believe it will work for them- many times because they have been unable to trust in the past.)
Wearable Drone Bracelet - Your students might think it's cool. Or scary.
Cleaning up Your Digital Footprint 
Transforming Learning Spaces - research-based classroom design

Hello overworked tired teachers! (and also those few of you who are happy energetic and completely caught up):

Kindergarten teacher Kory Graham (@tritonkory)  taught me that October is when the groove begins and the craziness of the begining of the year finally slows down to a dull roar.  If you are overwhelmed it will get better soon! Some of these links might even help that along:

Last week I threw a lot of links out there at you so this week I have just rounded up a few highlights. Feel free to catch up on last week's links by scrolling through these 3 blog pages below:

This week's Piedmont PD posts include a community PD offering this coming Tuesday to add to the last week's link to the new Discovery Place resource center for teachers! I also just heard Discovery Place is free on Saturdays for teachers so look into this!

This week's lesson ideas page include a video playlist to help students develop growth mindset. One video of Austin's butterfly is a good way to make learning visible and in doing so reinforce growth mindset grit and effort in your students. (I can't believe I just said grit!)

This week's Celebrating Piedmont blog includes Ms. Barone's trip to jail, inspiration to use your best teaching gifts from the encore team's example, and more.  I am a big fan of using one's strengths as the way to minimize weaknesses and I believe it is the reason for Piedmont's success- we use people where they work best. 
If you aren't sure what your best teaching strengths are, here is a great link via Keely Shannon @keelybshannon on Twitter)  that includes a quiz so you can find out.  http://www.weareteachers.com/hot-topics/special-reports/teach-to-your-strengths

Have a great weekend and remember you are amazing just as you are right now!  You are changing the world every day with the smallest act of kindness you can show to anyone you meet. For example, you can smile at a child who's having a bad day and turn their entire day around, their entire attitude about school, and that will ripple out to everyone else that child encounters.  Our jobs are amazingly important like that. (Thanks to Josh Gauthier @mrgfactoftheday for that reminder)

Here are useful resources for the latest news in GAFE- Google Applications for Education 
Google Classroom is a new Edmodo-type learning management system and Google Slides is now available on ipad.
 Below are details

Intro and instructions for students http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/lesson-ideas/student-introduction-to-google-classroom

Intro and instructions for teachers http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/piedmont-pd/how-to-use-google-classroom-teacher-instructions


Basic tour, including a Rollout Video herehttp://www.google.com/edu/classroom/


Google Classroom Thoughts so far:
It's not perfect yet, but ultimately this should be a great feature for your class, especially as it gets more integrated features.  
Good points:

• Students who use the dictrict chromebook logins or  google drive are automatically signed in, 
  
• you can make copies of any document for each student (doctopus), 
• there is automatically a folder of resources connected to your google drive account so anything you throw in that folder in your drive is automatically shared with each class. Also anything you post in the stream automatically goes there

What I'd like to see  

• a parent access code
• full integration with flubaroo 
• ability to co-teach
• more ability to have subsections of each class
• and a few more Edmodo like features but NOT the Edmodo style social networking communities that can fill up with spam and people hawking educational paid sites and apps. (I do love a nice badge though, everyone should be able to get a sticker or at least show others what they've mastered .)

Please send your feedback and suggestions for features to Google .( The bottom right of the teacher Classroom page has a "feeback" button. Please use it to request features YOU need)

Basic intro of Google Classroom in 7 easy steps-

1. Discuss the benefits of online learning (asynchronous, xplain what Classroom is and how it is alike or different than Schoology, Edmodo or whatever else they may have used.  http://www.google.com/edu/classroom/
2. Have students to go to the web address https://classroom.google.com
3. once there it should give them a login screen that looks just like a google drive or chromebook login.(IF they do this on a chromebook they will automatically be logged in already so they will go straight to the Google Classroom introductiory webpage !)  
4. Have students log in THE EXACT SAME WAY THEY LOG INTO THEIR SCHOOL CHROMEBOOKS- 7th and 8th graders should already know but if not firstinitial of first name plus entire last name (no dots no dashes) plus last 4 of their student ID@cms.gaggle.net and password is their bday yymmdd example ppirate5678@cms.gaggle.net would be student Pete Pirate's login . If his birthday is August 28th 2014 his password would be 140828
5. if prompted, they should select "I'm a student"
6. once they are logged in to Google Classroom, ask them to find the plus sign (+) next to their name at the top right of the page and choose join classroom. They will then be prompted to enter a code. You get the alphanumeric code from YOUR teacher page (it is visible in a box at the bottom left of the class homepage) and that is it! they now have access! they can click around from there and explore.
7. Photos and step-by step of all this plus instructions for how to use the site for turning in work for students are here http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/lesson-ideas/student-introduction-to-google-classroom

Using Google Classroom with iPads:
http://www.edudemic.com/ipads-with-the-new-google-classroom/
Google Classroom Presentation Slides by Geeky Gafe Girl via Jacob Standish 

These two images are the view as a teacher and the view as a student of the same page. 

Google Slides is a presentation tool  instead of PowerPoint. It lets students work from home without Powerpoint and also lets them collaborate. This link includes templates and instructions

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com/p/google-docs.html?m=1


NEW! Slides is now an iPad app
Many teachers have been disappointed that students can't work on their presentations if they are using iPads.
The Google slides app is a step toward equalizing the options of working in GAFE across devices.

this is a good blog review about the new powerpoint-type app's uses and limitations  http://jonathanwylie.com/2014/08/25/review-google-slides-for-ipad-is-now-available/U

My last post was all about GAFE ---I introduced how to log into google classroom and announced the Google Slides app here http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/news-and-thoughts/google-classroom-omg _

This post is a bit more about Google Apps - I just did a great training. First with Jake Standish and today with Heather Nussbaum of CMS

I took lots of photos of what I found most useful for teachers or students using Google Docs for Research and Translation and Google Classroom for Sharing files and assignments: