Today is one of those days where I would swear there are only 3 things that matter in educational technology: workflow, workflow, and workflow.
Today's challenge is a colony poster for 5th grade. The students have reseached their colonies and written their ad copy. Today they are coming into the lab and using microsoft publisher to create an 11x 17 poster.
Eariler this year I worked with 4th grade to create a book in publisher. I found that starting from a template helped focus the student's efforts on the skills I wanted them to learn in the lesson. In this case we are asking the students to start from our template, and to build on it and go beyond. A template for the poster that has placeholders for all of the required pieces is a great piece of scaffolding.
Today the 5th grade, who is not 1:1 but often uses our flexible groups of iPads, is coming into the lab to use the desktop computers. These students spend part of their computing time using google drive and part of their computing time connected to our school server. In many ways they have one foot in our old "local-server-based" storage and one in our new "cloud-based" storage model.
As a teacher this puts me time and again the the choice point of how to get files to my students. While I strive for an exclusively google-drive based workflow, when I want my students to download a template, I really like using evernote to share a file.
The advantage is that the template if for microsoft publisher, and publisher looks for the file locally. As soon as they click on the evernote file, they are prompted to download the file.
1. Once I got the template file from my partner teacher via email, I downloaded it onto my desktop and opened Evernote.
2. I created a new note in Evernote and attanched the file.
3. I clicked the "share" button and selected "Copy URL"
4. Then I opened the Google URL shortener and pasted the really long evernote URL into the URL shortener.
5. I generated shortcuts until I had one without 1, l, o, or 0 in it
6. I wrote that URL on the board and asked the students to download the file from there.
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