Grade Level – Page 88 – iLearn Technology

Picturing America Bookshelf

November 19, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2292 views

What it is: I have written a few posts about Picturing America but I have to do another one! Picturing America is now offering a free Bookshelf to k-12 libraries. The Picturing America Bookshelf is a set of classic books for readers in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Applications for the Picturing America Bookshelf are being accepted online now through Jan. 30, 2009. All that is required of your school is that you would encourage young readers to explore the Picturing America books. The great literature included in the Bookshelf can provide students with a window into our nation’s character, ideals, and goals. The books will give students the chance to experience some of the most iconic times, people, places, and stories in American history. The Bookshelf comes with the following titles:

Kindergarten to Grade 3: Walt Whitman: Words for America by Barbara Kerley; Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez by Kathleen Krull; Cosechando esperenza: La historia de César Chávaz by Kathleen Krull (translated by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy); The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Sweet Music in Harlem by Debbie Taylor.

Grades 4 to 6: The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich; American Tall Tales by Mary Pope Osborne; On the Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck; Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule by Harriette Gillem Robinet; The Captain’s Dog: My Journey with the Lewis and Clark Tribe by Roland Smith.

Grades 7 to 8: The Life and Death of Crazy Horse by Russell Freedman; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving; La leyanda de Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (translated by Manual Broncano); Across America on an Emigrant Train by Jim Murphy; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

Grades 9 to 12: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis; Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange by Elizabeth Partridge; Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck; Viajes Con Charley – En Busca de América by John Steinbeck (translated by José Manuel Alvarez Flórez); Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
Bonus: Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out by The National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance; 1776: The Illustrated Edition by David McCullough.

These books would be excellent companions to the Picturing America art and curriculum! Be sure to apply today, if the Picturing America art is any indication of the quality of the bookshelf, it will be amazing!

Tips: Be sure to visit National Endowment for the Humanities site EDSITEment for sample lesson plans and resources to enhance the use of the Bookshelf in your classroom or library.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Picturing America Bookshelf in your school.

Group Table

November 18, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment10789 views

What it is: “GroupTable is a web-based software and success network developed specifically to help student groups improve document management, project planning and communication.” Group Table helps students stay organized with all of their group projects and study groups in one place. Students can see all of their groups in one place including any file uploads, posts, tasks, upcoming events and more. Each student and group has their own binder on Group Table that allows them to organize, store and share word documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in one easy-to-use location. Group Table has the ability to create to do lists and assign tasks or remind others about upcoming events. Each group gets a dedicated chat room and discussion board with Group Table making collaboration and communication simple and efficient. This site was created by college students for students. Although the target audience is high school and college age students, Group Table could be effectively used in the secondary elementary classroom and the middle school classroom.

How to integrate Group Table into the classroom: For high school and college students, Group Table is a great site to introduce students to for their own group creation. Secondary elementary and middle school students would benefit from a teacher led group on Group Table. This is a great way to introduce your students to effective collaboration, communication, and 21st century literacy skills. It is essential that students learn how to collaborate on projects using web 2.0 technologies and Group Table provides the perfect space to practice.

Tips: Teachers, create a study group for your classroom that your students can join.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Group Table in your classroom.

Education Diigo

November 17, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2176 views

What it is: Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts! The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related. If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web. Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.

How to integrate Education Diigo into the classroom: Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together. Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo. Students can collaborate online to solve the problem. Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.” This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web. Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!

Tips: Your Education Diigo account must be approved so sign up today!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Education Diigo in your classroom.

Build Your Wild Self

November 13, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3104 views

What it is: Build Your Wild Self is a website I heard about on A Geeky Momma’s blog (which I thoroughly enjoy!). The site fits perfectly into my classroom this week as our Book Fair theme this year is “Safari”. The site, created by the New York Zoos and Aquarium, lets students create a character called their “Wild Self”. Students can choose a character and then add crazy hair, arms, legs, etc. to make them wild. There are even fun sound effects for the different backgrounds they add!

How to integrate Build Your Wild Self into the classroom: This would be a great site to use with students after reading a book like “Where the Wild Things Are”. Students could create their own Wild Things and write themselves a Wild Things story featuring themselves. This is also a great site to use with kindergarten and first grade students who are learning about different animals. As they build their Wild Self they can name what animal the crazy part belongs to. Older elementary students also enjoy working on this website, my students created a wild self for their safari passports for our book fair this week and really enjoyed it from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Tips: The Wild Self can be printed out, sent to a friend, or saved as a desktop.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Build Your Wild Self in your classroom.

Lunarpages Free Education Web Hosting

November 13, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2713 views

What it is: Lunarpages is a web hosting web service that offers free hosting to k-12 educators and schools! The free web hosting is intended to be used by teachers only (individual student web hosting is not available). Lunarpages will provide a free web builder, free unlimited phone and email support, unlimited email addresses and FTP accounts, 500MB of storage, 20GB data transfer, and one free domain name registration for each account. The only stipulation? You must have a banner ad somewhere on the site that says that Lunarpages donated the site…thats it!

How to integrate Lunarpages into the classroom: Lunarpages hosting is an excellent option for those of you who enjoy building your websites with software like iWeb. It is also an excellent option for a class website built with the web builder Lunarpages provides. Classroom websites are an outstanding way to communicate with parents and students about the goings on in your classroom.

Tips: The free web hosting is only available for k-12 public schools. Learn about how to get your free web hosting with Lunarpages here.

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

Middle Spot

November 11, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3131 views

What it is: Middle Spot is a spectacular new search engine for teachers, librarians, and students performing research. Middle Spot lets you see your results, you can pan and zoom individual website results. Workpads allow you to save and annotate results and sort by collections. Workpads can also be shared with others (colleagues, students, or professional learning communities). What I love about Middle Spot is the blending of the traditional search results (listed along the left side of the screen) with the snapshot results where you can see the results. When your cursor scrolls over a screen shot, the related traditional result and information is highlighted on the left making it very quick and easy to find exactly the results you are looking for. Middle Spot allows you to search the web or search images, very handy!

How to integrate Middle Spot into the classroom: Middle Spot is a great place for students to do research because of the ability to organize their finds and ideas right in the search engine with workpads. If students are working on group projects, they can share their findings and workpads with others in their group. Middle Spot is also ideal for teachers, collect your search results in one place based on topic or curriculum objectives and share with colleagues. Create your own “webquest” with Middle Spot by creating and sharing a workspace with your students. Make workpads for whole class lessons with an interactive whiteboard or projector to save yourself from typing in each url for the activity individually.

Tips: Middle Spot is truly my new favorite search engine. Your students will love the ability to take notes about websites and cite their sources as they go in the workpads. It really is well designed for the classroom setting!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Middle Spot in your classroom.

Big Ideas for Education

November 10, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2893 views

What it is: Big Ideas for Education is part of the Landmark Project created by David Warlick. The purpose of the site is to collect “priority actions that might be taken by a new Department of Education that would promote shifts in education that are relevant to today’s students and their future.” After ideas have been collected, the submitted statements will be linked according to topic to pare down all ideas into no more than 20 basic action statements. The final action statements will be posted on Big Ideas for Education for educators to share insights about their favorite statements. You will be able to order the action statements in order of importance to you.

Head over to Big Ideas for Education and share your big idea. It only takes a minute; but if we educators come together and start discussing some of these great ideas, we will start seeing a shift in education.

My big idea is to: Shift teaching away from teacher as lecturer toward constructivism where students are constructing their own knowledge. (id 158) Technology and 21st century learning skills naturally flow into the constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Using technology within the context of the traditional classroom is always going to feel like you are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, it doesn’t flow naturally. Make sure to copy and paste your big idea into the comment section here…we want to know what your big ideas are!

Daft Doggy

November 7, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2723 views

What it is: I found Daft Doggy several months ago and put it in my “explore more” folder. The Daft Doggy site is in beta version and it isn’t obvious upon first visit what exactly it does. Today I had a little bit of time to go and explore the site more and I am glad I did! Daft Doggy is a free service that lets you record web browsing sessions, play them back, and share recorded sessions with others. It is very simple to use (only 2 clicks to start recording!) You type in the starting point URL and Daft Doggy keeps track of all subsequent URL’s along the way. Daft Doggy doesn’t record everything you do, it only remembers each separate URL you visit in a sequence, it does this both within the site or a separate external site. When students or teachers view the session, a blue bar at the top of the page shows the URL along with reverse and next navigation. Each recorded session is assigned a unique link making it easy to share with students or other staff. After you have recorded the sequence of sites, you have the option of labeling each site and even adding a voice recording that will play when that site is being viewed.

How to integrate Daft Doggy into the classroom: Daft Doggy is a great way to lead students through a series of activities on the web. Younger students especially who would have trouble keeping track of and typing mulitiple URL’s would benefit from a lesson recorded with Daft Doggy. Daft Doggy is also perfect for whole class instruction with a projector when mulitiple sites will be visited. The recorded session will keep you on track and keep you from having to type in multiple URL’s while teaching. As a computer teacher and technology integration specialist, I like Daft Doggy for the ability to make quick guides for students and teachers as well as tutorials. The Daft Doggy recordings are quick and easy to create making them ideal for quickly answering web questions or leading colleagues/students through websites. Make your own online virtual field trips or webquests for students using Daft Doggy. Student projects can also be enhanced with Daft Doggy. Students can create web presentations with site to share with peers. This would also be a great site to use as students are researching. Instead of trying to remember the exact search words and links they used to find a site, they can record their research so that they can re-trace their steps at a later time if needed. So cool!

Tips: This beta site definitely doesn’t have any frills, it is very basic but it gets the job done easily and quickly. To get started just create a login and you are ready to go!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Daft Doggy in your classroom.

Free Reading

November 6, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2750 views

What it is: Not all technology resources require students on a computer, some technology resources are specifically for you, the teacher, to enhance curriculum or for professional development. Free Reading is one such site. This incredible open source instructional program helps you teach early literacy. Free Reading provides a 40 week scope and sequence of phonemic awareness and phonics activities. The goals of Free Reading are to help you teach kids to read, to make quality research-based instruction for reading free, and to provide a community of educators with a common goal of reading intervention. Free Reading is really, truly free… downloads, prints, teaching materials are all completely free!

How to integrate Free Reading into the classroom: Free Reading is ideal for the reading intervention classroom, or for small guided reading groups. The program is an excellent reading program for kindergarten through third grade and for pullout programs for struggling readers. Even if you have a reading program in place, check out Free Reading. You will find excellent tools and materials that can be integrated into the current curriculum.

Tips: Free Reading has some great live sessions, be sure to check one out! (It is, of course, free!)

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Free Reading in your classroom.

The Cool Teacher Podcast

November 5, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2481 views

What it is: The Cool Teacher Podcast is a podcast by educational technologist Chris Haskell who is an instructor for pre-service teachers in methods and applications of technology integration in the classroom (notice any similarities to iLearn Technology?). The podcast “delivers cool tools, techniques, and tactics to transform your teaching.” In episode #7 that came out yesterday, Chris gives a shout out to iLearn Technology’s post on Glogster (thank you Chris!!). The podcasts are very entertaining to listen to and give great ideas for using technology in the classroom!

How to integrate The Cool Teacher Podcast into the classroom: The Cool Teacher Podcast is a wonderful stop (in addition to iLearn Technology) for great ideas and tips for integrating technology into your classroom. You can find the Cool Teacher Podcast at the links here as well as on iTunes in the iTunes store (it is free to subscribe to). Listen to these great podcasts while you are grading, on the drive home, or while you are cleaning up your classroom for the day…just be sure to keep a pad and pencil handy to jot down the great ideas you are sure to hear!

Tips: Chris also has a blog related to the podcasts, you can check that out here. Thanks again Chris!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using The Cool Teacher Podcast in your classroom.