Category: Resource type

Jeopardy Labs

Kelly Tenkely3 Comments on Jeopardy Labs4075 views

What it is:  Jeopardy Labs is an awesome website that lets you build a Jeopardy game board without the use of Power Point!  All that you have to do to start is enter a password so that others can’t edit your game.  Then it is as simple as titling it, typing in categories and then entering questions and answers.  This is really SO easy to use!  You can also search through Jeopardy games created by others.  You won’t be able to edit these but you may find a ready made game that fits your needs perfectly.  Jeopardy Labs was created by Matt Johnson, an undergraduate at WSUV.  Impressive!

How to integrate Jeopardy Labs into the classroom:   Jeopardy Labs is a great way to review and practice class material in a fun, engaging way.  Use Jeopardy Labs to help your kids study for a test, to review a unit, or just as a fun learning activity on a Friday afternoon.  In the computer lab, I have used Jeopardy as a way to teach students how to perform searches.  Students can Google the questions and the first team to find the correct answer wins the points.  

 

Tips:  Before you reinvent the wheel, browse through other Jeopardy games…someone may have already done the work for you!

 

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

How Toons

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on How Toons2825 views

What it is:  How Toons is like an Instructables site for kids.  Kids learn through cartoons and videos how things work and how to make things.  This is kind of a How It’s Made website for kids.  Topics include science, space, nature, events, and a how to section.  The cartoons illustrate a concept and accompanying videos expand on the concept. 

How to integrate How Toons into the classroom:   How Toons is an excellent site to excite your students about science.  Share a How Toons with your students and then explore the science behind it together.  Use a How Toons as inspiration, after viewing How Toons, students can create their own cartoon on any topic being studied in class.  How Toons are great for teaching kids how to follow step by step instructions and would also be useful for teaching them how to create their own instructions.

 

Tips:  How Toons would be a fun RSS feed to subscribe to as a class!

 

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

Vista Zoo

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Vista Zoo3104 views

What it is:  Vista Zoo is a website where students can create incredible virtual tours of the world by combining pictures, video, audio, and objects in 3-D.  The tours are uploaded and placed on a map.  Tours can then be embeded into any website.  Students can also sign up for their own Vista Zoo portal that they can customize and save their projects.  Vista Zoo is also available on the iPhone and iPod touch (if you are so lucky to have a lab of them!)

 

How to integrate Vista Zoo into the classroom:  Vista Zoo would be a neat way for students to display geography learning.  Students could collect images in history or current images to embed in their maps to learn about a subject.  Teachers can also create virtual tours for students to take individually or as a class with a projector or interactive whiteboard.  This is a great way to teach geography and history, your visual students will love it!   The ability to add audio and video makes these virtual field trips around the world pretty amazing.  If your class has a pen pal class in another country, it would be fun for each group of students to create a virtual tour of their town for the pen pals to view.

 

Tips:  Use Creative Commons images from Flickr or open stock images from a site like stock.xchng for images to embed.

 

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

Audible Kids

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Audible Kids4724 views

What it is:  Audible Kids was a really exciting find for me today because I am writing an article for the upcoming issue of iLearn magazine about iPods in education.  Audible Kids is a website that engages kids in storytelling through audiobooks.  Kids can download books, read and post reviews for each book, and share their favorites with others.  Kids can discover books searching by keyword, age group, category, award winners, and more.  Students can listen to samples of the stories before they download them with a handy in-browser play feature.  While Audible Kids is not a totally free site, they do have some excellent audiobooks that are free to download.  Roscoe Orman (of Sesame Street) is one of the cheif storytellers on Audible Kids.  Enhanced Audible Kids audiobooks have pictures with the story, perfect for the iPod Touch or a computer center.  For free downloads click here.  Other books range in price from about $0.99 to $20.00. 

 

How to integrate Audible Kids into the classroom:  Because free products for the classroom excited me the most, I will focus on how you can use the free downloads in your classroom.  Use Audible Kids downloads for an iPod listening center, or classroom computer listening center.  Students can register for free Audible Kids accounts and discuss the stories in an online environment with their own classmates as well as children around the world.  Use the stories as a place for students to discover rich storytelling.  Encourage them to listen for voice, emphasis, tone, rhythm as the story is read to them.  Students who learn to listen for these and are exposed to excellent storytellers, will become more expressive readers themselves.  Students could listen to the audiobooks and use a computer drawing program (or just paper and crayon) to draw their own pictures to go along with the story.  This is a great way for kids to learn visualization reading strategies.  If you want to take it a step further, pictures could be gathered into iPhoto or a slideshow accompanied by the audio.  Students will be the illustrator for the audiobooks!  

 

Tips:  If you are in a Mac environment, download Skitch.  Your sudents can draw their pictures on the computer as they listen and they can easily be uploaded to the Skitch website or into iPhoto, Keynote, or Garage Band to create their own illustrated audiobook.  So neat!  Audible Kids has the option of giving the gift of audiobooks.  If this is something you are serious about making a part of your classroom, consider asking parents to donate audiobooks to your classroom library. 

 

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

The Tale of Despereaux Adventure

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on The Tale of Despereaux Adventure2857 views

What it is:  I learned about this awesome interactive site from Larry Ferlazzo’s blog.  It is just too good to pass up blogging about it!  This interactive story book lets students create their own tale in the Kingdom of Dor.  The students become a part of the story as they create a character version of themselves that takes part in the story adventure.  Students can choose to have interactive games and puzzles included in their story.  The story is a virtual pop-up book, it is read to students and they can read along with subtitles.  Along the way, students have to help solve problems in the story by playing an interactive game. 

 

How to integrate The Tale of Despereaux Adventure into the classroom:  The Tale of Despereaux Adventure is a really impressive site.  This would be a great introduction to the book by Kate DiCamillo.  The site would act as a teaser for the book that would have students eager to read.  Even if you aren’t reading The Tale of Despereaux, this is a fun way to get students interested in reading (most of them won’t even realize that they are reading!)  Set up a Tale of Despereaux center on your classroom computer during reading time for a month.  Each day two new students can visit the center and take part in their own adventure.  This site could also be used with an interactive whiteboard or projector for the students to create a whole class story.  If students choose to read the story with the interactive games, they  will be stopped along the way to complete puzzle and logic games throughout the story.  These type of games are great to get kids thinking creatively and outside of the box.  The story can be viewed in different languages, this would be a fun site for foreign language classes to visit in the language they are studying!

 

Tips:  One thing I don’t love about this site is that it asks students to enter their first and last name to be part of the story.  I teach my students never to put their last name online.  I ask my students to make up a last name when creating their story. 

 

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using The Tale of Despereaux Adventure in your classroom.

New Blog: Confident Teacher

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on New Blog: Confident Teacher2648 views

I have embarked on a new adventure with two other educators and bloggers in the form of a collaborative blog.  The blog is called the Confident Teacher and will be updated and maintained by myself, Mr. Bibo (Cal Teacher Blog), and Mr. Harmless (Harmless Thoughts).  This blog will be more of a discussion of education, teaching, learning, and life.  I encourage you to join us on this new adventure and jump into the conversation!  See you all there!  (My first post is called The Greatest Teacher)

World Math Day 2009

Kelly Tenkely4 Comments on World Math Day 20093676 views

What it is:  World Math Day is March 4, 2009!  If you participated in World Math Day last year with the World Math Day website, you know how motivating and fun it was.  If not, this is your year to join in the fun!  Students play against other students in countries around the world in real time mental arithmetic games.  Each game lasts for 60 seconds.  Students can play as many games as they want to.  When you sign up your class, you will choose the level of difficulty based on age and ability.   World Math Day is best for students who are 5 to 18 years old (k-12!).   There are even prizes awarded including student prizes, and school prizes for highest achievers.  Registration for World Math Day is open (and free), your students can start practicing right now!

 

How to integrate World Math Day into the classroom:  World Math Day was one of the highlights of math class last year.  The students who participated had a great time competing against other students from around the world.  I have never seen students so excited to practice math facts and many asked, “can we do this at home too?”  How often do you get students asking for more math practice at home?!  Get your students excited about competing on March 4 and start practicing now.  If you have one or two computers in the classroom you can set up a training center.  Reserve a computer lab during math class to practice as a class.  You can also split your class into teams of 3 to complete the 60 second games using a projector or interactive whiteboard.  You will not believe how motivating this site is for students!

 

Tips:  This is an amazing development, World Math Day 2009 is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch!!!  Woot, woot! Students can join in the fun of the practice period and work on their skills against other students before the big day. 

 

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using World Math Day in your classroom.

Password Bird

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Password Bird15226 views

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.

FontStruct

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on FontStruct1959 views

What it is: FontStruct is a free website that lets students build, share, and download fonts that they create in a simple font editor.  First students name their font, then they use the font editor to draw each character of the alphabet using font bricks and a grid system.  After each character has been created, the font can be downloaded and added to the fonts folder to be used in any word processing program or desktop presentation program.

 

How to integrate FontStruct into the classroom:  It would be fun to come up with a class font where each student is responsible for a letter in the font.  The font could be used for typing practice, or as a header for newsletters that go home each week. FontStruct is a motivating environment for students to practice forming their letters.  They love knowing that they created a font of their very own.  The fonts can be used for anything, I have found that my students love creating a font and using it for typing practice or as titles for projects or slide shows.  If you are creating a class font, this can be done on an interactive whiteboard or on a classroom computer.  If each student will be creating their own font, individual computers are needed.  

 

Tips:  FontStruct does require registration with an email address.  In my class, I created a school username and password so that each student didn’t have to register for an account individually. 

 

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

Movavi

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Movavi4007 views

What it is:  Movavi is a free, online video converter.  What I love about Movavi is its ease of use, there is no software to install and the site doesn’t have ads.  Enter a URL of a video or upload a file, choose your preferred output format, and enter your email address.  That is it! Movavi does the rest for you, you will get an email with a link to download the video.  Simple!  

 

How to integrate Movavi into the classroom: Movavi is great for those schools where YouTube and other video websites are blocked.  You can download the video for your class and view the downloaded version without worrying about it being blocked.  It is also great for those times when bandwidth is an issue.  Download the video and you won’t have to worry about a choppy video during peak Internet use times of the day.  After a video is downloaded, it can be viewed on a machine that isn’t Internet connected.  Embed the downloaded videos into PowerPoint or Keynote presentations.   You can even convert 5 videos at a time and have them merged into one video as part of the conversion process.

 

Tips:  Make sure you know which video formats play best on your computer before converting video.

 

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