Category: Subject

Read the Words

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Read the Words2630 views


What it is: Read the Words is a free website that offers an audio player that will read anything you want. The Reader on the audio player can be listened to online, downloaded to a mp3 player, broadcasted as a podcast, or posted on a website or blog. The first step to creating your reader is selecting what you want read, this can be uploaded from a PDF, MS Word, HTML file, or input manually, cut and pasted, through RSS or URL. Step 2 is selecting a reader for your purposes, there are 14 readers to choose from. The readers speak English, Spanish, and French. Each reader has unique voices and some have accents. You can control the reader’s speed and pitch. Best of all it takes approximately one minute to generate an hour long recording.

How to integrate Read the Words into the classroom: Read the Words would be an excellent way to guide a webquest for students, create a reader to steer students through each activity in the webquest. If you have mp3 players available for checkout, create a reader for guided reading. These can be used in class during silent reading time or checked out for home use so that the student learning day can be extended. The readers would be excellent for history or science reading where vocabulary can be challenging. Read the Words is perfect for your auditory learners and because you can have text that is already in your lesson read, the differentiation for these students is short and sweet. Read the Words would also be great for English language learners or for English speakers learning Spanish or French.

Tips:
Take some time initially to listen to each of the readers. Choose the one that is easiest for your students to understand and best fits your purposes.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Read the Words in your classroom.

Leon Math Movies

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Leon Math Movies3921 views


What it is: Leon Math Movies is a part of the I Know That website that I have posted about in the past. After introducing this to a new set of second graders today I knew I needed to write about this specific part of I Know That. The kids absolutely love Leon Math Movies and it helps them practice their math skills (truly they will play this one at home without being asked). It is a great way to reinforce math facts and give some great math fact practice. Best of all it can be adapted to whatever math skill they are learning. They can practice counting, skip counting, all levels of addition, all levels of subtraction, multiplication, division, and a mix of addition and subtraction. Leon is a chameleon that goes on adventures (think Indiana Jones), as the cartoon plays, students have to solve math problems on the on screen PDA to help Leon during his adventures. The storylines and graphics are really well done and fun. Students can choose from 3 math adventure movies and any combination of practice they need. When they finish an adventure they can print out a certificate showing their math fact progress. So much fun!!

How to integrate Leon Math Movies into the classroom: Leon Math Movies are perfect for any classroom or lab configuration. The movies are fun for whole class participation on an interactive whiteboard or with a projector, call students up one at a time to help Leon by solving math problems. This is also a good one to set up on the classroom computers as a math center that students can visit throughout the week. Or, you can use it in the computer lab setting with each student playing individually. If you live in an area where you can assign this one for homework, I guarantee you will have full class participation!

Tips: There are banner ads on the I Know That website, I use these as an opportunity to talk to my class about what an ad is and what the advertisers want us to do. There is also an option to register before playing a game. I always tell my students to choose the “Maybe Later” option so that we don’t have to worry about keeping track of usernames and passwords.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Leon Math Movies in your classroom.

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Zoho Challenge

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Zoho Challenge1975 views


What it is: Zoho may look familiar to you if you have been with me for a while. Zoho has a great online suite of office productivity tools such as spreadsheets, word documents, and online presentations. If you haven’t ever tried out the Zoho tools, they are definitely worth a look! Zoho has a new fabulous tool for teachers, called Zoho Challenge. Zoho Challenge allows teachers to easily conduct tests online in 4 simple steps. Zoho Challenge allows for multiple choice questions and descriptive questions. Results are displayed immediately for you and your students (although this setting can be altered to fit your needs.) Time limits can be specified, difficulty levels calculated automatically, and online access to students details. Zoho Challenge also has the ability to send emails to your students with their scores. Zoho makes it simple to create multiple exams, add candidates, schedule tests for future dates, look at student performance, find out who passed the test in a quick glance, view a “report card”, and view a graphical representation of overall results.

How to integrate Zoho Challenge into the classroom: Zoho Challenge can be used for any classroom testing. It makes it extremely easy for you to grade tests and see the results graphically. Zoho Challenge will save you time and quickly show you who understood the tested material and who needs more practice. Zoho Challenge is best used in a computer lab or mobile lab setting.

Tips: Test results can be sent home to parents via email…cool!

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

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Bloust

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Bloust2661 views


What it is: Bloust is a free website builder for teachers. It is extremely simple to use and allows teachers to easily broadcast important class information, communicate and collaborate web 2.0 style with other teachers within the Bloust community, organize classroom documents, and much more! Bloust also offers a place for students to organize their school life, network with their school friends on Bloust’s private student community, and develop and join clubs.

How to integrate Bloust into the classroom: No matter what age level you teach, having a classroom website can greatly improve school to home communication and extend the student learning day. Bloust makes it very simple to create and maintain a website…truly! Even those who have never created a website before will be able to quickly create and update their site. Try it out, I think you will be impressed! When you have your website ready to go, think about adding content such as: the weekly spelling list, homework assignments, important upcoming dates, links to great sites that correlate with your curriculum, make the site dynamic, a place your students will want to come back to!

Tips: When signing up be sure to check your Spam email folder for the registration email.

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


Reading Rockets

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Reading Rockets1750 views


What it is: In honor of No TV week, I am posting about a great resource for teachers called Reading Rockets. Reading Rockets offers free reading guides created for teachers who want to improve the reading achievement of children. These guides can be downloaded, printed and distributed with permission. The site also features strategies to help kids who struggle with reading, techniques for teaching reading, great books and authors for kids, podcasts and videos, webcasts, blogs about reading, and some spectacular reading resources. It is a free one stop shop!

How to integrate Reading Rockets into the classroom: Reading Rockets is a wonderful resource for you to utilize in your reading classroom. The strategies and freebies offered here are valuable and worth taking a look at!

Tips: The Reading Rockets site also has links to free guides from other organizations about reading. Turn off that TV and improve your reading curriculum! 🙂

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


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Writing Repeater with Loopy

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Writing Repeater with Loopy11208 views

What it is: Writing Repeater with Loopy is a virtual piece of paper that lets you write letters or words and plays them back with looping.

How to integrate Writing Repeater with Loopy into the classroom: The Writing Repeater is ideally used with an interactive whiteboard. Teachers or students can demonstrate handwriting and the Writing Repeater will play back the correct letter formation in a loop. This is perfect for teaching handwriting, you can show the technique with your infared pen and the Writing Repeater plays the formation of the letters over and over while students practice on their own. It is also ideal for students who are struggling with handwriting, they can use the Writing Repeater and you can replay their formation to see where the disconnect is.

Tips: The online site will save your handwriting sample (even if you close your web browser) until you create a new sample.

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

Help a Hedgehog

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Help a Hedgehog4838 views

What it is: Help a Hegehog is a phonics game where students read a set of words as fast as they can to beat a timer. The online game saves the last score so students can work to beat their score. You can choose from a set list of words, or enter your own words based on what your class is working on.

How to integrate Help a Hedgehog into the classroom: Help a Hedgehog can be used on your interactive whiteboard with the whole class, individually, or in a remedial reading classroom. If you play as a class, each day students can work to beat the previous days score. Individually and students can try to beat their own score. This is a great way to start phonics instruction each morning and as practice for new vocabulary. Enter your own vocabulary for students to practice spelling words, science or math vocabulary, etc. Extend the game by adding the rule that students have to define the vocabulary word before they can move onto the next word.

Tips: This site is intended for phonics instruction but would be appropriate for secondary elementary as well with the addition of your own vocabulary. You could even use this tool for math practice, type in problems instead of words and request that the students give the answer before moving onto the next problem. This would be a great way to start your math class with some mental math!

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

Interactive Word Tree

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Interactive Word Tree2280 views

 

What it is: The Interactive Word Tree is perfect for use on your new Wiimote Whiteboard (or any other interactive whiteboard.) The Word Tree allows students or teachers to input up to 26 phonemes or words that become apples on the interactive tree.

How to integrate the Interactive Word Tree into your curriculum: The Interactive Word Tree is very flexible based on your classroom needs. Type in short vowel and long vowels and have the students take turns moving all the short vowel words to one side of the tree and all the long vowel words to the other side. Or, type in spelling words and have students move the apples into alphabetical order. Or, type in science vocabulary and students can categorize words on the tree based on similarities. You can also type in words that form compound words, prefixes and suffixes, etc. for students to practice matching apples. It would also be a wonderful tool for matching rhyming words, synonyms, antonyms, the possibilities are truly limitless since you can type in your own words. Another great feature: your words are automatically saved in the list even if you close the web browser so you don’t have to re-type in the words or vocabulary each day. You can add, delete, or change words at any time. Such a cool tool! As I am writing this I keep thinking of additional uses like preparing for a matching test, simple math problems with the problem on one apple and the answer on another.

Tips: You don’t have to use this great tool with the interactive whiteboard, it would also be a great center for the one to two computer classroom or even for use in the computer lab.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Interactive Word Tree in your classroom.

Bookcasting

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Bookcasting5136 views


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What it is: Bookcasting is actually a term I made up. It is essentially a podcast about a book. My third grade students just finished their first round of Bookcast recordings that we uploaded to a Wetpaint Wiki. A Bookcast is a movie trailer-like review of a book that students create and share with one another. My students used GarageBand to record their podcasts (you could also use a free tool like Audacity) and add sound effects, then they published the Bookcast on our class G-cast account, and finally embedded the media player onto our WetPaint wiki.

How to integrate Bookcasting into your curriculum: Bookcasting is a fun alternative to the standard book report. It allows kids to be creative and gives them a great sense of audience. Bookcasting also has the added benefit of acting as a book review for other students to listen to. Bookcasting makes story retell a lot of fun! My plan is to have a link to our WetPaint wiki in the library so that students can listen to a peer review of a book before they check it out.

Tips: I had all of my students create a Bookcast on the same book before reviewing on their own. This gave them an easy starting place but still provided room for creativity. Click on the Easy Reader link on our wiki to hear the Bookcasts the students created.

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

Super Why!

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Super Why!2712 views

 

What it is: Super Why is a great new website created by PBS. Super Why is perfect for kindergarten through first grade and for remedial readers. The site focuses on helping kids gain important foundational reading skills such as alphabet, word families, spelling, comprehension, and vocabulary. The Super Why team is a group of super hero’s made up of four cartoon characters who solve problems with their reading skills, this is based on the Super Why TV show on PBS. Although the site is intended to be used in conjunction with the Super Why TV show, it is valuable as an independent reading skill tool as well. The site, games, and activities are fun and will hold the attention of your students while teaching them important basic reading skills that are needed as the foundation of literacy.

How to integrate Super Why into your curriculum: Super Why is one of those websites that is very flexible in its uses and applications. The Super Why site can be used as a center in the 1 or 2 computer classroom, independently in the computer lab setting, and as a whole class with a projector. (This is also a fun one for interactive white boards!) The online games can be played as part of your regular reading curriculum or you can print out ready made lesson plans that use the site. The lesson plans are very through and fun.

Tips: Check out the teacher section of the Super Why site for printable lesson plans, worksheets, and a great list of resources both web based and books.

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