Google Sky

Keeping up with technology is definitely a collaborative effort. So I'm out there looking at what others are doing. Today Mark Wagner's blog mentioned that all his teacher "participants came in excited about the release of Google Sky". It looks like a great tool to integrate technology into 3rd grade science. To read more about it check out the Google Sky News Story.
What was really exciting "blog communication" was that K. Lysenko, the director of Sky-Map, who read Mark's blog, commented "what Google just announced already exits in web-based version for about a year". You can check out that site at Sky-Map.org

Educators in Space

Yes, it's summer and who will read this? One never knows. Just it case you are reading this, did you see the shuttle launch Weds. evening? I of course missed it, even though I wrote it on my calendar. Thanks to my son in law, Mark, who did watch it on NASA TV, I was reminded that it's not to late to get involved, thus the post. This is a historic mission because teacher Barbara Morgan, who was the alternate for Christa McAuliffe, is among the crew. Finally, after twenty-one years, there is a teacher in space. Of course, NASA has provided a page of online educator resources related to the mission.

If you want to get involved you can sign up for a hour session with NASA educators at set times. It costs $25. Come on guys this is an opportunity you don't get everyday. You can even purchase seeds from the plants on the space station. The sessions end August 17 and you have to sign up 3 days before a session. Please check it out!
click for times

NECC 2007

This year's National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) was held in Atlanta, Georgia, June 24-27, 2007. The most popular sessions were the BYOL (Bring your own laptop) and anything about blogging or podcasting. We (my husband, Darrel and I) went early for a two day Digital Camera preconference session and learned how to use our new camera, a Nikkon D40x. We went in a bus to various sights around Atlanta and learned how to take pictures without auto on. That was a challenge especially when it got dark. We took two cameras and traded off. We took one of the student cameras, a Kodak Easy Share V803 (hopefully, you will use these this year!) and the bigger Nikon.

One of the advantages of podcasting is the ability to watch speakers at a conference you can't physically attend. Using your own computer where ever you are as long as you have Internet access you can participate through webcasts, podcasts, blogs and something new twitter. The keynote speaker, Andrew Zolli, talked about what we can expect for education's future. click here to see a podcast of Zolli's presentation.

Here are a links to other recorded sessions.
They also have a links to handouts if you care to check out something that interests you.
Anyone interested in attending next year's conference, check out NECC 2008. It will be in San Antonio, Texas (June 29th-July 2nd).

Tons of Resources

Two great resource links from the conference worth checking out are Palma Sola a link that Gail Lovely recommended in her presentation, Web Wonders: Sites That Are Time Saving Tools for Elementary Educators, (After clicking on the highlighted Palma Sola link or the picture link, just click on the arrow of the drop down box and click on the area you are interested in)


and Jigzone. Try a puzzle I made for my students_at family puzzle.Click or the link or the web picture below. Once you see the puzzle you can click on the "change cut" link on the left to make the puzzle easier or harder. The 6 Piece Classic is great for first grade.

The links below are from Gail's presentation also. Thank you, Gail!

Media Sources and Tools
Free Graphic Resources
http://www.surweb.org/default.asp
http://kitzu.org
http://pics4learning.com
http://www.arkive.org

Free Sound Resources
http://www.findsounds.com/ISAPI/search.dll
http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/noflash.htm
http://www.christiananswers.net/kids/sounds.html

Template Tools
Teacher made Templates
http://www.mrsperkins.com/testing.htm
Templates for Office
http://office.microsoft.com/templates/
Email Awards
http://www.kidbibs.com/awards/

Lesson Creation Tools
Filamentality
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/
TrackStar
http://trackstar.4teachers.org/trackstar/index.jsp
Quia (trial offer then $49/year)
http://www.quia.com/web

Visual Literacy Resources

Enhancing lessons with images is one of my passions so...most of the presentations I attended at NECC had something to do with images. One of the presentations I attended was by Dr. David Thornburg's, "Visual Learning and Generation M". I had the pleasure of learning from Dr. Thornburg while working on my masters in education through Walden. Dr. Thornburg talked about how the invention of the printing press effected how we teach and learn. Before the printing press manuscripts had beautiful and colorful drawings, but they had a limited audience. Adding images using the printing press was very costly. They had to carve a picture onto a wooden plate, which was a lot of trouble, and color was not an option. So books were mass produced and made available to the general public but they usually lacked images. So textbooks for teaching also had limited images.

"Today's learners use visual media extensively." "The average youth spends 22,000 hours watching TV by age 18." The outside world markets all kinds of gadgets for this digital generation. Even the textbooks today are rich with images and photographs. Textbook publishers are even setting up website resources to include technology with their products. Our teaching methods however, remain basically old school (through no fault of our own). We mostly use text on a board and talk. It's dependable and we don't need that ever-elusive tech support. Why should we incorporate more images into our lessons?

Just the Facts Mam:
Lynell Burmark, also from the Thornburg Institute, presented "Wonders of the Digital Playground: Internet Resources for Classroom Instruction" and shared some statistics.
"•Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
•Words are processed sequentially; images simultaneously
•Using illustrated materials can boost retention and recall up 42% and transfer up 89%
•Images are stored in long-term memory"…
and jokingly she asked "Where are words stored? We all know they go in one ear and out the other."*

I think most of us understand that to reach every learner and to really engage today's digital learners images are a must. There is definitely not a lack of resources out there. The problem is that there are too many and we don't have time to sift through them all. So when teachers pass on sites they found to be great resources it narrows down our own searches. Maybe we'll find what we want and maybe not but we don't have to surf through zillions of sites. The last Adams' Tech posting and the next one are all about Internet resources. Here are more with a focus on images.

Web Resources for Images
Recommended by Lynell Burmark

Freefoto.com
http://freefoto.com/index.jsp http://freefoto.com/index.jsp

Pics for Learning
http://pics4learning.com

Art Images for College Teaching
http://arthist.cla.umn.edu/aict/html

Berkeley Digital Library Project
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/photos/

BUBL Information Services – Image Collections
http://bubl.ac.uk/link/types/images.htm

New York Public Library Web Gallery
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org

Astronomy Pic of the Day
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod

Web Museum, painters
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
http://www.npg.si.edu/

Digital Librarian – best of the Web
http://www.digital-librarian.com/images.html

U.S. National Archives & Records Administration
http://www.archives.gov/index.html

Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/home.html

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/

American Memory Project
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

Civil War Photos
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html

American Indians Pacific Northwest
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/wauhtml/aipnhome.html

Garst Photographic Collection
http://lib.colostate.edu/wildlife

Cybrary of the Holocaust
http://www.remember.org

The Natural Child Project
http://naturalchild.org/gallery

Kidspace Comic Strips & Funny Pages
http://www.ipl.org/div/kidspace/browse/fun5000/

Calvin and Hobbes (comics)
http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/

The Official Peanuts Web Site
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/

Amazing Comics by Kids
http://www.amazing-kids.org/akcomics.htm

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com

Using Search Engines to find Images
Google Images Search Engine
http://images.google.com/

All The Web (Pictures)
http://alltheweb.com/advanced

Alta Vista Images Search Engine
http://www.altavista.com/image

Lycos Multimedia Search Engine
http://multimedia.lycos.com

Web Crawler (Photos)
http://webcrawler.com

*The quotes, photos and links are all from The Thornburg Center and Dr. Thornburg's and Dr. Burmarks separate but equally informative presentations and handouts.

Primary Source Materials

More from NECC:
Kathy Schrock's presentation was called, A Three-Hour Tour: Navigating Primary Source Material On the Internet. It had a sea-going theme complete with a Gilligan's Island music intro. We got the one hour tour but it was packed with so many sources it could have easily been a three hour presentation. Kathy gave two definitions of Primary sources:

"Definition 1
-actual records that have survived from the past, such as letters, photograhs, videos, and articles of clothing. Secondary sources-accounts of past created by people writing about events sometime after they happened.

Definition 2
Primary sources
-orginal records created at the time or after historical events occurred in the form of memoirs and oral histories
-may include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts."

Why should teachers use primary resources?
Kathy stated that:
" • primary sources expose students to multiple perspectives on great issues of the past and present
•Primary sources help students develop knowledge, skills , and analytical abilities"
If you want to see her presentation slides which include the links below go to http://kathyschrock.net/navigating/navigating.pdf


Kathy's Ports to Visit
• National Archives: Digital Classroom
(http://www.archives.gov/education/)
• Library of Congress American Memory Collection : Learning Page
(http://memory.loc.gov/learn/)
• National Archives: Our Documents
(http://www.ourdocuments.gov/)
• National Park Service: Treasures of our Nation
(http://www.cr.nps.gov/museum/treasures/)
• Library of Congress American Memory Collection: Inventing Entertainment
(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/)

Primary and Secondary Sources in the Classroom

• American Memory Collection definition
(http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/psources/source.html)
• University of Washington definition
(http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/RUSA/)
• Why use primary resources in the classroom?
(http://learning.loc.gov/learn/lessons/fw.html)
• Selecting Primary Resources
(http://learning.loc.gov/learn/lessons/fw.html#select)
• Phyllis DiBianco. "Primary sources: clues to the past." Information Searcher. 13:3.
(http://infosearcher.typepad.com/infosearcher/articles/primarysources.pdf)
• Historical Records and Teaching
(http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/dbq/Julie.html)

Subject-Specific Sites

• Geography
o Martha B. Sharma, et.al. (2000) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in Geography.
o Lewis and Clark Archives: The Journals
o Lewis and Clark Expedition: Voyage of Redisovery
o Rocky Mountain Life
o America's Historical Maps
o Topographic Maps
o Topographic Map Symbols
o Keyhole Satellite Imagery
o Microsoft's Terraserver
o Aerials Only Gallery
• Mathematics
o Evan Glazer. (2001) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in Mathematics.
o Bath Time with Archimedes
o Hobbes' Internet Timeline
o Project Interactivate Image Tool
• Visual Arts
o Pamela J. Eyerdam. (2003) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in Visual Arts.
o Architecture and Interior Design (LOC)
• Sciences
o Carolyn Johnson. (2003) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in the Sciences.
o Hippocratic Oath
o Scientific Anomalies
o Alexander Graham Bell Notebooks Project
• History
o Kathleen W. Craver. (1999) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in History.
o Photojournalism: A Record of War
o Weather on Your Birthday
o EdSitement Use Search to find topic
o What are we fighting for over there?
o Letters Written by the Pilgrims
• World Languages
o Grete Pasch, et.al. (2000) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in World Languages.
o The State Hermitage Museum
o The Official Berlin Site German
o The Berlin Wall English
• World Literature
o Roxanne M. Kent-Drury. (2005) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in World Literature.
• Government, Economics, and World Issues
o James M. Shiveley, et.al. (2001) Greenwood Press.
Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach Critical Thinking Skills in Government, Economics, and Contemporary World Issues.
o NARA Analysis Sheets
o WebQuests in Our Future Slide Show

More Edison Movies

Primary Source Super Sites

• American Memory Collection
(http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/)
• America's Story
(http://www.americasstory.com/)
• National Archives Digital Classroom
(http://www.archives.gov/education/)
• Repositories of Primary Sources
(http://www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html)
• Avalon Project
(http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm)
• Historical Census Browser
(http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/)
• USPTO Patent Applications
(http://www.uspto.gov/patft/)
• BBC Legendary Interviews
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/)
• Feeding America
(http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/)
• NYPL Digital
(http://www.nypl.org/digital/)
• AD*Access
(http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/)
• United Streaming
(http://unitedstreaming.com/)
• Technorati: Blog Search Engine
(http://technorati.com/)
• Google Blog Search
(http://blogsearch.google.com/)
• Archive.org and The Wayback Machine
(http://archive.org/)

All of the above information including the web pictures are from Kathy's presentation and her handout site http://kathyschrock.net/navigating/ Kathy spent a long time gathering and posting all these links and I thank her for sharing them. Thank You Kathy Schrock!