WVSKPhillips Domain

Which country lets you visit both cities of Edinborough and Glasgow? Where can you see stalactites?

Remember these questions from the wonderful folks over at BrainQuest? Those  marvelous flip books which kept thousands of us entertained on the road and we now are trying to get our own children interested in learning various tidbits in the hopes of landing a Jeopardy slot someday.

Now, even better, these books are available for free over at Scribd! Scribd is a free place provided by Google to allow us to jot something down and publish it. In a nutshell it is “largest social publishing company in the world — the website where more than 60 million people each month discover and share original writings and documents.” (See here)

You can browse for items to read and even save them to a “reading list”.

I think this would also be a great activity for Smart Boards and allowing the students to take charge of the activity.

So – do you know which has the most gravity: a supernova, a white dwarf, or a black hole?

I’ve posted before here about my love of Voice Thread and I just received an email from them touting even MORE to make Voice Thread better! If you’d like to read even more about Voicethread – check out their blog.

They’ve added the New York Library’s Digital Library with over 700,000 historical images that can be used in the Threads. VT has also improved its Flickr search and import capabilities along with adding Learning Modules which allow you to set options giving other’s permission to copy and use your VoiceThreads.

These changes and updates are awesome! What a great way to start a new school year with an old friend who has some fresh features?

When telling a story, words can convey so much. However, when you can tell a story using words, pictures, music, and your own voice – the power of the message becomes exponentially greater. Even those unenthusiastic writers may show a glimmer of interest when presented with this program as a medium to create a project.

Photo Story 3 is a free download for Windows XP and greater computers. It is a program that is very easy to learn and show others how to create their own digital movies, narrate them, set them to music tracks, and publish them for others to view. Students can create their own videos for just about any topic you can think of. Turn them loose with a couple of digital cameras and see what they can come up with. Don’t have any digital cameras? Use Flickr to search for photographs relating to the topic and have students use those.

Here are directions on how to download music to Photo Story 3 from a CD as well as general Photo Story directions. (The directions on downloading music were created by Melissa Given.)

There are some ideas and websites listed below for inspiration.

The following activities are just a few samples from TeachersInTouch.
* Learn how to create a farewell, end-of-year video file that will be remembered long after the streamers are cleaned up and the DJ has gone home. Using still images and text, you can create a video file complete with music and narration using Microsoft Photo Story.

* What I should have done in the holidays – Students always write a recount of what they did in their holidays. Here is a way to make their recount dynamic and more meaningful. Using Photo Story 3, students narrate their
recounts making their everyday recount come to life in visual and audio multimedia.

* In this activity, students create a Photo Story video file using still images, text, narration and sound files to advertise and promote sun safety. Throughout this lesson, students will gain an understanding and appreciation of their home climate and its affect on skin.

* Waltzing Matilda – In this activity, students are asked to analyse the meaning behind a well known song or quote. Students create a visual audio story using Microsoft Photo Story and synchronize it with a PowerPoint presentation detailing the song lyrics along with their own interpretation.

Websites with examples:

Digitalcamerasined – a wiki with resources on using digital photography in general in the classroom along with Photo Story 3. Lots of great ideas!

ReadWriteThink - Here is a website that has a lesson plan and activities using Photo Story 3 and/or Movie Maker from the ReadWriteThink site.

I’m actually pointing you to another blog today, but the post that I want you to read is very powerful. It’s something that if you are reading blogs already, it probably doesn’t apply to you – but we all have colleagues that would fit the description of “technologically illiterate” perfectly.

I want you to read that post and consider sharing it with your faculty and peers to use it as a discussion starter. Don’t use it in an accusatory, finger-pointing sort of way. Just start some dialog and see where it goes.

“Is it okay to be a technologically illiterate teacher?”

If you would like another post to read and use a video to begin conversations in your school, check out the “Did you know 2.0? – shift happens” presentation. The actual video is a fairly long download, so make sure you have it saved before you need it and don’t try to stream it. They have a wiki set up to continue discussions online with your global peers.

Shift Happens wiki

Once you have some good talks with your peers, direct them to these blogs & wikis (mine included of course!) and set them free to begin their own technological journey.

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

  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

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!

Ok – this post will be about the obvious resource – EduBlog! The site that’s hosting this blog is extremely easy to set up a blog for your own use! I’ve registered for several other blogs and played around with them – they all are fairly easy to set up but it’s nice to have a site that’s dedicated particularly to educators.

All you have to do is go here and click on the blue box that says “Sign up for FREE” and follow your nose to register for your very own blog.
I’ve registered and test driven a few other blog hosting sites and they are all fairly simple to use but I will say it’s nice to have a place just for educators.
So – what could you do with a blog for your classroom?

1) Post essential questions at the beginning of chapters or units and have students respond through the comments as a discussion so you can evaluate their understanding of concepts as they progress through the curriculum.

2) Post homework and/or assignments.

3) Use this for your class newspaper.

4) Post electronic resources such as your recent lecture powerpoint slides and notes – *gasp* you mean your students aren’t just chomping at the bit to review those notes on Beowulf? You might be surprised……

5) Engage your parents in discussions.

6) Gain feedback from your students and parents – they can post anonymously feedback about what they love about your class! You get to decide what comments are posted back to the site so you control what’s viewed here. WARNING – be sure to have a thick skin if you are asking middle school students to do this.

These are just a few ways to integrate a blog into your class fairly painlessly. So – what are you waiting for? It’s not exactly the Undiscovered Territories…..go blog!

I am a Kanawha County special education teacher who is absolutely IN LOVE with all things technological and how they can be used in the classroom. I will be using this blog space as a forum to bring to the teachers view some resources that I’ve used in my classroom and fell in love with. I am absolutely NOT affiliated with (or being paid by) any of these sites or resources that I post, unless I specify otherwise. I hope at least a few teachers enjoy this blog and will find something useful here. Let me hear back what you think of think of the site and if anyone is looking for something in particular, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do about digging something up!