Hi, I hope your week is off to a good start. In our blog this past Monday, Giovanna and I shared about our ECSES- STEM Makerspace opportunities, and a little bit about the upcoming live STEM lessons. We want to talk about this exciting opportunity for you and your class to join our live lessons.

Hello Everyone!

This summer, Giovanna and I offered several online Professional Development (PD) sessions using courses in Schoology. I have taken these courses and updated them to remove all the assignments and discussion posts and just provide the training videos and resources for instruction. If you did not attend a session this summer, but would like to learn more about

This week Giovanna and I are focusing on teaching staff how students can annotate on PDFs. Yesterday our teaching was focused on students using iPads to annotate on PDFs and submit back to the teacher. Today I am focusing on students using Chromebooks. There is a instructional tool called Kami. There is a free version that we are going to be discussing. Teachers can get a Pro version for a free trial, but we are not recommending that so it does not confuse you students once the Pro version expires. Giovanna and I created a document with links to our video recordings on:

Many of our students are using iPads for instruction both at home and at school. There is a way to have students "mark up" documents either by using an app called PDF Cabinet if the teacher is using Schoology, or by the built in features of Google Classroom. Giovanna has made two videos to assist with this process. Annotating PDFs in Google Classroom as assignments and PDF Cabinet App-Demonstration Video

The ECSES STEM team is excited to announce the ECSES STEM-Google Classroom. This resource is for all ECSES teachers and will provide a platform for teachers to use the “Stream” feature as a discussion board among colleagues, make requests for lessons, and receive updates. The “Classwork” feature will allow teachers to look at the STEM lessons (EI-HS level) that will be added weekly to determine if they would like to use them. The most amazing feature of all of this is that if you like the lesson you see, simply re-post the lesson to your own Google Classroom for immediate use. I know some of you are Schoology users. For those teachers you can either add the lesson to your Google Drive and create an Google Assignment in Schoology, or just copy the links and post in Schoology. If you like the lesson but need to modify the lesson, you can make a copy, and make changes to better support your students’ unique learning needs.

This was shared with me by Sherry Zubeck. Really wraps up what has occurred so far in 2020 and what is yet to come. If you can find 4 minutes to watch this video – I promise you will find it time well spent. You are great. We need you here at IU13. You can do "virtually" anything. We believe in you! We are here for you! 😊 Lori, Giovanna, Hillary, and Melinda (the ECSES-IT Team!)