February 2018
February 2018 Teachers' Digest
Professional Development
Online Workshops and Webinars are offered by OTAN to meet the demands of busy adult educators. We are currently working on our line up for this year, so stay tuned and check the California Adult Education Professional Development calendar so you won't miss any!
Face-to-Face Workshops:
Contact us at 916-228-2580 or e-mail support@otan.us to schedule one of our workshops at your school this year! We will do most of the work for you. We just need your available computer lab.
OTAN offers a wide variety of no-cost, hands-on, three-hour workshops. We will come to your school if you have at least 10 interested participants and an approved lab. If you have a smaller school and need more participants, consider coordinating with other small schools in your area to fill your workshop. If there is a technology topic not listed that your staff needs assistance with, let us know and we will discuss creating a new workshop to meet that need. Here are some of our workshop titles:
- Moodle: Create a Course Web Site
- Beginning PowerPoint 2010 for Adult Education
- Advanced PowerPoint 2010 for Adult Education
- Chromebooks for Adult Education
- Creating Web Pages with Weebly
- Digital Badges in Adult Education (New!)
- EL Civics: Digital Literacy & Internet Safety (New!)
- Google Tools and Drive
- Interactive Whiteboards - Creating Student Activities (Promethean or SmartBoard)
- iPads in Adult Education
- Mobile Devices in Adult Education
- Office 365 for Adult Education (New!)
- Open Education Resources for Adult Educators
- Privacy, Practice, Presence, and You
- Social Media for Adult Education
Visit our Web site to see the complete list including descriptions and prerequisites for each.
Teaching Resources
Web "Sitings":
Be Internet Awesome!
Google has created four free mini games that are aimed at K-12 but could certainly be used in the adult education classroom to help create awareness about internet safety and help them understand the consequences of their actions.
In “Kind Kingdom”, bullies have spread bad vibes throughout Interland. Your mission is to collect hearts and cheer up the citizens. You also need to block bullies and report their bad behavior.
“Mindful Mountain” allows you to send posts, but different paths share each post with a different audience. Your goal is to share each post with only its intended audience. If a post is shared with someone outside of the intended audience, an explanation is given, and examples of possible consequences, and you are invited to try again.
In “Tower Treasure”, your goal is to collect lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and symbols, then combine them to make a strong password.
In “Reality River”, you need to cross a river to get to the other side. To do this, you are given a scenario along with 3 possible answers. Your avatar jumps onto the selected platform, and if the correct answer is chosen, you remain on the platform and move on to the next question. If the incorrect answer is chosen, you move back to the previous platform, and are invited to try again.
Once all activities have been completed, you are declared “Internet Awesome”, and can claim a “Certificate of Awesomeness. You can then see your scores for each game and revisit the lessons to try for a higher score!
BookWidgets
Bookwidgets is an interactive learning site that allows teachers to create interactive lessons and widgets for tablets, smartphones, and computers. The lesson plan linked here focuses on chemistry. There are different membership plans available. The free plan requires students to be signed in to an account, but allow teachers to collect, review, and grade student work. Paid plans allow teachers to crate and share widgets through the website or the BookWidgets tool. Be sure to read the Terms of Use for further information.
https://goo.gl/XkoGj1
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