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?

Click on the “click here” button to see new possibilities. My thoughts for this in my classroom would be to use this when kids need a break from the usual routine, when things are getting stale, on early out days and class periods are short, and so on. Once you see how it works, you could also make your own options with your own curriculum and choices for how/what type activities and let kids draw from a hat. Then give them 20 or so minutes to get set, do whatever researching they need to do, practice, and then have them hit the stage! This would be lots of fun and the kids may not even realize they are learning as well as doing a little teaching.

I also love chocolate, soft cotton t-shirts, cuddling with my kids, holding hands with my husband, and learning new things. Over the last year or so there has been an explosion of web 2.0 tools to learn about. On twitter, there was a question about what were my favorite ones that I just couldn’t live without. So, after humming for a little while about doorbells, and sleighbells and schneitzel with noodles.…here are my favorites:

1. Google Earth has to be one of the best tools out there that I can think of. There are so many ways this application can be utilized for just about any class and learner. There are also many, many resources out there showing you the golden brick road to best useage of Google Earth.

• Google Earth 101 for Educators – Teacher Hacks

• Google Earth Lessons

• Google Lit Trips

2. VoiceThread is probably going to be on a lot of people’s lists – also for its flexibility across many curriculums and forums. I already blogged about this site here.

3. My third pick (this list not in any particular order, just someone had to be third…) would have to be Primary Source Learning. This site is set up in conjunction with the Library of Congress (which by the way is debuting a new resource of its own very soon here.) Anyway, Primary Source Learning is a site that shows teachers how to integrate primary historical documents into their classroom for everyday lessons. It strives to teach students connections between then, now, and the future. Lessons are there along with whatever printables are needed as well as field test reports from real live teachers who have used these lessons in their classrooms. Lessons also have links to how to differentiate the content, processes and products for each experience. What an amazing resource!

So – there you go – my favorite three…..for today. Who knows what’ll come along tomorrow?

LearnOutLoud has an incredible library of podcasts and audio files free for the taking. The podcasts range from Aesop’s Fables to Greek Mythology to Ralph Waldo Emerson essays and Great Speeches in History. The podcasts can either be downloaded and listened in your leisure or streamed and listened to immediately. The only software you need is a program to listen to mp3 files. You can use Quicktime, Windows Music Player, or any other program that plays sound files with the mp3 extension. These are both free downloads and usually come already installed on many systems.

How much more alive would your class be if your students could actually hear Richard Nixon giving his resignation speech? Make history authentic with audio files of stories of slavery. How about bringing to your science class the latest in nanotechnology? The reading of The Road Less Traveled could encourage your students to enjoy further readings of Robert Frost’s works. Looking for something in the foreign languages genre? How about a daily Mandarin Chinese lesson podcast for your learning pleasure?

There are also video and audio files that are fee based. The Great Gatsby is only $4.99! Prices range anywhere from $1 to $25 depending on the download and whether you want CDs ordered with it or not.

This resource is an incredible one – not just for those reluctant readers we all have in our classes – but also for the enjoyment of hearing the spoken word as these wonderful files will prove, over and over again. Have students actually choose to listen these files as part of completing projects, reviewing for tests, or previewing for upcoming units of study. These files can be downloaded, burned to a CD or synced to a portable music player (iPod, Zune, mp3 player, etc) and played again and again.

This is a site in progress but here are its first efforts to have some great applications for almost any classroom in today’s world. The link on the left side under Find what works for English Language Learners takes you to some techniques and information that you can use not only for ELL/ESL students, but students with reading difficulties or low achievement/motivation students. These activities and suggestions can be used across the grade levels and curriculum with just a little bit of thought and planning.

This site also has a subscription link so you can be notified when they make updates to this site. I am looking forward to added content for cognition & learning as well as for math & science.

It is incumbent upon us to keep current with best practices so that not only will we reach the goals set for us by the Federal Government, but so that we can also do what’s right by our students.

Ok – don’t let the “podcast” part of that scare you off. The website 60-Second Science is just chocked full of science tidbits and the podcast is only one part of it. You can also find archives of past podcasts here. The postings are written for down to earth people to read and comprehend the extremely intelligent part of science. This is great for teachers who rarely have the time to distill the “science-ese” out of publications and interpret for their classrooms. Of all the curriculums, science is the most dynamic and often times the most difficult to stay current with.

The podcast part of the site is found in the middle of the screen, right at the top. You can subscribe to it using iTunes to keep updated when new podcasts are posted – or you can just click on “play” and just listen through your browser. This would be a wonderful way to start a class – to hook the kids right in with something that is current and relevent to them – and not just in science classes either.

This is an on-line, graphic, collaborative way to brainstorm. Take a look at a sample screen shot:

Bubbl.us is stripped down to the necessary buttons and features. It states that one of its main goals is simplicity – such that a 6th grader can figure it out in 10 seconds or less.

And guess what else I found for you? A teacher who actually uses this program with his class, assigns them to create “mindmaps” and then also requires them to post the maps to their blogs!! What an inspiration to me this teacher is! Be sure to click on that link and spend some time scouting around his and his students’ efforts.

With second semester beginning – I can always use a bit of excitement and inspiration to get my enthusiasm back up, I think this could well help with the winter classroom “blahs”.

This site has over a dozen different java based applets which demonstrate concepts from probability to functions. The game Towers of Hanoi is also available here which asks the player to move disks from one peg to another in as few moves as possible, remembering that one cannot stack a larger disk on top of a smaller disk. It’s harder than you think!

Looking for other math topics? Here is the main chart that you can peruse. They are divided by grade level and mathematical concepts. These are also just plain fun to play with!

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

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