BeMused- Museums and Art Galleries: Watch. Look. Do. Discuss

November 1, 2010November 1, 2010Kelly Tenkely2 Comments3054 views

What it is: Bemused is another site from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. BeMused helps students be excited, aware, informed, amused, and involved in the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Through videos and activities sections students can discover more about the museum and gallery. Students can get involved by visiting the Your Say section or submitting their own artwork to the online Gallery. Students can watch videos including an introduction to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and short poems created by kids inspired by the issues surrounding slavery and Olaudah Equiano’s life. The online gallery holds beautiful artwork created by students. Your students can create and submit their own artwork for the online gallery. The activities section has interesting quizzes and activities about art, history and museums. In one activity, students try to find the faces in famous works of art as quickly as possible. The Your say section gives students an opportunity to talk about history, art, and museums. Students can add to an existing topic or start their own topic for discussion. Currently discussions include what would you like to see in an art gallery?; who is your favourite artist?; and Is graffiti art?

How to integrate BeMused into your curriculum: Bemused is a good place for students to be inspired by art and history. This site encourages student interaction. Students can join into forum discussions about art or history and even submit their own artwork to the online art gallery. In the video section, students can watch a video of student created poems centered around history. Use the video for classroom inspiration. Your students can create and write their own poetry inspired by history. If your students have visited many of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery sites, they may enjoy challenging themselves to the quizzes in the activities section of the site.

Tips: BeMused was created for the Birmingham Museum and Art Collection. They have several excellent websites that I will be reviewing.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using BeMused in your classroom!

Bedazzled-Interactive Museum and Art Gallery Magazine

October 29, 2010Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2989 views

What it is: Bedazzled is another site from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In this interactive magazine, students can discover more about style, fashion, and accessories from the past to the present. Students will learn what clothes say about them (and what they say about people in the past), look at accessories throughout history, read an interview from a jewelry designer and learn how to make their own jewelry, learn about what fashion tells us about different cultures, view actual pieces of fashion and accessories from the museum, and learn about what jewelry was used for and represented in the past.

How to integrate Bedazzled into your curriculum: Do you have students (read: fashonistas) who are absolutely positive that they don’t like history? Introduce them to a love of history with the Bedazzled interactive magazine. Your students will be drawn in by the fun fashion magazine and will be intrigued by the way that fashion can be used to learn about history. Allow your students to explore the pages at their own pace as a center activity on the classroom computer or in a lab setting where each student has a computer. The magazine is an entertaining read but also packed full of history. After your students read through the magazine, challenge them to choose an accessory, fashion item, or jewelry to learn more about. Ask them to find out what was happening in the time period that the piece is worn and how the item can help them better understand the people of the time period. Take it a step further by asking students to write a fictional short story about the person who wore the item using historical facts that they learned in their exploration.

This interactive magazine is a great way to show your students that history is more than a collection of dates and facts. History is about stories, it is about people just like them. Give your students that connection and the love for history will begin to blossom. This site would have hooked me as a child!

Tips: Bedazzled was created for the Birmingham Museum and Art Collection. They have several excellent websites that I will be reviewing.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Bedazzled in your classroom!

Alien Adventures: Museum tour

October 29, 2010Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2466 views

What it is: Alien Adventures is another site from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The premise of the site is that an alien king has sent two aliens, Borg and Zunk, on a mission to find out about Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Students join the aliens to discover information and activities about the collections there. Students will learn how to create a masterpiece, find hidden messages in portraits, learn about landscapes, and learn about signs and symbols. Students can also play history games like the curator collection game or the extraordinary Earth game.

How to integrate Alien Adventures into your curriculum: Alien Adventures is a fun way for students to explore a museum and learn more about art and history as they interact with fun activities and games. I love how museums are creating such wonderful websites for students to explore and enjoy learning more about art and history.

Can’t swing a visit to an art gallery or museum this year? Don’t let your students be deprived of the experience, visit the online offerings for the next best thing. Allow your students to explore the Birmingham collection online with the help of some aliens and then, come back as a class to talk about what they saw and learned on their “trip” to the museum. If you don’t have enough computers for each student, use a projector or interactive whiteboard to explore with the aliens as a class.

Tips: Alien Adventures was created for the Birmingham Museum and Art Collection. They have several excellent websites that I will be reviewing.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Alien Adventures in your classroom!

The Pre-Raph Pack

October 29, 2010Kelly Tenkely1 Comment5364 views

What it is: The Pre-Raph Pack (don’t you love that name?) is a brilliant site about artists, the techniques they used, a timeline that spans 100 years, and a collection of images from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. First students discover the Pre-Raphites (that is artists who were before Raphael). Students will learn about the influences, the different styles that emerged, the early and late style and the lasting influence that these artists have. Students can learn more about the individual artists which are easily categorized and searched by last name. Next, students can learn about the different painting techniques that were used from the wet-white technique to the use of bright and vivid colors. The timeline lets students explore each time period of the almost 100 year Pre-Raphaelite movement. Finally, students can see the collection of paintings themselves. The collection is easily searchable by category.

How to integrate The Pre-Raph Pack into your curriculum: The Pre-Raph Pack is a comprehensive look at the Pre-Raphael art movement and the collection at Birmingham. Students not only get a peek at the artists themselves, they learn the history, technique, and what the movement meant to art.

This is a well put together site for use in any art class, but the in-depth look at the artists and the history makes it a great site for any classroom. Art is a medium that can absolutely hook a child on history. They begin to see that art has gone through evolutions and that it is deeply reflective of the times. If you have a student who is struggling with history, introduce them to a little art history and see if you can’t help them make different connections with the stories. I have said this many times before, but history was a hard subject for me. I saw it only as a collection of dates, facts, places, and names that I couldn’t get to relate to each other. It wasn’t until I met my husband and he started talking history, that I realized that history is all about story. The Pre-Raph Pack is a site that can help your students begin to connect the pieces in history.

Use the paintings on this site as writing prompts, ask students to write about the story they think is happening in the painting. The collection includes everything from history and medieval, to religion and myth, to portraits, literature, and landscapes. Each of your students will be able to find a painting that speaks to them.

Tips: The Pre-Raph Pack was created for the Birmingham Museum and Art Collection. They have several excellent websites that I will be reviewing.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using The Pre-Raph Pack in your classroom!

Wiggio: Group Collaboration made easy

October 28, 2010Kelly Tenkely23 Comments6797 views

What it is: Yesterday as I was scanning through my Twitter stream when I came across this tweet from my friend @jasonshmidt123: “Holy buckets of love, this is cool! RT @plugusin: Checking out Wiggio: http://wiggio.com/ for collaborating.” Now, any time buckets of love are involved I am intrigued- I had to check it out. I must say, Wiggio is a way cool tool for collaboration. Wiggio is a completely free online toolkit that makes it easy to work and coordinate with groups. Wiggio is SO very simple to use and has a very straight forward interface that makes it easy for even those who are low-tech. Wiggio lets you share and manage files, manage a group calendar, poll your group, post links, set up conference calls (including voice, webcam, shared whiteboard space, and screen sharing), chat online, send out mass text messages, and send voice or email messages to the entire group. Wiggio has a lot of features that remind me of Google Groups but some additional features that truly make it a “holy buckets of love” experience. Everything is in one place, handy and easy to use!

How to integrate Wiggio into your curriculum: I can see a lot of possibilities of Wiggio in the classroom. Use it to create a class group with student families each year. Keep families up to date with the latest happenings in your classroom, volunteer opportunities, and class projects that will need some parent support. Share all important documents, videos, and resources that you use in your classroom for easy access from home. (I can’t tell you how many, “I’ve lost the permission slip could you please send a new one?” I get in a year!). Keep all those documents in your Wiggio group file and parents will never have to worry about lost paperwork again. Live meeting opportunities mean that you can hold a virtual parent university where you catch parents up on the new math/reading/science/writing curriculum. Teach your parents everything from reading strategies to use at home to working through math problems together. Parents would love a little support in this area! Offer virtual conference opportunities for parents who are unable to make it for a live conference due to long-term illness, job travel, or in multiple parent homes.

Use Wiggio to create student groups where you keep students up to date with classroom happenings and resources. Offer your students a study hour where they can meet with you virtually for a little extra support or mentoring. Remind your students of upcoming assignments by creating to-do’s. Collect digital assignments using Wiggio files.

Students can create study groups of their own for collaborative projects. As they work together they can meet virtually, share resources and links, and create a schedule to keep themselves on task.

Working with a class outside of your school? Maybe in another state or country? Wiggio is the perfect platform for connecting them, they can work together with shared space and chat live from your classroom.

Wiggio can be used with teaching staff to keep teaching teams organized and give them a place to share resources, ideas, and share a common calendar of events.

Have ambitious parents? They can use Wiggio to collaborate and work with other parents for fundraiser events, coordinating volunteers, and special days.

I am currently using Vyew as my virtual classroom meeting space but Wiggio offers so much more functionality all in one place, I think for the next round of virtual class I will be making the switch! To quote Jason again, “Holy buckets of love, this is cool!”

Tips: Wiggio has a demo area where you can play with all of the features yourself without registering or creating an account. Note to all web 2.0 companies…this is a really nice feature, I wish you all would do it 🙂

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Wiggio in your classroom!

Symbaloo EDU and Weblist: Sharing the web with students

October 26, 2010Kelly Tenkely26 Comments6106 views

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What it is: Sharing the web with students can be a challenge. Websites can often have urls that feel unending, students can copy down a url incorrectly, students type with different speeds, or characters show up in the address that they are unfamiliar with. Complicated urls can single-handedly convince teachers to ditch a wonderful web resource for something easier to manage…like a worksheet. Sharing websites with your students doesn’t have to be a challenge. Symbaloo EDU and Weblist are two of my favorite ways to quickly and easily share websites with students.

Symbaloo EDU is fabulous because it was created with educators in mind. Symbaloo lets you gather all of your favorite online tools and sites into a webmix about the topics you teach. Symbaloo web mixes can be published and shared with colleagues, students, and parents. Symbaloo can be used by students or teachers to create a personal learning environment. With Symbaloo folders can be created that contain sites and resources that are related. Symbaloo can be used year-long, just continue adding sites and resources for your students throughout the year. Everything that you have used all year-long will be in one easy place for students to access.

Weblist lets you pull together and organize content on the web. Create a list of urls centered on a theme and it is combined into one easy to navigate url. The list can be saved as a bookmark or a homepage. What I like about Weblist is the visual aspect. Each website is saved as a snapshot of that website with the website name and a description below. The visual organization is perfect for younger students who may not be able to navigate links designated by text.

How to integrate Symbaloo EDU and Weblist into your curriculum: Symbaloo can be used by students to create their own “textbooks”. As students search the web for resources based on subjects or inquiry questions, they can save what they find and create a virtual e-book of sorts. Symbaloo can also be used by students to organize all of their online work in one place. Students can add links to the slide shows, documents, videos, images, etc. that they create online. Symbaloo becomes an e-portfolio. Teachers can also use Symbaloo to create a customized “textbook” for their students complete with articles, maps, video, images, and interactive content.

Weblist is great for quickly sharing a collection of sites with students. Weblists are fast and easy to create (you don’t even have to login or register first!). Weblists are perfect for sharing a collection of sites in a computer lab setting or with colleagues. The visual interface of Weblist is perfect for students. Students can easily travel from one site to another because the web page is embedded in the Weblist, the url never changes.

Want to get really crazy? Combine Symbaloo and Weblist. Create folders for your students on Symbaloo so that there is one central url to go to. Have Symbaloo link to your various Weblists. This combines the great organization and collaboration aspect of Symbaloo with the awesome visual interface of Weblist. It is a powerhouse of learning for your students created by you. Cool!

Tips: Don’t forget that both Symbaloo and Weblist make for a great way to share online resources with your colleagues!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Symbaloo EDU and Weblist in your classroom!

Netsmartz Kids: Router’s Birthday Surprise (Internet Safety)

October 21, 2010Kelly Tenkely5 Comments8045 views

What it is: NetSmartz Kids is an incredible Internet safety site for kids. I have reviewed this site in the past here, and use it every year with my students to teach and reinforce Internet safety. Router’s Birthday Surprise is a new feature of NetSmartz. It is an interactive video where students are drawn into the story, playing a contestant on a game show to learn online safety rules. Clicky, the robot star of NetSmartz, is planning a surprise birthday party for his robo dog Router. As they follow Clicky through his hectic day, students play games, help Clicky put the Webville Outlaws back in jail, and decide who is a trusted adult. When students complete the video and games, they become certified NetSmartz Kids complete with an official certificate. Students have to complete all sections correctly before they can be certified. The complete video and game play runs for about 45 min, but NetSmartz has broken the video and game into manageable pieces so that it can fit in any schedule. Students can watch a portion of the video and play the associated game and save their progress for the next time they are able to login. Games include Make-a-Match where students think about the fun things they do online (history, music, jokes); What Rule is it Anyway where students play a contestant on a game show to learn about the rules of online safety; Get Clicky to Webville where students choose an Internet tube to get Clicky to his destination, Outlaw Roundup where Clicky captures the Webville outlaws and students match the outlaw to their crime; Who Can You Trust where students define a trusted adult; Router’s Gift Grab where students choose a gift for Router; and a NetSmartz song about the four rules of real-world safety where students drag words to complete the lyrics of the song.

How to integrate NetSmartz Kids: Router’s Birthday Surprise into your curriculum: I truly didn’t think that NetSmartz Kids could get any better. They have outstanding videos and songs about Internet safety that my students love year after year, they have fantastic educational resources (lesson ideas and downloads), and the games get requested by my students frequently. Router’s Birthday Surprise manages to make it even better! This interactive video is an excellent way for students to learn about Internet Safety and has the added bonus of tracking their understanding of the concepts being learned. Regardless of what subject you teach, Internet Safety is something that we all need to teach and reinforce in our classrooms. In the past, I have used NetSmartz in addition to the sites listed here to help my students learn proper use of the Internet. The rule that I love that NetSmartz includes is the “Tell a trusted parent or adult if there is anything online that makes you scared, uncomfortable, or confused.” I cannot tell you how many students see inappropriate content but fail to tell an adult about it because they think they will be in trouble. This is a rule I make sure that my students know and a rule that I pass on to parents so that they can handle inappropriate web content appropriately (without banning use).

Router’s Birthday Surprise is such a nice addition because it invites students to be part of a story. It breaks the learning down into manageable pieces so that it can be used in any class situation. In the computer lab setting, students can each create an account and save their progress as they go. In a classroom setting, the video can be played for the whole class on an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer. Poll students to find out how they would respond to each question and invite students to take turns coming to the whiteboard or the computer to interact with a game. If you have a student response system (clickers) students can respond to the game show questions using them. In the one or two computer classroom, Router’s Birthday Surprise can be played as a center activity over several weeks. Each week students can complete another video portion and game.

In my class, after students had learned the Internet safety rules (which we came up with as a class), we would have an Internet safety quiz. This was similar to a drivers permit test. I made a big deal about how using the Internet is a privilege just like driving a car. Just like driving there are rules to learn and follow that will keep them and others safe. Just like driving they would have to prove that they knew the rules in order to get their license. And just like driving, they could lose their license if they weren’t following the rules. When students passed the test, I handed out Internet Licenses. Most years I used their previous yearbook picture and created the license myself, but a few years before I had the pictures, I used the NetSmartz UYN club cards, these are great because they list the UYN rules on the back.

Tips: Mike Hill, a creative producer with NetSmartz, generously sent me some DVD copies of Router’s Birthday Surprise to share with my readers. If you don’t have Internet access in your classroom, or don’t have reliable Internet access, let me know in the comment section and I will be happy to send you a DVD version-free! If you need a DVD let me know why, and be sure to leave your correct email address when filling out the comment form.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using NetSmartz Kids in your classroom!

Death in Rome

October 20, 2010Kelly Tenkely2 Comments6726 views

What it is: Death in Rome is an interactive history experience from the BBC. The game takes place in the year 80AD where Tiberius Claudius Eutychus is found dead in his apartment. Students must put their sleuth skills to work as they investigate clues scattered around the room to solve the mystery. They have until dawn to crack the case. In addition to clues in the room, students can “talk” to modern-day experts for additional information, and interrogate witnesses.

How to integrate Death in Rome into your curriculum: Death in Rome is a fantastic exercise in critical thinking, reasoning, and deduction. Students will learn about ancient Rome, using clues to solve a mystery, and find out how engaging and interesting history can be. Death in Rome would make a great partner activity. Students can work together in teams to solve the crime. When each team has cracked the case, they can share the strategy they used and the clues that tipped them off to the solution. If you don’t have access to a lab setting, solve the case as a class using a projector or interactive whiteboard. Students can take turns at the board acting as investigators and leading the investigation. As the game progresses, those students at their seats can make note of the clues and offer conjectures as to what the clues reveal about the death.

Tips: Because of the subject matter, this game probably isn’t appropriate for students under the age of 10. I recommend playing through the game yourself to decide if it is appropriate for your age group. Older students will enjoy playing investigator!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Death in Rome in your classroom!

Picture a Story: Digital Storytelling

October 13, 2010Kelly Tenkely9 Comments4001 views

What it is: As I mentioned a few days ago, I am starting a virtual classroom/club for digital storytelling. I have been on the lookout for great resources, I listed my favorites here, and now I am remembering a lot of tools I left off of my original list (like Toon Doo!). Today as I was going through my Google Reader, I learned about this gem from Richard Byrne’s Free Tech for Teachers. The Delaware Art Museum has provided a great website dedicated to storytelling. The tagline is “bringing visual art to life through stories”. On the site, students can picture a story, experience a story, or tell a story. The Picture a Story was the most intriguing portion for me, as it provides a great tool for telling a digital story. First, students choose a genre of story that they want to tell, next they choose a famous painting background for their story, students add characters (also from famous works of art), props, and then tell the story. In the tell the story section, students type out the story. If a microphone is available, students can even record the story in their own voice. When students have completed their story, it can be shared via email.

How to integrate Picture a Story into your curriculum: Stories are powerful. I love the way that Picture a Story weaves together famous works of art with story. It teaches students to reflect on the art that they encounter and think about the stories that it represents. Picture a Story is a great way to discuss genre, characters, and parts of a story. It is also a fantastic way to bring a little art history into your classroom. It would be a neat class experiment to have students choose all the same genre, background, characters, and props and, without talking to others, write their story. After students are finished they can share their stories with the class. Students will learn about perspective, creativity, and voice as they listen to all the different stories that originated from the same picture. If you don’t have access to a computer lab, this activity could be done with an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer and students writing on paper. Let your students experiment with story and share their finished pieces with each other. Picture a story is ideal in a lab setting where each student has access to their own computer. If that isn’t a possibility, you could also have students visit Picture a Story on classroom computers as a storytelling center. The site is quick to navigate through and students can tell a story in a sentence or a few paragraphs making it a good center. If students don’t have access to email or can’t email the finished product to you, have them take a screenshot of the story to save in a digital portfolio or to print out.

Tips: The teacher section of this site has some great lesson ideas for every grade level.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Picture a Story in your classroom!

Pinball: Bounce Ideas Around

October 6, 2010Kelly Tenkely2 Comments4028 views

What it is: Pinball is a neat site from the BBC that helps students kick-start new ideas to get thoughts flowing and develop creative talents. There are four tools that will help students brainstorm and bounce ideas around. Dot Dash is for firing out ideas, start with a main idea and branch out with connected ideas in a web. Drop Zone is for making quick decisions, add ideas, name the zones, click “go”. As ideas speed by, quickly make a decision and select a zone; analyze the results. Snap Shot lets kids play with images; here they can upload an image or select a random image or word in “Lucky Dip” and then use the tools to play with the idea. Students can reflect, rotate, scale, bend, erase or cut an image or word to get different effects. Wild Reels is for mixing up ideas. Students can create reels of images and words, then they can label the reels. When the ideas are all in, the ideas can be “spun” to see what combination comes up. In each of the tools, the results can be “flipped” to another Pinball tool. Each tool allows students to think about a subject and explore ideas they may have about the subject.

How to integrate Pinball into your curriculum: Pinball is a fantastic tool to help kids think through their ideas for writing, research, science hypothesis, making connections in their learning, brainstorming, and fleshing out ideas. Each tool is designed to let students think visually in a way that lets their ideas flow freely. The integration of one tool with another is really helpful for transferring loosely related thoughts into a more cohesive thought process. Pinball can be used for whole class thinking with an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer. For example, as students read about a time period in history, and related events, they can use Dot Dash to show how the events and people are related. Students can each add to the class understanding of the time period. Drop Zone would be a great way for students to generate ideas for a creative writing, or journal project. Students can enter the ideas they have and let Drop Zone help them decide which to write about. Bookmark Pinball on classroom computers so that students can use them as an inspiration station center. Any time your students need to bounce ideas around or think through their learning visually they can visit Pinball and work through their ideas. Pinball would also be helpful for structuring thinking prior to a research report, or science experiment. If you have access to a computer lab or 1-to-1 setting, allow your students time to think about their learning and connect new learning to knowledge frameworks they have already built. The possibilities with these tools are endless.

Tips: Pinball offers links to additional thinking tools that are available on the web including Exploratree, Mind Tools, bubbl.us, Aviary, Mind 42, and Wisemapping. Each of these tools is fantastic for mind mapping, creative thinking, brainstorming, and visualizing ideas.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Pinball in your classroom!