Category: Interactive book

The North Star

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What it is: North Star is a book written by author Peter Reynolds. The North Star book is online for students and classrooms everywhere to read and enjoy. The book is a fable which helps children chart meaningful journeys in life and teaches a philosophy of creativity and lifelong learning. The North Star website includes the book, a place for sharing and communication with other North Star readers, a North Star constellation Map Maker where students can chart their own journey, crossword puzzles, inspirational quotes and cards, and several activities that encourage creativity and reaching goals.

How to integrate North Star into the classroom: The North Star is an amazing addition to any character education program. Read the story as a class using a projector (or purchase the book). Use computer lab time or classroom computers for the North Star constellation map maker where students can chart their life journey and goals. Encourage students to share their hopes and dreams with one another. Your students will not only learn more about themselves, they will learn more about their classmates.

Tips: Be sure to visit the Educators section of North Star for some outstanding free teacher resources. Find mini-posters and clip art. Note- the North Star Constellation Map Maker requires a Shockwave player.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using North Star in your classroom.

Fable Vision

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What it is: Fable Vision is a virtual town for kids filled with stories, games, and fun places to visit. The Fable Vision Library has a collection of online stories and stories that can be downloaded, borrowed, and shared. The Fable Vision Arcade fun games featuring the whimsical characters of Fable Vision. FVTV is the Fable Vision TV station, here students can watch mini cartoons that are fun and informational. At the Fable Vision post office allows students to send Fable Vision e-cards to family and friends. Fable Vision School is the home to all things educational. The first offering is the Fable Vision publishing workshop. Fable Radio is a place for students to listen to the Fable Vision books.

How to integrate Fable Vision into the classroom: Fable Vision is a fun virtual world that teaches reading and writing language skills. Use this site during literacy time. Read fables together using a projector. Use the Fable Vision School as part of the writing publishing center in your classroom. Students can stop by the Fable Vision School to learn about publishing and then open a word processing program to digitally publish their writing. Students will love the Fable Vision stories, use them for retelling and story ordering activities.

Tips: Be sure to visit the Educators section of Fable Vision for some outstanding free teacher resources. Find mini-posters, a guide to Sparking the Creative Spirit, a Fable Vision Field Guide, and a Fable Vision clip art collection.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Fable Vision in your classroom.

Mighty Book

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What it is: Mighty Book is a fun, interactive website that makes reading exciting with animated talking books…animated story songs…animated jokes, games, puzzles and riddles. All with words that highlight in sync with the stories and songs. It’s so much fun, students don’t even know they’re learning to read. The site is very engaging for students. The link I have provided is for the Mighty Books home page. These are free interactive books and games. However, this is only a small portion of what Mighty Books has to offer.  For $24.95 a year your class can have full access to the membership portion of the site and for $99 a year your school can have full access to the membership portion of the site which allows access to hundreds of animated books, 5 new books are added each month.

How to integrate Mighty Books into the classroom: Mighty Books can be used for whole class instruction or individual instruction. Use the animated talking books during reading instruction. These books would be great for recall and story ordering activities. For whole class instruction, use a projector (speakers are a must on this site!). Struggling readers would also love the “read along” aspect of this site. If you are an art teacher, or study art in the classroom, be sure to visit the interactive museum together. It is organized wonderfully and includes kid-friendly information about the artist and the genre.

Tips: Make sure to visit the teachers page for some great integration ideas as well as some free printouts!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Mighty Book in your classroom.

VoiceThread

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What it is: VoiceThread brings Web 2.0 communication to presentations. Slide show presentations are no longer static, VoiceThread makes them interactive collaborative learning experiences. Features include: the ability to create voice comments, voice recording within a browser allows for recording of multiple voices, doodling which captures drawing as an animation synced to voice or text commentary…listeners can watch the process, voice threads can be embedded in other sites, one account can have many identities so a classroom can switch identities on the fly without having to sign out, media importing so slide show presentations and pictures become collaborative conversations, comment moderation abilities, and the ability to zoom in and pan images.

How to integrate VoiceThread into the classroom: VoiceThread has hundreds of uses, the following are a few that I came up with. Use VoiceThread to create a time line of the students day. Students can record themselves describing different events of the day. Parents and out of town family can see what happens on a typical day in your classroom. Debates can be hosted and conducted using Voice Thread. VoiceThread can make history interactive, for example, host an art history artist critique and discussion. Create a book group using VoiceThread where students interact and discuss their reading together. Students can read their stories and record as a VoiceThread (this also makes a special keepsake!). Teachers can use VoiceThread for math problem demonstrations, step by step science “experiments”, staff training, or to teach a second language. Computer teachers, what about creating Voice Threads to teach your students when you can’t be there? This would make life easy for a substitute and ensure that your students are on track when you return.

Tips: Go to the “help” section of VoiceThread for some great interactive tutorials.

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

Interactives

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What it is: Interactives is a truly amazing website for teachers and students. Interactives provides educators and students with strategies, content, and activities that can enhance and improve students’ skills in a variety of curricular areas including math, literature and language, science, history, and the arts. The site has great webquest/interactive activities on a variety of subjects for first through twelfth grades. These activities are extremely well done. The spelling bee activity is really the only activity appropriate for first grade but I found that many of the activities that were rated for middle and high school students, would be appropriate for elementary students as well. I cannot say enough about this site, it is a truly amazing site for teachers and students!

How to integrate Interactives into the classroom: Interactives has a variety of interactive activities for the subjects listed above. These would be great to use as an introduction to a new unit, or as a learning activity or field trip in a unit. The Interactives could be completed as a whole class (using a projector), in groups (center style in the one or two computer classroom), or individually (in the computer lab setting). Any of these options would be time well spent for your students! Each Interactive presents the student with information about the unit and follows with interactive activities such as building a roller coaster, collecting rocks, or tracing the growth of the United States.

Tips: Sign up for the learner.org newsletter for some great teaching tips and ideas.

Knowledge Box

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What it is: Knowledge Box has math, science, language arts, and social studies games and videos for primary elementary students. These games are interactive and very impressive. The math section includes a video about finding numerals, a cute “ballet” and song about patterns, a shape game called Space Shapes, and a subtraction game called Math Maze. The language arts section includes a great little video called When Two Vowels Go Walking, a folk tale called The Wise Old Women, a picture pick game based on the short “a”, and a folktale. The science section includes a video about the basics of electricity, a health video about organs (catchy songs), a physical science game about force and motion, and a young scientist virtual experiment on growing plants. The social studies section includes a video about the balance of nature, a video about storms, a game about different viewpoints, and a game to teach map and globe vocabulary.

How to integrate Knowledge Box into the classroom: Use Knowledge box as an introduction to an activity or unit. Students can use some of the interactive science games with the scientific method. Have students experiment in the online environment and record their hypothesis, test and results of their experiments. Use the videos to support your curriculum. Students can watch the videos in a center setting or all at once with the projector. These are content rich games and videos and will support any curriculum well!

Tips: Knowledge Box is a media rich website and will require a fairly quick Internet connection. Make sure that your connection speed is adequate before assigning games on Knowledge Box.

Kidoons

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What it is: Kidoons brings time-honored, universally recognized stories to life. Stories include tales from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Thorton Burgess, and more. Kidoons offers both online stories and games for kids developing literacy skills.

How to integrate Kidoons into your classroom: Offer students the opportunity to use Kidoons during silent reading time, or during a unit on one of the time-honored authors listed above. The online books are not read for the students, so it is best used with independent readers.

Tips: Visit the teachers section to join the Kidoons teacher’s resource newsletter. Kidoons will alert you of any new games, stories, and ideas for your classroom.

Kidoons does have advertisements on it, use this as an opportunity to teach kids about how to spot ads on the Internet.

 

 

Podcast

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What it is: A podcast is a digital media recording that can be saved on and distributed over the Internet.

How to use Podcasting in your classroom: Use a podcast to record students reading. This can be used for reading records, for pronunciation, and reading fluency. Students, teachers, and parents can listen to reading records recorded over the course of the school year for fluency and progress made. Podcasts can also be used to share news with students and families, guest speakers, student presentations, student produced podcasts, lessons, assessment, digital stories, motivation, auditory learners, celebrating student work, interactive media center, a tool to help struggling students, to provide a “window” to your classroom for parents, and to show student growth at parent teacher conferences.

Tips: Podcasts can be created using several programs such as Apple’s Garageband (this application comes standard on Macintosh computers), Audacity which is a free open source software for recording and editing sounds, and My Podcast where podcasts can be recorded and hosted for free.

Clifford Interactive Story Books

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What it is: Clifford Interactive Story Books features Scholastic’s Clifford the Big Red Dog in four interactive books and four fun games. The games include concentration, make a word, letter match, and sound match.

How to integrate Clifford Interactive Story Books into your classroom: Use Clifford for beginning and emergent readers. Early readers can practice phonemic awareness and phonics skills as they actively listen to words read aloud and select which words to include in their book. Set up the Clifford site as a reading center.

Tips: Find lessons to use with Clifford on the Teacher’s Guide page. Lessons include beginning consonant sounds, letter recognition, short vowels, and long vowels.

 

 

Berenstain Bears

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What it is: The popular children’s series, Berenstain Bears goes 21st century with their very own website. Students can visit the art gallery, read biographies of each of the bears, print out activities, read interactive story books, visit Barn theater for some Berenstain Bear videos, write an email to the Bears at the post office and more.

How to integrate Berenstain Bears into your classroom: Allow students to explore the Berenstain Bear site as part of their reading time. The site is sure to motivate students to read. This is a great site to have on hand for indoor recess days!

Tips: Make sure you have the most current Java and Quicktime players for the interactive books and videos.