Technology Gems, Ideas, and Facts
Friday, February 19, 2010
Gem ~ a website or application that might work well for you or your students
Edupic Graphical Resource is a collection of photographs and drawings that are free for teachers and students to use. You can search for images by subject area or topic. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of this collection. Next time you or your students are looking for pictures for a project, check this one out. (http://edupic.net/index.html)
Idea ~ a way to enhance your LFS lessons with technology
Interactives, a site produced by Annenberg Media, includes activities to engage students with content in a variety of curricular areas and grade levels. A few of the topics include Elements of a Story (Gr. 2-5), Metric Conversions (Gr. 6-8), and Historical and Cultural Contexts (Gr. 9-12). Each “interactive” provides content as well as “hands-on” activities. Many also include background information for teachers and links to further resources. (http://www.learner.org/interactives/)
Fact ~ Just a bit of information
In addition to videos, Discovery Education also has an “On This Day” feature. When you login, the landing page will feature an event that happened on that day in history. You can choose from subject areas such as Biographies, Arts & Humanities, Science, etc. Each entry provides a summary of the event and includes links to videos or other Discovery Ed content related to that event. You can also click on “View Full Calendar” to find events for any date. (http://www.discoveryeducation.com/)
Have a great weekend!
Anne
Technology Gems, Ideas, and Facts
Friday, February 12, 2010
Gem ~ a website or application that might work well for you or your students
Teacher Tap is a “free professional development resource that helps educators and librarians address common questions about the use of technology in teaching and learning”. This site has many great links under the categories of “Tech and Learning”, “Internet Resources”, Libraries and Literacy”, and “Tech Tools”. This one is worth a look when you have a few minutes. (http://eduscapes.com/tap/index.htm)
Idea ~ a way to enhance your LFS lessons with technology
Last spring I shared Wordle, a site that allows you to copy or type in text and create a word cloud that displays the most frequently-used words in a larger font. Wordle has become very popular, but it has some limitations in terms of your ability to customize the word cloud. Word It Out is a new site that works much like Wordle, but allows many more options. You can choose words to remove or tweak their importance. You can choose your own colors and sizes. You can save the word cloud to their site (publicly or privately) or embed it on your own site. Students could use this site to analyze their own writing to find overused words or enter the text of a speech to look for general themes. Here’s a word cloud I made using a news article about this week’s weather…
Fact ~ Just a bit of information
Make your own personalized candy heart at http://cryptogram.com/hearts/.
Have a great weekend!
Anne
Technology Gems, Ideas, and Facts
Friday, February 5, 2010
Gem ~ a website or application that might work well for you or your students
Wolfram|Alpha is a new “computational knowledge engine”. The goal of its developers is to “make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” Lofty goal. When I read the word “compute” I usually think of math, but this does so much more. Type in a math problem and it will give you the answer. Type in a word and it will return the definitions, parts of speech, word origins, pronunciation, syllabication, and much more. Type in weather 17055 and get the current temperature and conditions as well as weather history and forecasts for our ZIP code. Since today is the 100th day of school, I typed in 100. This picture shows just a part of the results…
Wolfram|Alpha is like the old “World Almanac” on steroids. You and your students can use it to look up quick facts on a WIDE variety of topics. Give it a try! (http://www.wolframalpha.com/)
Idea ~ a way to enhance your LFS lessons with technology
Tuesday I spent the day at the CAIU for a workshop led by Discovery Education (the provider of what we used to know as Unitedstreaming). Click here to access the resource blog used by the presenter. If you haven’t been to DE Streaming in a while, I suggest you take another look. If you’ve only used it to search for videos, look again, because it has much more to offer. Discovery Education Streaming has updated their website and is constantly adding new content in the form of videos, images, and more. We also now have the ability to create student accounts within the service. This could be helpful if you want students to find videos or other content to use in projects. The students would only be able to search for videos tagged for their grade level range (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12) or lower, keeping our youngest students away from topics that are inappropriate for them. (Remember, there’s nothing “bad” in DE Streaming, but there are things that are not age-appropriate for young children.) Teachers can also create classes within Discovery Ed and develop and assign quizzes and assignments for students in those classes. If you’d like to try these features and want some help, just let me know. Also, for the month of February, Discovery is providing a free preview of their Discovery Science and Discovery Health modules. When you login to DE Streaming, you’ll see tabs for Science and Health near the top of the page. If you teach Science or Health, take a look. If you don’t currently have a Discovery Streaming account, contact me and I’ll send you the information you need to get started. (http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/jendorman/2010/02/02/iu15/; http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/index.cfm)
Fact ~ Just a bit of information
Related to the DiscoveryEd resources mentioned above, here’s some clarification on copyright and the use of their materials. Videos from DE Streaming can be used in classroom and school projects but can not be posted on webpages that are open to the public. Images, sound effects, songs, and other media available from DE Streaming can be used and posted publicly as long as they are properly cited.
Happy 100th Day of School!
Anne