For Teachers – Page 55 – iLearn Technology

ISTE10

June 27, 2010Kelly Tenkely8 Comments2782 views

Screen shot 2010-06-27 at 6.40.06 PM — @ktenkely (left) @amandacdykes (right)

This week I am at the #ISTE10 conference in Denver! The conference goes from June 27 to June 30. ISTE stands for the International Society of Technology in Education, the goal of the conference is to share proven ways that technology can improve and enhance education and learning. People from all over the world have come to Denver to learn together. It is truly an amazing sight to have so many passionate educators in one place!

Today I got the chance to meet my PLN in person, what a wonderfully bizarre experience. We interact on Twitter all day every day and it feels like we are already old friends. But we had no idea what the other really looked like, what facial expressions they make, what their voice sounded like. To start putting all of that together was pretty cool. I got the chance to spend the day with @kylepace, @amandacdykes, @thenerdyteacher, @MrsBMG, @buzzgarwood, and briefly met many other of my awesome PLN. All I can say is that I wish you all lived closer by so we could hang more often. We had a blast!

This week things are going to be a little different on iLearn Technology. My posts will be focused on what I am learning at #ISTE10 that I want to share with all of you. For those of you new to iLearn Technology, my posts are generally dedicated to quick easy ways to integrate technology into the classroom. Those posts will resume on Thursday. Until then, join me on my ISTE journey here and on Twitter. You can follow me @ktenkely or follow the #ISTE10 hash tag.

Aviary Education

June 25, 2010Kelly Tenkely3 Comments4378 views

Great news! Aviary has come out with a special education edition! In the Education version, teachers can create private student accounts, manage assignments and projects, use the image editor, vector editor, audio editor, and music creator. All content and images will be 100% school safe! Right now the Education site is in Beta, you can request an invitation to test the site with your students. If you aren’t familiar with the Aviary tools, check out my previous posts HERE. Aviary is a fabulous online alternative to those expensive Adobe creativity suites.

Hot Shot Business

June 25, 2010Kelly Tenkely5 Comments7467 views

What it is: The Disney website has a lot of engaging and fun content for kids, unfortunately, not all of it is educational. Hot Shot Business is one of the better Disney games I have seen for the classroom. It teaches kids about business and entrepreneurship through a fun simulation game. Students are introduced to the idea of entrepreneurship and franchising by their virtual business hosts, Kate and Jack. Kate and Jack offer advice and recommendations throughout the game. The decisions that students will make throughout the game will have consequences that extend beyond profits and losses alone. They will have to deal with environmental factors, as well as finding ways to provide jobs for members of the community. Students can choose to start a pet spa, a candy factory, a comic shop, custom skateboard shop, professional landscaping, or a magic shop. Kids are sure to find a business that they are interested in! The entire game is narrated which is great for all levels of readers. As students play the game, they will be exposed to the nuts and bolts of running their own business, they will have to make decisions about how to respond to market trends, how to respond to customer preferences, how to respond to fast breaking news reports that may affect their business, and how to respond to ethical dilemmas. Students even have access to a Hot Shot Business kit where they can download and print out business cards and fliers.

How to integrate Hot Shot Business into the classroom: Hot Shot Business was designed to meet national standards in both language arts and math, making it fit easily into any curriculum. The ideal setup for Hot Shot Business is a few days in the computer lab for a 1-to-1 setting where each student can work individually on setting up their own store. Game play could extend for several days depending on the unit that you are teaching. The Disney site has some excellent lesson plans and suggestions for implementation, I highly recommend them. I like the idea of connecting with entrepreneurs in the community during this unit so that as students are working through the game, they can get advice and recommendations from those who do it every day.

If you can’t make it happen in a computer lab setting over several days, choose a business to start as a class and make decisions as a team. You can do this using an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer. In this scenario, students will have to discuss their decisions and reason with each other to decide on a course of action.

Hot Shot Business is a really well designed game, it would be a great addition for the 3rd-6th grade classroom. I suspect that it ties into several of the curricula already being used in schools, I know that Treasures (MacMillan McGraw Hill) has units that it fits nicely into. This is great hands on learning, a definite step up from Lemonade Stand. 🙂

Tips: This is a really great site, but I must warn you that it eats up the bandwidth!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Hot Shot Business in your classroom.

Meet Me at Midnight

June 24, 2010June 25, 2010Kelly Tenkely5 Comments1488 views

What it is: As I said yesterday, the Smithsonian is a wealth of outstanding online activities and interactives. Meet Me at Midnight is an interactive adventure/comic book that takes place in the Smithsonian Art Museum. Through this fun mystery adventure, students are introduced to American art and Artists from the Smithsonian collection. Students are taken on adventures as they explore each item in the Root Monster’s treasure chest. The coyote teaches about sculpture, the headless horseman about landscape, and the ballerina about light. As students go through the adventures they will pick up art terminology. Each story takes place in five galleries: media, technique, design, purpose, and culture. Students will play art games and puzzles to find clues about where the artwork in the treasure chest should be returned to.

How to integrate Meet Me at Midnight into the classroom: Meet Me at Midnight is a fantastic interactive game for third to fifth grade students. The reading throughout the interactive is appropriate for 8-11 year old readers. To me, Meet Me at Midnight feels like a fun graphic novel/comic book adventure that students can interact in. The interactive takes time to get all the way through, once students get to certain points in the interactive, they can stop and get a code that they can plug in the next time they visit the site. They will pick up right where they left off. Meet Me at Midnight is a good way to pique students interest in art. There is a lot of good learning embedded in the games and puzzles. Because there is so much reading on this site, it would make a good reading center/thinking activity on classroom computers. Meet Me at Midnight is really best played individually in a computer lab setting, but I think students would also enjoy playing together in a whole class setting using a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard.

If your class takes a field trip to your local art museum, this site is a must visit prior to the field trip. It will give students common language about what they see at the museum and students can complete the accompanying Kids Activity guide. If a field trip to the art museum is out of the question, use this site as part of a virtual field trip experience for your students.

Tips: Are you taking your family on a trip to the art museum this summer; start your art adventure by visiting Meet Me at Midnight!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Meet Me at Midnight in your classroom.

A Walk in the Forest

June 23, 2010Kelly Tenkely4 Comments15189 views

What it is: The Smithsonian site is a wealth of outstanding activities and interactives. In the Walk in the Forest interactives, students are guided through a virtual forest where they do field research using the same scientific methods and tools that Smithsonian scientists use to monitor forest biodiversity. Students can act as dirt detectives, predicting which trees will thrive in each type of soil; learn about forest layers and the plants and animals that take up residence in each; identify a tree; observe seasonal changes; map the forest; and use amphibians as an indicator of the forest. Each of the interactives has the option of narration (audio) or non-narrated (students read through the interactive).

How to integrate A Walk in the Forest into the classroom: The interactive activities on A Walk in the Forest are very well made. They will have your students working and thinking like a scientist. The activities are meant to be completed by individual students, but if you don’t have access to a computer lab, they would also be excellent as a center on classroom computers or on the interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer. For whole class participation, send a team of scientists (your students) into the forest to investigate and collect data. Give each student a job to do on the forest adventure. For the students not at the board, create a field guide that they can fill out while they observe. As an extension activity, students can create an Animoto or Prezi about what they learned in the forest. They could also create a comic book style field guide about walking through a forest.

A Walk in the Forest is well suited to all elementary students. Independent readers can complete the activities without narration while emerging or struggling readers could have the interactive narrated.

Every year, we have an outdoor education program for our 5th graders. They spend a week in the mountains, in a forest, learning outside. If you do something similar, A Walk in the Forest is a great preparation activity for students. They can learn about the processes of collecting and analyzing data virtually before they do it in real life.

Tips: If you and your family are visiting national parks this summer, these are fun activities to do before hand that will transform your kids into scientists when they are exploring outdoors.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using A Walk in the Forest in your classroom.

TED Talk Tuesday: Tom Wujec Build a Tower, Build a Team

June 22, 2010Kelly Tenkely4 Comments2904 views

The group that consistently fails at the marshmallow task: recent graduates of business school.
Business students are trained to find the single right plan and then execute it. The problem with this strategy is that they wait for the last minute to add their marshmallow to the top of the structure and when their plan fails, it is a crisis.
The group that consistently succeeds at the marshmallow task: recent graduates of kindergarten.
Kindergarten students start with a model and they build successive prototypes of their structure. They always keep their marshmallow on top. They have multiple opportunities to refine their structure until it is working. With each version of the prototype, students are getting instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t and they can adjust accordingly.
Kids don’t spend time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti Inc. They aren’t jockeying for power, they are working together creatively and having fun.

What stands out to me about the data that Tom Wujec shares, is not that architects and engineers build the best towers (as he says, we would expect that), but that kindergartners are not very far behind. This makes me wonder about what important things we are deprogramming kids to do as we send them through the education system. If the education system was really working, I would expect that adults would be able to construct the best, highest towers. I would expect that those with the most education would build the best towers. But as we see, this isn’t the case. In school we teach students that everything has a correct answer. Sometimes that answer means filling in the “c” on a bubble test, and sometimes it means getting your teacher to nod and say “that’s right”. School has become a game of “guess what the teacher is thinking”. As a result, we have students who can come up with one correct solution to any problem. In the real world, we often need more than one right solution. Many times we need several solutions and creative thinking applied to the problem. Our most recent example of this is the BP oil spill. I can’t help but wonder what great solutions kindergartners would come up with that adults aren’t even considering because we have been deprogrammed to think that way.
What does this mean for schools? It means that we need more opportunities for students to explore multiple solutions to a problem, it means that we offer kids the chance to discuss and stop asking the one answer questions all the time. Sometimes there is one correct answer, but in life that isn’t always the case. Students need to be given the chance to explore both options.

(As a side note, it is interesting to me that when the incentive of a prize was offered, not one team had a standing structure. I am working my way through Daniel Pink’s book Drive right now and it mirrors what he says in the book.)

Crypto Kids

June 18, 2010Kelly Tenkely4 Comments5342 views

What it is: Crypto Kids is a website created by the National Security Agency all about creating and breaking codes. This is a fantastic critical thinking website that also taps into math, linguistics, engineering, and analyzing skills. I found Crypto Kids while I was hunting for an activity for students to learn more about codes as part of our Treasures reading series. Crypto Kids turns out to be an excellent site for all elementary classrooms. Students learn all about cryptology, the National Security Agency, and ciphers. Students get the chance to meet the characters of Crypto Kids which include: Crypto Cat, Decipher Dog, Rosetta Stone, Slate, Joules, T. Top, and the leader CSS Sam. Students can play logic games to test out their code breaking skills. There are three levels of game play beginner, intermediate, and advanced. As students play games, they will learn Morse Code, complete brainteasers that involve math and logic, create their own cipher machines, crack Yardleygrams and cryptograms, and learn some words in different languages. Students can then learn more about careers that use cryptograms and code breaking at the National Security Agency.

How to integrate Crypto Kids into the classroom: Crypto Kids is packed full of thinking and logic games and activities, many of which involve mathematical problem solving. Crypto Kids games and activities are a great way to get your students thinking critically before math class. Put one of the brain teasers up on the projector connected computer or interactive whiteboard for students to solve as a warm up activity. Crypto Kids games are short enough that they could be used as a math center activity on classroom computers. Students can visit the center in pairs or small groups and work on solving cryptograms together. The Yardleygrams are stories that must be solved, these are fun to solve as a whole class.

Since I was using this site to build background knowledge about codes with my students, we focused on what secret codes were, how they were used, and cracked some codes for practice. As an extension activity, I had students read the descriptions of the characters on Crypto Kids and write a short story about the character. These turned out great! Students have to use the character qualities that are written and craft a story about the character, paying attention to how they think the character would act and what special skills they could use to solve a problem.

Tips: Check out the Teacher/Parent section of the site for some additional resources.

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

MeeGenius

June 17, 2010Kelly Tenkely6 Comments3870 views

What it is: MeeGenius is an outstanding site I just learned about from @NMHS_Principal on Twitter. MeeGenius is an online library of picture books that kids can read independently or as a read along. Books can be personalized with students names, just answer a few quick questions and the book is rewritten for you. Each book comes with audio playback and word highlighting, perfect for beginning or struggling readers to read along.

How to integrate MeeGenius into the classroom: MeeGenius is a nice web library of picture books that can digitally expand your classroom library. Students will love the way they can personalize books using themselves and friends as characters in the book. Personalized books can be saved and shared with friends. Set up MeeGenius on classroom computers as a listening and reading center. Students can practice their reading, vocabulary, and fluency.

Begin the school year by making personalized books that contain your students names in them. Read them throughout the first week as a class on the interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer.

Older students can use MeeGenius, too! If you have students who are learning a foreign language, have them listen to or read a story and translate it into the language they are learning.

Tips: MeeGenius is also available as an app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

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

TED Talk Tuesday: Tim Brown urges designers to think big

June 15, 2010June 15, 2010Kelly Tenkely3 Comments3841 views

Today’s #edchat discussion on Twitter was all about training kids as critical thinkers. I believe that we are losing students as critical thinkers because in our current model of education, where we are standardizing education with tests, we teach kids that there is one correct answer to every question. We limit their thinking to what we have already determined is an acceptable answer to the question. This is extremely limiting. Critical thinking means that we aren’t satisfied with the easy answer, we think about multiple solutions to the problem and even think of additional questions. We approach a problem differently, more creatively.

In today’s TED Talk, Tim Brown talks about his journey in design and his tendency to think about problems on a small scale, limiting himself to the obvious answers and a single solution. Design wasn’t always this way, design used to be big. Design thinking solves problems and works to create world changing innovations. It seems to me that there is a strong correlation with what Tim refers to as Design Thinking and what we call critical thinking. Roger Martin calls this integrative thinking, the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions. Isn’t this what we are asking our students to do when we are looking for critical thinking? What we really want students to do is think as designers. When I watch children who haven’t yet entered the classroom, I notice a strong correlation between the way a child thinks and the way a designer thinks. They are questioners, tinkerers, and are never satisfied with one solution.

Design thinking could be our model for critical thinking in the classroom, but beyond that design thinking could be our solution to reform in education. Exploiting opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions.

Design is human centered, it starts with what humans need or might need. It means understanding culture and context. From destination to active participation that is meaningful and productive. Value is added through collaborative experiences and not through monetary gains alone (think Twitter). In times of change we need new thinking and new ideas. We are in the midst of massive change and we need to rethink what we accept as basic fundamentals. We need new choices because our current options are becoming obsolete. We need to take a divergent approach and come up with something that hasn’t been done before. What is the question we are trying to answer? What is the design brief for education.

The first step is to start asking the right questions. (I think #edchat does an honorable job of this!) What are the right questions?

iLearn Technology Edublogger Alliance #2

June 14, 2010June 14, 2010Kelly Tenkely8 Comments3953 views

Setting a deadline at the end of the school year was a BAD idea. It seemed feasible when I set the deadline but soon I was packing away 7 years of classroom… stuff, and sorting through 7 years of digital mess. Alas, the release of the second edublogger alliance is a little later than I had hoped. Better late than never, right? (If you joined the alliance and didn’t receive an email from me today, I have an email address from you that is invalid. Send me an email through my contact form with your correct email address so that I can re-send that email.)

As I compiled the second alliance and sorted through blogs, I was again reminded of the greatness I am surrounded by in the educational blogger community. Every time I read your blogs, I am overwhelmed with a sense of hope that together we can solve the problems of the educational system. With amazing educators like you there is nothing stopping us!

If you aren’t currently reading and following educational blogs, I highly recommend it. Nothing will boost your learning, enthusiasm, and professional development like subscribing to some good educational blogs. To subscribe, simply click on the link below and then choose the “subscribe” button. The blogs will be added to your Google Reader account.

Edublogger Alliance #2

The Original Edublogger Alliance

If you are new to Google Reader, here are some great keyboard shortcuts that will have you navigating quickly through those blogs in no time:

n- view the next post

p- view the previous post

v- view the original post (this is helpful when you want to comment on the post)

s- stars an item for your favorites

shift d- share the item with a note

r- refresh

a- add a subscription

If you come across a blog that is in another language, you can easily have Google Reader translate the subscription so that each time you get a new feed, it is automatically translated. To translate a blog, click on “Feed Settings” and choose “Translate into my language”. Easy!

Finally, the educators who participate in the educators blogging alliance are also great Tweeters. You can follow the educators who participate in the alliance by following these Twitter Lists

edublogger alliance 2

edublogger alliance

Thank you for all who are participating and to those who join us as readers. If you are wondering how you can encourage an educational blogger, there is no higher praise than Tweeting about our posts or leaving us a comment!