Summer workshops, TechCamp, Food Fights…

Several workshops coming up in June. To register email Jo Urias or call her at 471-7725 ext.149.

• Using Moodle, BC# 08-211, June 17, 2008, 8:30 - 11:30 am
  Wondering how to give your students an online learning experience? Use Moodle, a tool available at no cost from the ISD to create and manage an online extension of your classroom. Moodle allows you to create a password protected site where you can create online assignments, have students upload documents, facilitate online discussion, take quizzes, and more. Most of what you would traditionally “hand out” to students can be made available online. Using Moodle is free and easy!

• Digital Storytelling with Photo Story and Co., BC# 08-212, June 17, 2008, 8:30 - 11:30 am
  Make your students’ stories come alive using Photo Story, a free program that allows you to blend images, music, and sound with the text of a story. We’ll also explore other digital storytelling tools.

• Wonderful Web Tools, BC# 08-213, June 20, 8:30 - 11:30 am
  There are wonderful, free tools on the web that you and your students can use across the curriculum. Spend the morning exploring some of the best resources for publishing, presenting, diagramming, drawing, and creating projects.

• Classroom Podcasting, BC# 08-214, June 24, 8:30 - 3:30 pm
  Teachers and students can easily produce their own classroom audio programs to be shared with classmates, parents, and other classrooms. Learn how to create your own podcast as well as how to find and subscribe to the podcasts of other educators. No iPod needed!

• 123VC! Jazzing up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing
  Two Sessions: June 16 – 20 (BC# 08-206) OR July 28 - August 1 (BC# 09-002)
  Videoconference connections between classes open a whole new world of collaborative learning for students! Immerse yourself in videoconferencing communication. Come learn about structures for projects with other classes and other educational uses of videoconferencing. This class is team taught with VC colleagues across the country. Team up with other teachers to create a VC project for next year. Also learn about collaborative technologies such as blogs and wikis.

• You’ll soon be receiving information about one other event happening this summer…TechCamp 2008. Watch for a flyer today or tomorrow! TechCamp 2008 is a two-day technology integration event featuring over 30 hands-on sessions for all K-12 educators. Get geared up for the new school year with the latest tools as well as proven lessons and ideas to use your available technology. BC# 08-200, August 19 & 20, 8:00 – 3:30 pm

If you teach any type of accounting or personal finance unit you should take a look at Mint. Mint is a free, online application much like Quicken. Track expenses, created budgets, and see where all your money is going!

Middle schoolers will enjoy picking up some math skills as they explore MathMovesU. MathMovesU was created by Raytheon…they make missiles, rockets, radar, satellites, and other cool stuff like that.

The Good Food Fight promotes healthy eating choices and allows for some cafeteria mayhem without the mess or suspensions that go along with it.

Racing, Dipity, Fluxtime…

• Keyboarding isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, but TypeRacer can make it a little better. It may appear to only be another typing/racing game, but what spices it up is that 1) you actually type sentences instead of random words and 2) you can race live against other people…presumably your classmates. This would be fun to explore.  UPDATE! A couple comments from Karen and Ben let me know that TypeRacer’s content may sometimes be inappropriate…which means that it’s basically no good for the classroom.  Oh, well…Karen has a link to other typing resources though.  Thanks Karen and Ben!
• You may not know what an RSS feed is, let’s just say it’s a special web page that you can subscribe to for news and other information. With Dixero you can subscribe to RSS feeds and have it read to you by the amazing computer voice. A great tool for students with reading difficulties!
• Here’s another easy timeline tool, Dipity. Not sure what the word dipity has to do with timelines, but that doesn’t make it any less useful.
• Have your students tell stories with animation using Fluxtime Studio, a free online tool. Animations can be saved and shared with others.
• There’s no reason not to have students using photos and images in their presentations and projects. There are lots of online tools to help make those images just right and now Adobe has jumped onto the scene with Photoshop Express. Edit and store images for free!

Free Animoto, Timelines, Sprouts…

• I’ve highlighted Animoto before…Animoto is an online tool that lets you create short, simple video collages.  The news is that Animoto is giving away their All-Access Pass to teachers and their students.  Now you’ll be able to download and save movies as well as create longer movies.  All for free, of course.  What a deal!
• We love to make timelines…they quickly summarize events through the years.  So then, xtimeline is going to make you very happy because you can use it to create and share good looking timelines with text, images, video, etc.
• There’s a lot to see under the lens at the Microscope Imaging Station.  Besides cool images, this site contains full articles about the tiny things that you’re looking at.
• Water is one of the most important substances on the planet.  Take an in depth look at dihydrogen monoxide and how it affects our lives on this site from the American Museum of Natural History.
• PBS Kids Sprout has games, recipes, craft ideas and more for young students

Weekly Web Wonder Webbies

This week’s Wonders are all nominees to receive Webby Awards.  The Webbies are probably the most prestigious web site award and represent the best of the Web.

• Sometimes these links a little math/science heavy, so social studies teachers listen up!  American RadioWorks produces radio documentaries for both public radio and the Internet which you can download, listen to, and read transcripts.  Topics are both current historical.
• Here’s a game worth investigating…use it to spark classroom discussion…and perhaps go farther.  World Without Oil simulates the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis and asks the simple question, “What if?”
• Sharkrunners is a game of oceanic exploration and high stakes shark research. Players take on the role of sharkrunners: daring and adventurous marine biologists who seek to learn as much as possible about sharks through advanced observation techniques.  This game was developed by The Discovery Channel to coincide with Shark Week.
• This is an interesting site for parent as well as elementary teachers.  Handipoints is a site where students can collect online points for completing chores, homework, and simply lending others a hand.  It’s basically a reward system where points are collected and can be “spent” online…but the work is done in real life.  Pretty cool.
• FactCheckEd is an educational resource for high school teachers and students. It’s  designed to help students learn to cut through the fog of misinformation and deception that surrounds the many messages they’re bombarded with every day.  With politics in full swing this year it’s worth checking out.

• Our last online class of the year begins next Monday, April 14.  Creating WebQuests helps participants develop and create their own WebQuest to use in their curriculum.  WebQuests help focus student activities and thinking while using the Internet and make great activities for utilizing your classroom technology.  Participants can earn 2 graduate credit hours or 6 SB-CEUs.  To register call Jo Urias at 471-7725 ext. 149.
• Now that Spring Break is over thoughts turn to summer…and the Summer Olympics.  Track the progress of the Olympic Torch as it travels from Olympia, Greece to China using Google Earth or Google Maps.
• I know there are a lot of you with interactive whiteboards.  Read The Whiteboard Blog for ideas, resources, and activities to make the most use of your hardware.
• Here’s another site in the artsy/creative/exploration category…viscosity.  Students can create their own modern art.

Madness, Superdelegates, Playing ball…

Top o’ the mornin’ to ye… or whatever.

• The Science Museum in London brings to you Launchball…an experiment in physics that anyone can learn from. Use it to study forces, motion, energy, gravity, reflection…
• I usually don’t like to point to sites with lists of more sites, but I’ll share the Best of History Web Sites with you. There are a lot of links…certainly a better place to begin than just a Google search.
• Nothing says March like NCAA Basketball, so let me pass on a couple sites that allow you to incorporate the Madness into your math curriculum.

• • March Madness
  • Time Out for March Madness and Mayhem
  • March Madness Math

• Do Super Delegates get to wear capes? And if not, then why not? If your class is talking about this year’s election, add this site to your list of resources. You can use Google Earth to track what the Super Delegates are up to…just love that Google Earth.

Muxic, Booklets, MACUL Blog…

• This site is difficult to explain…just go and try out muxicall.  If several people are on the sight at once, you’ll be able to interact with them.  It’s very fun!
• I just ran across this site, the BookletCreator.  Take any PDF document and upload it to this site and it will convert it so that you can print out and staple the document into a booklet.  If you can’t save your file to PDF, then use CutePDF Writer or Zamzar to convert it from Word.
• This Bar Grapher from Marco Polo is easy to use and free, of course.  You can enter your own data or use their data sets to explore various topics.
• The Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) held its annual conference last week.  Check out the MACUL Conference Blog to read about many of the presentations as well as to find the web resources mentioned and used.
• Your kids can write and illustrate stories with ToonDoo, an online comic strip creator.  Strips can be saved online, downloaded, or printed.

Last Session! Hall Davidson

This post is being cross-posted on the MACUL Conference blog…Whew! What a day and what a conference. The last session is about to begin… Hall Davidson is presenting on Thinking Big as the World Gets Small. As i’m sitting here everyone is looking around for the boxes…you know, the ones you put your nametag in to win fun and fabulous prizes. I’m pretty sure I’m going to win something good this time…

Hooray for Berrien Springs Middle School teachers (and the RBS) being mentioned by Hall in his words of thanks…

There is geographic shrinking…the world is closer than it once was. There is also a temporal shrinking…

Hall has had the pleasure of connecting with lots of educators…sharing connections and experiences.

We have all these tools…but as educators we are unstoppable and we find a way.

Kids are already in virtual communities…Club Penguin, for example. The distance between imagination and reality is shrinking.

How do we teach innovation? Start with what they have in their pockets…iPods and cell phones. iPods are being used to assist bilingual students learn English…there are a lot of other examples as well. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT all have course curriculum downloadable from iTunes.

(I only have 20 minutes of battery left…oh boy…)

What if Anne Frank had had a blog? Students have stories to tell!..and you can empower your kids to do it!

That’s all the juice I have…too bad I couldn’t say more, but I suspect there will be other posts on this session. I had a great time here in Grand Rapids and am looking forward to actually reading some of the posts here!

Staggeringly Good Things Mixing Google Earth and Media

This post is being cross-posted on the MACUL Conference blog…

Hall Davidson

Joe mentioned it earlier, but Hall Davidson is very entertaining to listening to and not only that, has some great ideas.  This Google presentation sounds like one he was going to do at the 2006 NECC conference in San Diego.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t do it because there was some copyright confusion with Google.  I vaguely remember how that was soon cleared up yadda yadda yadda, but not in time for his presentation.

Google Earth is one of my favorite applications…visually it’s awesome…but besides just the satellite views, there are lots of ways to add content on top of that.

Here are Hall’s handouts.

Google Earth is a platform…one that you can add more information to…web cam, image, video, whatever.  If you’re an educator, you can get a Google Earth Pro license.  If you use it, just be aware that it is even more of a bandwidth hog than just regular old Google Earth.

Google Earth Tips

• Type N on the keyboard to put North at the top.
• Right-click on a placemark and choose Snapshot View to keep that same view each time you visit the placemark.

Hall highlighted the 3D overlays…there are tons of buildings, monuments, and landmarks available for anyone to use.  Same thing with Layers.  Most people probably use thse pre-made layers that are available for free.  In Google Earth, look down on the left and you’ll see them under Gallery: Discovery, National Geographic, NASA, and more…

Route
Use a route “drive” from placemark to placemark.  It kind of looks like driving along from a bird’s-eye view.

Ruler
Use the ruler to measure distances from point to point, or even along a route…and you can change the units on the fly.

Image Overlay
From any image on the Internet, copy and paste its URL and paste it right on top of Google Earth.  You can change its transparency, size, rotation.  It also will lay right over terrain if the Terrain layer is turned on.

There’s so much embeddable content on the web…sites like YouTube or Flickr or whatever that give you a URL…that code can be quickly copied and pasted into Google Earth.  It’s easy to make a multimedia presentation simply by adding content on top of maps.

Last resource from Hall:  Google Lit Trips.

Hall didn’t get through nearly as many items as he may have wanted to.  Remember to check out his handout.  Also, Ben Rimes is giving an 11:30 presentation entitled, “Google Earth for Tech Savvy Educators.”  Very enjoyable!

MACUL Keynote…Mary Cullinane

This post is being cross-posted on the MACUL Conference blog…

I’m sure someone’s post, maybe Steve’s, gives a little background about our opening speaker, so I won’t go into the details. One thing I will mention before the action starts is that these seats are sweet! They’re soft and have a springy back…it’s going to be hard not to want to sit in here all day! Plus…and here’s a conference tip…I’m sitting in the row that in the across-room aisle, which means that I can stretch out my legs.

Rather than summarizing her presentation, here are a few of her nuggets of wisdom.

At the end of the day, all we really want is more of our own ideas.

It’s difficult to be open to the ideas of others…because, more or less, we’re pretty pleased with how we think and what we know. I think this is particularly true with educators…we think we have the necessary knowledge and expertise and it’s difficult to let go of the power.

What would be different at your school if your principal was called the “Chief Learner?”

Since I do a lot of professional development I witness a lot of strange occurances. Often as I stand in front of the teachers of the building I wonder where the principal is. Aren’t they part of the learning community? A little better are the principals who are indeed participating, but let me know that they’re behind with “this technology thing.” Where have they been? As the Instructional Leader of the building is there not the expectation that they should be held to high standards?

Be comfortable not knowing.

I just did a Google search on “new things” and got 98.5 million hits. Live Search (that’s from Microsoft) returned 588 million hits. How can anyone keep up with that? The answer is that you don’t have to…you shouldn’t try…you’ll be doomed for failure.

Lastly, and it wasn’t her last point, here are some questions that Mary encouraged us as educators to ask…

What if…We understood our customers…

We were guaranteed not to fail…

We knew exactly what we wanted a learning environment to look like…

We had resources, commitment, will, and courage…

How would you answer this? What are your visions…and should they be different even though we know we may never achieve them? (I thinking especially of resources.) Anyone want to leave a comment?