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Life Is from BBC Earth

What it is: Life is is an incredible site from BBC Earth.  The beautifully interactive site is full of images, video, and stories from BBC Earth’s most captivating documentaries.  Each month features a different theme with September’s theme, Life is…Colorful.  The astonishing images and video capture life’s most colorful displays in nature.  The search page is equally stunning, offering an on-screen widget that lets students adjust the pictures in the grid by filtering by hot/cold, slow/fast, sea/sky, or color. How to integrate Life Is from BBC Earth into your curriculum: Life is would make for an incredible discussion starter or creative writing prompt.  This month’s theme is Life is Colorful.  Ask students to come up with descriptive words for the pictures and images they are seeing.   Students can use the descriptive words they came up with to write a Life is… poem.  The poem could start with the line Life is… include descriptions of what they observed in the video and end with …Colorful. Students can make their own Life is… type videos with a theme of their choosing using a tool like the National Geographic Wildlife  Filmmaker. This site can be used on classroom computers or in a lab setting, but I think it would be absolutely stunning on an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer! Tips: The left and right arrows on the site let you view each picture in the theme series separately. Each picture has an overlay with additional information about the image. Please leave a comment and share how you are using Life Is in your classroom!

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Password Bird

Posted by admin | Posted in Character Education, Fun & Games, Middle/High School, Primary Elementary, Secondary Elementary, Teacher Resources, Websites | Posted on 30-01-2009

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What it is: Password Bird is an extremelly simple website, but one that I love to use with my elementary students.  Password Bird helps students create a password using a few easy to answer questions.  Students enter a name that is special to them, a word that is special to them, and date that is special to them.  Password Bird takes these and turns it into a randomly generated password.  The ideas is that the password generated will be something easy for students to remember but hard for others to guess.

 

How to integrate Password Bird into the classroom:  In my computer classroom I hear the words “I don’t know what my password should be” a lot.  Password Bird is the perfect place to send these kids.  It helps them create a password quickly that should be fairly easy for them to remember.   Sometimes Password Bird generates great passwords, and sometimes the passwords are not as strong.  I have used Password Bird to generate passwords that we then dissect and decide if it is a strong password or not.  

 

Tips:  Not every password generated on Password Bird will be a strong password, usually this is due to the words that the students chose that make it a weak password.  Use the opportunity to discuss what makes it a particularly strong or weak password. 

 

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Password Bird in your classroom.

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