iLearn Technology

What it is: Stixy is a fun and easy way for students and educators to collaborate online.  Stixy reminds me of Wallwisher, but has many more options for sharing.  Start out with a blank virtual bulletin board.  Use the Stixy widgets to add content or functionality to your board, positioning them anywhere.  Users can add notes, photos, documents, or to-do items.  After content has been added to a board, it can be shared with others of your choosing.  Those that have been invited to the Stixy board can be given permission to add content, upload, or edit.

How to integrate Stixy into the classroom: Stixy is an excellent tool for the classroom.  Use it as a communication tool for your students.  Create a classroom board where you post homework, resources, to-do items, etc. for your students.  Students can, in turn, submit assignments via the document upload, add notes asking questions of the class, and participate in online discussions.    When working on group projects, students can create a Stixy board where they can collaborate virtually.  Here they can post ideas, research findings, and deadlines for the group.

Stixy can also be used as a virtual portfolio for students.  Ask each student to create a Stixy board for the year (or per semester, trimester, or quarter).  Throughout the year, students can add their content and learning to the board.  Teachers, other students, parents, and family members can be invited to view the board throughout the year.  Students can view their learning and progress in one place and parents, teachers, and other students can leave feedback and encouragement on the Stixy board.   This virtual portfolio can “travel” with students as a body of evidence.  I would prefer getting a virtual portfolio of learning over a report card of grades any day!

Tips: Stixy does require that users have email addresses.  If you are working with students that have not been assigned a school email account, you can use a service like tempinbox.com or mailinator.com to set up an account.  Stixy does not specify a minimum age requirement for use and does not require any personal information for use.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Stixy  in your classroom.

What it is: Signed Stories is an excellent online story site that I learned about from The Techie Classroom blog.  Signed Stories makes hundreds of children’s stories available online accessible in British Sign Language and in text, pictures and sound.  This site has it all.  Students can read the story, watch it signed, and listen to the story.  This enriches literacy on a variety of levels.  Deaf and hearing alike can benefit from this excellent free website.  These are published stories and include a variety of popular titles.  Books are sorted into categories including adventure, baby and toddler, fairytales and folktales, families and friendships, funny, open house, slimy scary, or students can browse all books alphabetically.

How to integrate Signed Stories into the classroom: Signed Stories is a fantastic add to any literacy classroom.  Students can read, listen to, or watch a book signed.  The site is accessible to all language learners and has engaging popular stories that students will love.  Expand your classroom library by pulling up Signed Stories during reading and allowing students to read online.  Signed Stories also adds great discussion to the classroom about different ways that people learn.  Students can expand their sign language vocabulary by listening to familiar stories and watching them being signed.  This is also a great site to send home.  Kids can practice their reading even when their isn’t an adult available to read with them.

Tips: Check out the Resources page for links to other interactive story sites.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Signed Stories in your classroom.

What it is: Hooray!! It is World Math Day time!   This year World Math Day will be held on March 3, 2010.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with World Math Day, it is a day when students from around the world compete in an online environment in live games of mental arithmetic.  Each game lasts for 60 seconds and students can play as many as 500 games, earning points for every correct answer.  The students who answer the most questions show up in the Hall of Fame. This is an absolutely free event to take part in.  Students can train for World Math Day every day leading up to March 3rd by participating in arithmetic competition. For those of you home school readers, World Math Day is also open and free to you!  The competition is designed for students 5-18 years old.  This year has a little bit of a new format (the change is fantastic!) with multi-levels for all groups.  Teachers, parents and media are also invited to participate for the first time.  Last year 2 million students from 204 countries participated and correctly answered more than 4 million questions!!

How to integrate World Math Day into the classroom: World Math Day is a fun competition to involve your students in.  It helps build mental arithmetic and numeracy.  Students from around the world compete in this competition to find out which country has the top mathematicians.   Students have a great time working to get their country to the top (nothing like a little National pride!).  My students beg to be involved in World Math Day each year.  We spend extra time in the computer lab and on classroom computers preparing for the day.  Students answer mental math questions appropriate to their age level. This is a phenomenal way to get some fact practice in!

We make a big deal out of World Math Day and let students have an extended math period to compete on March 3rd.  You could use World Math Day as a Math Olympics for your class and have and opening and closing ceremony for your class, school, or representing your country.

Tie World Math Day into your social studies curriculum.  As students compete against other students from around the world, the other student is represented by a flag.  My students are always very curious to learn more about the other countries and cultures represented. It would also be fun to start a map in Google Earth where you put place markers on the countries that students have competed with.

The platform is open, register your students and start training today!

Tips: If you would like to find out more about past World Math Day competitions check out my posts 2009 here and 2008 here.  There are rumors of a World Math Day iPod App coming soon, check back with the official site for more information.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using World Math Day in your classroom.

What it is: This blogging alliance has been expanding my knowledge of great tools for the classroom faster than I can keep up with!  Recently, I found two more excellent ways for students to practice typing from @2sparkley’s blog.  The first is reminiscent of the popular Rock Band, called UpBeat.  Students can choose a song and level of difficulty.  They must type the letters as they appear to keep the song going smoothly.  This had my students absolutely SILENT while they practiced typing.  They were so involved and having a great time trying to keep up.  The way the game is set up, really challenges kids to touch type.  They can’t very easily keep up without touch typing!  Students stopped by my lab the morning after I introduced the site to tell me how many combos they were able to get.  The second typing site is called Typing Chef. In this game students try to type words as they float past on bubbles.  The goal is to type the word on the bubble before it pops. It gets increasingly harder as more bubbles float up and speed up.

How to integrate UpBeat and Typing Chef into the classroom: Typing can be a subject that elicits groans.  Adding these games in the mix as additional opportunities for practice is sure to make students happy to practice.  I try to keep typing to a minimal in my classroom.  With only 35 minutes once a week with students, I don’t want to spend all of our time practicing typing. I have the kids do the majority of typing practice at home.  Once a year (sometimes twice) I hold a big typing Olympics competition.  Students can earn a free break dress code day (we have uniforms), this is great incentive…like gold to them!  The fastest boy and girl touch typist in each class get the break dress code certificate.  I make a huge deal about how athletes who participate in the Olympics have to train hard.  Practice doesn’t always make perfect but we are aiming for practice makes permanant (good habits).  I created the following website for my students to use in their training www.typing.weebly.com.  Upbeat and Typing Chef have both been added to the games page of my Typing website.

Tips: UpBeat is a Mini-clip game. This site is often blocked at schools, make sure it is unblocked at your school before you plan on using it in class.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using UpBeat and Typing Chef in your classroom.

Photo via websuccessdiva Flickr

Just about a month ago, I proposed the idea of a blogging alliance between educational bloggers.  The response has been incredible.  To date there are 73 educators involved from around the world.  In this month of reading and commenting I have learned a great deal from these amazing men and women, I have built new friendships, and started new conversations.  It has truly been an incredible experience to have educators, passionate about learning, coming together to support each other.  If you are looking for some excellent educational blogs, may I recommend those in our alliance?  By clicking this link, you will be offered the opportunity to subscribe to the “bundle” of blogs in Google Reader.  All of the work has been done, all you have to do is subscribe!  Join us in this journey of learning, exploring, and sharing. The blogs range in topics and focus from k-12 and higher ed.  Even though I teach in the elementary school, I have found the blogs geared toward middle, high school and higher ed to be fantastic. I learn something new every day.

A few of the blogs are in Spanish or Portuguese, don’t let this stop you from reading them.  Google Reader makes it simple to translate a blog to your language with the click of a button.  As you are reading the blog, simply click on the “Feed Settings” button above the post and choose “translate to my language”.  That is it!  Even if you view the original blog to add a comment, Google Translate keeps the blog translated for you. How cool is that?!  There really are no boundaries to learning any more.

What it is: Number Gossip is an outstanding math tool that I learned about from the excellent blog ZarcoEnglish-Tool of the Day.  Number Gossip is a search engine for numbers only.  Type in any number and you will learn “everything you wanted to know about it but were afraid to ask”.  For example, when I search for the number 2 I learn: 2 is the smallest prime number, 2 is the only even prime number, the smallest field has 2 elements, for any polyhedron, 2 is the number of vertices plus the number of faces minus the number of edges.  I can also learn the rare properties of two, and the common properties of two.  Now that is pretty cool!

How to integrate Number Gossip into the classroom: Number Gossip makes an excellent introduction to math class.  Call on a student to choose a new number each day and learn all about the number.  New math vocabulary and concepts will be introduced every day.  Number Gossip helps students understand numbers, their properties, and their relationship to one another.   When students are studying new properties, they can search numbers that fulfill those properties and find out why.

Students could create a baseball type card for a favorite or lucky number, listing all of it’s stats on the back.

Tips: I just love the name of this site, Number Gossip, doesn’t it just make you want to know more?  I think students will feel the same.  When you search for a number, input the actual number (2) it doesn’t recognize (two).

P lease leave a comment and share how you are using Number Gossip in your classroom.

What it is: Kerpoof is one of my favorite creation tools for elementary students, it allows them to draw, create pictures, cards, books, and even movies.  My original post about Kerpoof can be found here. Kerpoof has added some new features that make it worthy of another post.  Students can now save their pictures, cards, stories and drawings locally (on their computers).  On each canvas is a JPEG icon that will allow any picture to be saved to the computer locally.  They are working on making it possible to download the movies locally soon.   Kerpoof also introduced info bubbles.  In the Make a Picture object library, students can drag out a picture onto the canvas.  Now there is a new question mark button that shows up on an object.  When students click on the question mark, a little bubble of information pops up.  Students will gain all kinds of information from these little fact bubbles.  They can learn everything from: who wrote Treasure Island, to learning the national animal of Australia.

How to integrate Kerpoof into the classroom: Kerpoof is an outstanding creativity program for the classroom.  With there education accounts and these new features, it is even more useful in the classroom setting.  Now that students can save their pictures created on Kerpoof locally, they can use their Kerpoof creations in new ways.  Upload the saved JPEG to the class website, blog, or wiki, or add illustrations to a word processing program.

Use the new information bubbles to start a Kerpoof scavenger hunt.  Ask students specific questions ahead of time or instruct students to research broader topics like “dinosaurs” or “Mexico”.  After students have found answers to their assigned questions, they can do more in-depth research using library or Internet resources.  After research is completed, students can come back to Kerpoof to create a picture, story, essay, or movie including information that they learned.

Tips: Be sure to check out Kerpoof’s lesson plans, they have just added a new lesson called “Programming Wizards” designed to teach students about how computers work and how to build, design, and test a program.  Very cool.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Kerpoof  in your classroom.

What it is: Spelling City is a fabulous site for practicing spelling, I have written about its uses in the classroom before (here and here).  Spelling City has just added a new feature that teachers are going to love, the ability to add your own sentences on Spelling City!  Now you can customize your spelling lists to fit your needs.  For example, if you are studying fish and one of your spelling words is “scales”, the default sentence that Spelling City might offer is “The scales were not giving the weights accurately.”  Now as you create a list, you can click on “add” and type a new sentence to fit your classroom needs. The feature is also extremely useful for homonyms (our fifth graders are using this feature this week!).  For the teacher created sentences, the audio read of the sentence will be done by a sophisticated voice synthesis.

How to integrate Spelling City into the classroom: Now that Spelling City allows teacher generated sentences, you can customize your lists for students even more.  Have students generate sentences for the weeks spelling words and vote on which sentence should be included on Spelling City.  This is a great way to involve your students in thinking about word meanings and uses.

Tips: Spelling City has a premium membership that has been approved for funding by Adopt-a-Classroom.org.  You can use the Adopt-A-Classroom service to ask for donations to cover premium membership.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Spelling City  in your classroom.

What it is: The Eco Zoo is an impressive 3d environment where students can meet different “animals” that will give them some ideas about taking care of the environment.  Each of the critters has a virtual pop-up book that tells a little about the character.  Each character has an environmental quirk, like one who is always turning off the lights to save energy, and has a little story that will get your students thinking about the environment.   The site is available to view in both Japanese and English.

How to integrate The Eco Zoo into the classroom: The Eco Zoo is a great site to travel through as a class when you are studying the environment, ecology, or eco-friendly solutions.   This site is ideal for an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer.  As a class, travel up the tree, visiting each animal along the way.  Ask students to guess what environmental issue the animal is passionate about.  Have students brainstorm ideas of ways that they could be friendlier to the environment as it relates to each animal.  This would be a great site to guide classroom discussion and spark some new ideas.

The look of the site is very unique, students will love the virtual popup books!  Students can also explore this site on their own on classroom computers or in a computer lab setting.  As they view the different animals, students can create character cards about the animal, listing the environmental passion, and ideas of how they can be more environmentally friendly.

Tips: This site was created in Japan so some of the English is a little awkward, or the humor missed.

Leave a comment and share how you are using The Eco Zoo  in your classroom.

Kelly Tenkely | TheApple.com (Posted at The Apple.com)
Field trips can be amazing learning experiences.   They provide students with the opportunity to actively participate in education, offering learning possibilities that aren’t readily available in the classroom.  Unfortunately, it isn’t always practical or possible to take students on field trips.  Tight budgets, location, transportation, time, and resource restrictions can keep your students school-bound.  Virtual field trips can fill this void.  Virtual field trips have come a long way from the page of links they used to be.  Now students can explore the world with simulations that are so realistic, they will believe they have left the classroom.  Below are five of the best virtual field trips on the web:

Virtual Field Trip #1:

Smithsonian Museum
Not all cities have access to an incredible natural history museum like the Smithsonian.  This virtual tour is the next best thing to taking an actual field trip to the Smithsonian.

The Smithsonian Virtual Museum is truly remarkable.  Students can ‘step’ into the exhibits and take a tour through the entire museum in a 360 degree environment.  The virtual museum is made up of panoramic pictures of the actual exhibits inside the Smithsonian.  Using their mouse, students “walk” through the museum room by room. They can zoom in, look left and right, look up and down, and walk forward or backward.  Camera icons throughout the museum show students hot spots where they can get close to an exhibit panel.  As students explore the museum, they will see: the ocean hall, ancient seas, dinosaurs, early life, fossils, plants, mammals, African cultures, the Ice Age, Western cultures, reptiles, insects, butterflies, bones, geology, gems, and minerals.

Students can explore the various exhibits on individual computers in a computer lab setting or life size with an interactive whiteboard or a projector.  Split your students into groups and assign them an exhibit to explore and take notes on.  After students have explored and become the ‘expert’ on their exhibit, project the Virtual Smithsonian Museum on an interactive whiteboard/screen.  Explore the museum as a class. As you enter an exhibit, invite the group who explored the exhibit to act as tour guides.

Even if you have access to a natural history museum for field trips, the Smithsonian Virtual Museum is still incredibly useful.  Prepare for a field trip to your local history museum by visiting the virtual museum.  After the field trip, students can compare and contrast what they saw at the local museum with the Smithsonian.

Virtual Field Trip #2:

UPM Forest Life
A field trip to a forest is a wonderful way to learn about tree species, ecosystems, habitats, and animals.   The UPM Forest Life virtual field trip will have your students believing that they are actually in a forest smelling pine trees.
UPM Forest Life aims to teach about forest sustainability.  It does this by inviting students to take a virtual hike through a forest.  The forest is made up of panoramic pictures of an actual forest.  Students can zoom in, look up and down, left and right, and ‘walk’ through the forest with their mouse.  Students start their field trip with a virtual tour guide.  As students ‘hike’ through the forest, they will click on hot spots that reveal videos of forest life, pictures with information, and sounds.  Throughout the forest are opportunities for learning about forest planning, harvesting, regeneration, re-spacing, thinning, transport, recreation, training, berry picking, bird watching, hunting, fishing, natural forests, valuable habitats, deadwood, forest structure, water, native tree species, and the various animals that call a forest home.   This virtual field trip is impressive on individual computers and amazing when viewed as a whole class on an interactive whiteboard or with a projector.  Allow students to take turns acting as forest rangers. They can click on various videos, pictures, and information embedded in the forest.  Students can record their observations of the forest, trees, animals, and sounds they experience in an observation journal.

Virtual Field Trip #3:

Moon in Google Earth
The moon is no longer off limits for field trips!  Students can visit the moon virtually using Moon view in Google Earth.  Google Earth makes for excellent virtual trips around the world; in Google Earth 5.0 you can also take your students to the moon.
Moon in Google Earth makes it possible for students to take tours of Apollo missions to the moon, from takeoff to landing – all narrated by Apollo astronauts.  Students can explore 3-D models of landed spacecraft, zoom into 360-degree photos of astronaut footprints on the moon, watch rare TV footage of the Apollo missions, and, of course, explore the surface of the moon.   Take your virtual field trip to the moon as a class with an interactive whiteboard/projector, or send students on their own mission to the moon using student computers.  Assign groups of students to an Apollo mission to explore.  When the ‘astronauts’ return to earth, they can tell other students about their mission to the moon or write a newspaper article about their journey.

Virtual Field Trip #4:

Planet in Action
Real field trips don’t allow for adventures like a helicopter ride above the Grand Canyon, an expedition to Mount St. Helens, or a helicopter tour of Manhattan or Disneyland Paris.  Planet in Action makes all of these possible with the help of Google Earth.
Planet in Action is an outstanding way to bring learning to life.  Students can take a guided tour of the Grand Canyon, Mount St. Helens, Manhattan, or Disneyland Paris or take control and explore on their own.  These journeys are incredibly lifelike on an interactive whiteboard/projector.  Take your whole class on a virtual helicopter ride above famous landmarks that they are learning about in class.  First, watch the recorded tour and discuss the different landmarks as you see them.  Then ‘hire’ a student helicopter ‘pilot’ who can navigate a trip for the class.  On individual computers, students can create postcards of their virtual field trip or create their own virtual tour that can be saved and shared with others or with Planet in Action.  As students fly above the landmarks, a Google Map will show them exactly where they are in the virtual tour.

Virtual Field Trip #5:

AR Sights
Most students probably won’t have the ability to travel to the pyramids or the Eiffel Tower for a field trip.
Augmented Reality makes it possible to see these landmarks, and more, using Google Earth in 3-D.
Augmented Reality requires a webcam, browser add-on, and a printout provided by the AR Sights website.
After a simple graphic is printed out, it is held up to a webcam.  Students will see a landmark spring to life right before their eyes on the computer screen.  As the printout is tilted, twisted, and moved the landmark moves accordingly.  Students can view the famous landmark in 360-degrees, 3-D, and up close.  It is truly incredible!
AR Sights makes it possible to view Google Earth right in a web browser and then zoom into places of interest, looking at them in 3-D with Augmented Reality.  Students can ‘fly’ around Google Earth, when they find a place of interest, they will hold the printout up to the camera and explore the landmark.  This is an amazing visual method for learning about geography and famous landmarks.  If you only have access to one webcam, use it with a computer connected to a projector or interactive whiteboard for whole class exploration.

Geography, budget, and time are no longer field trip restrictions.  With virtual field trips, students can explore the universe using a computer.  These simulations are so realistic that your students will believe they have traveled the universe, actively participating in their learning.