WVSKPhillips Domain

Writing is probably one of the most painful activities to a student. Why? Because most often teachers are having students COPY someone else’s words that mean nothing to them. Or if the student is being tortured with a “free-write” or “journal entry” – what has the average student done in their life that is memorable enough to write about? Another problem with poor attitudes towards writing – how many books with good examples of writing have students read by this age? How can they write well if they’ve never read examples worth emulating?

So – the first hurdle is getting students to at least have a working relationship with words and sometimes that’s easier said than written…er…done…

One tool that could hook their interest could be the Comic Creator. This site gives students several pre-made backgrounds, characters, and props in order to tell their story. Students could retell the plot of The Tell-Tale Heart or come up with an alternate ending to The Pit and the Pendulum. You could create a weekly strip using students for the characters and make a bulletin board with them or add them to the class newspaper. A couple of draw backs to this particular site are the choices are rather limited and printing is only in black & white. However, it’s a good start.

KABAM! is another comic strip site but this one has pre-created strips with story lines. The cool thing about this site is the stories have to do with typical teenage issues and the creator is asked to help finish the story and as a reward for answering correctly, they get to create their own stories. Excellent site for students to have access to if they have some extra time on their hands.

Another excellent tool for students to learn how words can interact is the acrostic word puzzle. Acrostic puzzles are ones that use the letters in a word as the first letter in other words that describe the first word. This can get kids to really exercise their brains in thinking of adjectives, adverbs, strong verbs to help spice up their poems. Once finished, kids can print them out and then decorate or mount on paper to show off to friends and you.

Once kids learn to have an enjoyable passing acquaintance with words, stringing them together into sentences and paragraphs can be less painful for all involved – hopefully.

Ok – a short post but it’s a good one.

Flashback: The last time you took students to the computer lab to research a topic. What happened? “Where do we go for the information?” “I can’t find anything!” “Can I use ebay as a source?”

Solution? Google’s custom search engine!

Enter Google’s latest tool to help people create a search engine that will narrow down options and limit hits to those sites which are specifically listed.

Try mine out.

The really cool part that sold me on this tool is the option to “opt out” of advertising on the search results page. This option is only available to government and non-profit entities (such as schools). I LOVE it! I don’t have to worry if there is going to be an ad asking my students if they want to register for a dating website while they are researching topics for my class.

Best of all? It’s FREE! And no sur-charge to make it “advertisement free” either!

These are the directions I’ve written in a word document to help you get started in making your very own baby search engine. Enjoy!

Creating a Custom Google Search Engine

How about your very own poster with motivational quote? How cool would you be if you walked into class and there was a picture of you as a motivational poster complete with funny/wise/pithy saying to use as a journal prompt for the day? Or as a way of recognizing various students in your classes. Or even as a cool “Happy Friday” gift for a fellow teacher.

Check out the poster I made of my youngest daughter.

Click on it for a bigger view. (This is cute enough I may even use it in her scrapbook! LOL!)

So – where can you do this? Head over to Flickr and their “Motivator“. You can upload any picture from your computer or if you already have pictures uploaded somewhere else, just click on the “url” tab and enter the link where the picture is stored.

Make a few editing choices about borders and whatnot and enter what quote you want to go with the picture.

What? Can’t think of anything quotable? Neither can I so I cheated.

Check out these sites for ideas: Motivational Sayings and Quotations . If you can’t find anything there to satisfy your pithy phrase craving, just search google for quotations and MILLIONS of suggestions will be at your fingertips.

Once you’ve typed in your text, click on “create” and then you have the choice to save it or print it out. There a couple of other options you can play with but those two will probably take care of most of your desires.

Have fun and don’t forget about friends’ pictures for the upcoming high school reunion – how funny could those be as posters?

  No – not RIKKI, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi….WIKI!

The short answer is a wiki is a place for collaborative efforts to collect and disseminate information. Imagine a website where the students can collaborate on lecture notes, teachers can post notes – powerpoints – document resources, students can work with on-line assignments, teachers and students can have online discussions, and podcasts can be posted. (What’s a podcast? It’s the name given to any audio file available to be downloaded and listened to via a computer media program or an mp3 player such as an iPod. I’ll talk more about podcasts in another post.)

Wikispaces is a hosting site for your own classroom wiki. Wikispaces is also giving away (free) 100,000 upgraded wikis to educators. Click here to fill out the information and claim yours!

Here is the directory for WVDE wikis. These can give you an idea of what others put on their wikis.

The thing to remember about wikis is that anyone (if it’s public, no password is needed but if it’s private, only those who have the password) can make changes to the material on the site. This is the most powerful feature of a wiki, but oftentimes students need to learn to appreciate this as a tool and not just a place to vandalize fellow students’ work.

The most popular wiki is the Wikipedia site. It has information on EVERYTHING! The downside is, not all the information is 100% correct. Therefore, students need to realize that they shouldn’t use wikipedia as a primary resource or even a secondary source for research papers. However, it can be a good place to jump start their search for information to then verify elsewhere for citation purposes.

Here are a couple more hosting sites for a wiki:

PBWiki

JotSpot (Google recently bought JotSpot.)

WikiFarms Sites that will host wikis in various configurations and cost

Here’s a thought – you can make a wiki just for your own use. You don’t have to share it with anyone – you can save documents and files to it, have an online bookmark list, or jot notes to yourself. This way you can access it anywhere you are and work on all those projects we always have too many of!

Still not convinced to try one? Read this excellent article from Education world and check out some of their links.

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Now playing: Jim Brickman – Angel Eyes
via FoxyTunes

Flickr has a tool that lets users make trading cards of their favorite pictures. How cool would it be to make a bulliten board for Open House that showcases your students with a trading card of their own? They could fill out the information part with likes and dislikes or some of their interests.

How about another use for this tool? Have students make FLASH CARDS with this site! First step – have students find a picture or graphic for each card they need to make. These pictures are saved and the student needs to remember where they are saved. Then picture is uploaded to the Flickr site using their tool and the student types in the information they want to have on the card and click “create”. Here’s a cool option – the “icon” selector allows students to choose up to seven icons that will go on their card. What I found this to be useful with was specifically when my students were making cards for various cell organelles. If the organelle was specific to plant cells, they chose the “clover” icon. If the organelle was specific to animal cells, they chose an animal icon. And if the organelle could be found in both types of cells, then both icons were chosen.

This assisted the students to not only to study the information they typed on the card, but the icon helped in reminding them which cell type the organelle belong to. What a neat way to help kids study!

You could print up sets of cards based on students’ likes, dislikes and activities from information you have gathered from various “Get to know you” activities and pass them out to students as they come into the room. Then the students can gather into their groups for the lesson based on whatever sorting you wish to use. Example: all students with a musical based card, group one. Nature based cards, group two. People based cards, group three. and so on. The cards themselves can either be positive reinforcers to give to students at the completion of the daily assignment, or collected to reuse another day. Use the icon feature to add more variety to your grouping for future projects.

Flickr has other tools which I’ll post on here in future posts but all of flickr’s tools are part of something referred to as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the name given to a collection of sites that are the “next generation” of internet tools. You will generally find them to be free, community developed, and a cleaner look to the site – i.e. fewer ads. Not all of the new sites are something worth your time and energy, but alot of them are really cool and with a little creative thought can be used in the classroom to help you reach your students and teach those technology objectives!

Check out a card I made of my iguana!

Ok – while this resource isn’t completely free – the school or school system pays for it so it’s not coming out of the individual teacher’s pocket which is good too.

Unitedstreaming is a division of the Discovery Channel and this website provides thousands of videos and resources for educators across all grades and curriculum. There is a 30-day free trial so if your school doesn’t have this marvelous resource, you can check it out for a few weeks, show off how awesome it is, and beg for the system to pay for a subscription.

Need a video for ecosystems? Dozens of videos with Jeff Corwin starring pop up, begging to be downloaded. Teaching algebra and need a short take on the history of math? There’s a good video that explains who the father of algebra was (do you know?). Looking for lessons to reinforce the school’s stance on bullying or sexual harassment? Unitedstreaming has up-to-date, age-appropriate videos on those sensitive topics too. Spanish speaking students? Many videos also come with spanish translations that can be downloaded separately. Close-captioning is optional on almost all the videos.

Another good tool is that you can download only part of the videos if you want. If the entire movie is 50 minutes and you know the kids would probably be snoozing by then, just download the 10 minute segment that really hits home the concept. Segments are listed by title and length of segment.

Extra resources are also available to the videos. Most have state objectives/standards correlated to the video. Oftentimes there is also available for download teacher guides which contain the script from the video and blackline masters which have various activities to complete before and/or after viewing of the video.

What else is there you say? Well….Unitedstreaming also makes available the ability to create assignment and quizzes based on these videos. The teacher creates and saves the activity, linking it to a particular video and is given an activation code. This code is then given to the student who enters it at the Unitedstreaming homepage and then completes the assignment. Once finished, the assignment/quiz is emailed to the teacher automatically without the student ever being given your contact information.

Tip #1: If you make an assignment/quiz for students to complete outside of class, make sure they have access to high-speed internet. Dial-up internet connectivity will not be fast enough for them to view the video anytime this century.

Tip #2: To gain even more benefit from this resource, consider joining their on-line community of Discovery Educator Network. This opens up even more options in terms of lessons and activities made by educators as well as networking with other DEN members in your area and across the country.

ps – Al-Khwarizmi is named as the father of algebra in the video.

Teachertube is the answer to the other video site which has been blocked by so many systems. For a quick peek at what you can find check out this video – this is an excellent resource to use for various educational staff meetings to help prod along those educators who may need reasons why about using technology in the classroom.

3 steps

Next, search for a topic that you might be interested in using for your classroom. If you type in a broad term, you might be asked to refine your search, but if you scroll down you’ll still see some videos that match your broad search.

Click on any title you wish to view and the video will stream to your computer. Now, streaming is ok for a few minutes if you want to just preview the video but most school systems want you to download videos to your computer rather than streaming them as streaming takes up a whole lot more resources. Some systems have even blocked the ability to stream. That’s ok – we can work around that.

Once you’ve found a video you want to use, look to the right of it in the box that says “video details” and look for the line that says “download video” and the title is next to it. Click on the title and a box will pop up asking you what you want to do with it – click on “save” and remember where it was saved to.

Now that you have it on your computer – what do you do with it? You need to convert it to a format that Windows Media player (or whatever media player you use) can use.

Go to Zamzar for an online converter. Nothing to download or install here. Just follow the 4 steps to upload the video you downloaded (this is why you need to remember where it downloaded to) and then Zamzar will work its magic and send you an email telling you where you can download the converted file. Now you have the file in a format that you can play anytime you want! How cool is that?

Tip #1: If you are converting to use Windows Media Player, and probably most of you will, on step 2, choose the format .wmv Other formats apply to other players.

Tip #2: The email with the link to your newly formatted file tells you that you have to download your new file within 24 hours. Don’t forget that.

Raise your hand if you love post-it notes? Ok – hands back on the keyboard now. Raise your hand if you spend more time taping them back onto the edge of your monitor screen than actually DOING what they are supposed to remind you of.

Enter: Post-it Notes Lite. I was shown this program a few years ago and it was an instant hit – I was so tickled to be able to toss the notes that made my monitor look like a cat face with yellow whiskers and ear hairs!

This easy to download and install program (don’t forget FREE!) is a joy to use. It has a good number of options for a free program and it feels so good to watch the notes blow up and away when one is ready to be deleted. This particular download has unlimited time for the free version, but if you go over to the 3M site their freebie version is for only 30 days.

There is a fuller featured program that you can pay for should you so choose but I’m a cheap date so free is better.

How can this be used to make a teacher’s life easier? How many of us can actually SEE the desk calendar that our monitor is setting on?  How many scraps of paper are in your pockets reminding us to call lil’ johnnie’s mother with all her phone numbers? (and yes, each note can be printed!) Where did that gentle reminder from the principal about bus duty run off to? Now you can just type up a note on your computer’s desktop and you’ll never lose it again.

So – make yourself a post-it note reminder to go download the post-it note lite program!

More and more school systems are using Grade Quick for their electronic gradebook and also subscribing to the online side EdLine. I have facilitated my high school’s EdLine page for several years and found it to be extremely user-friendly and an excellent communication device with parents.

However, not every teacher realizes that they can do more than just post grades to it. I’ve attached to this posting my directions to managing the News and Calendar sections and another write-up on how to upload documents such as lesson plans to EdLine.

These directions are very detailed and shouldn’t give you too many headaches in following them. There are even screenshots through-out them! Feel free to print out and use these – but please leave my name on them for credit. Thanks!

Beyond logging in to EdLine

UPloading directions for Word documents

Free is always good!

Star #1

Rubistar has been bought by Intel (so I’ve heard, if you know differently drop me a line) and thus it will remain free for teachers. All they ask is that we give them our zip code so they can track useage. I think that’s manageable, don’t you?

Anyway, they have many rubrics already made so why reinvent the wheel? And everything is customizeable so if you want a different point allotment for the categories, just click inside the box and change it. Don’t like the description of the category? Click inside and change it to fit your needs.

You can print it, save it, and/or download it. They also give you the option of sharing it with the world if you just happened to have created the world’s best rubric and you are in a generous mood.

Star #2

Trackstar is another awesome resource that cuts down on so much work for teachers. To experience the ease of this site just type in the keyword box one or two words that describes what you are looking for and click “go”. You will be taken to a site that has a listing of the resources that have been created by other teachers. This is an excellent place to find webquests for students to complete. It’s also a great way to find other resources that might otherwise elude you. Here’s a hint for you if you want the students to complete a worksheet: to save students having to type in the whole link (and misspell or misinterpret symbols and take 20 minutes just to get to the daggone site….) give the students the trackstar number at the top of the page. It’s the 6 digit number at the top of the page. Have the kids type that number in back at the front page of http://trackstar.4teachers.org and your track will pop up and all the links are clickable therefore the students can’t mess up entering the link!

Word of caution: some of these resources were made a couple of years ago and then abandoned so you will want to preview the sites to ensure they are active before asking the students to search those sites for information.