Saturday, March 08, 2008

CUE 2008 Internet Resoursarama

Attendees at this presentation get a chance to win a 1 year free subscription to BrainPop. You have to fill out an evaluation and be there during the drawing :)

Great Educational Sites (K-3):

Starfall is primarily designed for first grade, but can be used for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and second grade. It has a major focus on letter/sound recognition, and first grade phonics skills. The format is fun for your students and they can print out a worksheet for more practice with the skill they worked on.


Little Fingers is a on-line software company, meaning none of their software is on CD, you have to purchase and download it. They have all kinds of language arts and math games for elementary students. They also have free online games for preschool through 4th grade.





The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (NLVM) is an NSF supported project that began in 1999 to develop a library of uniquely interactive, web-based virtual manipulatives or concept tutorials, mostly in the form of Java applets, (like you care about that) for mathematics instruction (Pre-K-12th grade). It's a free online source and has a free download trial desktop version. You can also click on links to have a Spanish version or French version.


Story Place is a site with games and read alouds organized by themes. Click on other themes to see the long list of titles. This site is easily navigated by your students.




Count Us In has 15 Math games for little ones covering counting to measuring and everything in between. Each game is designed to help children understand basic concepts in mathematics. All of these games require the Flash 5 Player or higher to work online.


Gamequarium is a site with lots of links to games for all subjects and the links are lots of fun for your studens (and they're learning, too)! It's organized by K-2 to 3-5. It links to lots of other sites, mostly all good.


Storyline on-line is a free online video streaming program featuring members of the Screen Actors Guild reading stories aloud. They talk about the stories and how children can get the book. It also has printable activities that go along with the stories.


Fun Brain is a site first graders love. It's engaging and they like to navigate on their own.




PBS Kids- Between the Lions has great short videos on phonics rules and letter sounds. The PBS site has lots of pages with their TV characters themes. There's lots of printable activities as well.




Computer Centers This is a teacher created managed site, that has links for students to work on the current skill in the first grade N-MUSD pacing plan. It's updated for each Houghton Mifflin reading theme and is easily navigated by students while directing them to a limited area of links. It links to a kinder centers page and a second grade page.


HMTech Wikispaces is a site designed for those teachers that think teaching Houghton Mifflin is too all consuming to have time to integrate technology or teachers that feel their classrooms have been conquered by the worksheet. We hope to change your mind and give you hope. This site has been made by teachers that use technology daily to motivate and engage students in authentic learning, differentiate instruction, integrate many standards into one lesson and like to have FUN!:) It IS a work in progress. Please, please add ideas!


Brainormous created by Aaron Turner, a flash script writer, is a web site with games for learning number facts. It focuses on third grade multiplication skills, using a solar system theme. Students go on missions to objects in the solar system and to get their fuel for each trip they need to do math facts. The faster and more correct they are they get more fuel. It also has addition and subtraction games that can be used at lower grades and of course for higher grade students who haven't mastered their addition, subtraction or multiplication facts. You can play free on line or download the software at a very low price. If you can it's always good to pay the creator for his/her time and effort to create these cool things for our students to use.

BrainPop is a library of short videos on everything from the Underground Railroad to the atomic model to Shakespeare. It has Interactive quizzes for assessment and enrichment materials like experiments and creative activities ideas to supplement the movies. Topics are aligned with state and national education standards and searchable by state standards. They're also by subject area; Science, Math, English, Social Studies, Health, Technology and Arts and Music. Right now the library consists of more than 600 movies for grades 3-12 and they are constantly expanding. All the videos are closed-captioned. Many are also available in Spanish at es.brainpop.com. The videos are hosted by an orange robot named Moby and his bubby Tim.

You can get a 30 day free trial with the access code PALM2008, but you have to activate it by March 21st.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

OC CUE Tech Festival: Web Resources for Primary Grades

Finding resources on the web that are specific to your grade level and to the skills and strategies you are teaching on any given day is not easy. You may be looking for material to help you teach or a site that gives your students independent practice in the skill of the day. Sites that offer interactive activities to reinforce the skills your students are learning and that require only a small amount of your time for instruction are the ideal.
Our vision was and still is to create a collaborative site with links to interactive sites - students can use independently, project sites that incorporate 21st Century skills and links to downloadable lesson presentations for teachers; all pretested by teachers, and that support our curriculum standards.
Before you get into checking out web sites, you should have a social book marking account. Furl is one source for social book marking. Once you set up an account you can book mark sites no matter whose computer you're on. All the bookmarks are kept on an on-line site you send them to. If you don't already have a social bookmarking account you can set up one with Furl.net, then you're ready to check out some resource sites. If you're not on your own computer use the link http://www.furl.net/doc/get_started to get back into your account and set up the furl button link on your own computer later. Use the get started link and log in (top right) using your user name and password (that you hopefully wrote down).
Our first site hmtech.wikispaces.com is a wiki that has links for each week in our K-3 HM Reading Themes. Right now this is just a K-3 site but, the great thing about wikispaces is that any one can post to the site and we're hoping some teachers of other grades who have created presentations or used links will post links to their work for other teachers to use on the site.

At the time we created this site there was little online support from HM. But other groups were also gathering materials and links. Two good examples of these collaborations are Santa Maria-Bonita School District
and YAHOO WEB GROUPS
These are groups you can join and download files or contribute files that support using HM. Some groups can be joined immediately and others have a moderator who reviews your application before they email you that you've been accepted. To join a group you must first open a free account at my.yahoo.com or click on one of the group links below and click on sign up on the top left. After you have your verification email you can go to groups.yahoo. and find your group under "Find a Group" or click on one of the group links below and then click on sign in.

hm_kinder

5TH GRADE GROUP

HM SHARING ALL GRADES

HM SHARING 1ST GRADE

HM SHARING 2ND GRADE


HM CHAT
This is a chat group, started in Missouri, who posts times for future chats. This group is intended for use by teachers, specialists, and administrators using Houghton Mifflin Reading programs. It is a forum for educators to share ideas, discuss strategies, and ask questions of each other about using these programs to their fullest potential.

Once we got our site going we thought what we really needed was a site with links and presentations not just for reading but for all our curriculum and techtips.wikispaces.com came into being.


Computer Centers are links for students to use during UA or other practice time.

There's more! Check out the posts
Tons of Resources
from Gail Lovely (NECC 2006)
Visual Literacy Resources from Lynell Burmark( NECC 2006)
Primary Source Materials from Kathy Schrock (NECC 2006)

At the NECC 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia, the Teacher Tube(a great teacher resource) execs were recruiting and offered me suggestions on how to get my site funded. They are looking for teacher created videos to share with other teachers. Just a sample:

Thursday, August 23, 2007

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

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Educators in Space

Barbara MorganYes, 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

Saturday, June 30, 2007

NECC 2007

Centenial Park, Atlanta, Georgia
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. Kodak Camera We took one of the student cameras, a Kodak Easy Share V803 (hopefully, you will use these this year!) and the bigger Nikon.

Andrew ZolliOne 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).

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Tons of Resources

Palma Sola Elementary School siteTwo 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)

Jigzone Site
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. At family puzzleThe 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

Monday, July 10, 2006

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.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Primary Source Materials

Kathy SchrockMore 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 check for purchase of Alaska
-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.

Kennedy's Inaugral Address DraftDefinition 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

first telegraph
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!