Language Arts – Page 38 – iLearn Technology

WizIQ

August 26, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2126 views

What it is: WizIQ is a virtual classroom platform where you can teach and learn. You can teach for free or earn money teaching. The WizIQ is free to use, has no downloads (it runs in your web browser), and works on Macs, Windows, and Linux. WizIQ provides a place to find, share, or upload PowerPoints on educational subjects and topics. The sessions are intuitive to use and can be scheduled for individal students or a group. The virtual classroom provides a place to teach and learn live online. Everything launches in a few clicks with…NO downloads! With WizIQ you can network with students or teachers, send a personalized invite to your contacts right from WizIQ. Share educational content in the form of slideshows, pdf, and online. When you start a session with students, you have access to a shared whiteboard space, live audio, video, or both, flash file sharing, and text messaging. Sessions can be recorded and saved for students to view again and again.

How to integrate WizIQ into the classroom: WizIQ is a great place to start experimenting with virtual classrooms. It has a simple to use interface, requires no downloads, and is free. Record lessons that you are doing with your class so that they can go back and review the lesson online at their lesiure. This puts students in control of their own learing. Interact with students during live virtual sessions. WizIQ is also perfect for students who were absent, have a long term illness that prevents them from being at school, or students who know they will be attending your school for half of the year.

Tips: You can make money by setting up and teaching in a virtual classroom (and lets face it, we could all use a little more of that!) Your classroom will be visable by search engines and open to students from accross the world. Don’t let the technology scare you, this is simple to use (even my fellow elementary teachers can get in on this one!)

Leave a comment and share how you are using WizIQ in your classroom.

Jigsaw Planet

August 20, 2008August 21, 2010Kelly Tenkely1 Comment15732 views

What it is: Well, it is the first week of school which for me means that it is rules week. Every teacher has to go over the rules at some point and it is usually met by major groans from students. This year I approached rules week differently. I used an awesome site called Jigsaw Planet to turn my rules into jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw Planet is a site that makes it simple to create custom jigsaw puzzles. Just upload a jpeg image to the site, choose how many pieces you want, what shape you want the pieces to be and Jigsaw Planet does the rest. You instantly have a custom interactive puzzle for your students to play! The puzzles can be saved for your own account, shared with students via a url, or embedded into your classroom website for easy access.

How to integrate Jigsaw Planet into the classroom: Jigsaw Planet puzzles are AMAZING to use with an interactive whiteboard! Each puzzle is timed as you put it together, split students into teams to see which team can complete the puzzle the fastest. Instead of the typical PowerPoint type presentation to teach students facts, create a puzzle for them to put together and have them read the fact once the puzzle has been completed. Turn your classroom rules into a series of jigsaw puzzles for students to put together. Honor your star student of the week by creating a puzzle of that student, just take a picture of the student and upload to Jigsaw Planet. Put the puzzle of the student on your classroom website to honor them. Students can use Jigsaw Planet to create their own puzzles. This is a great place for them to study, they can upload spelling words, math facts, maps, etc. Students will love creating their own jigsaw puzzles, if they have their own blog or website they can embed the puzzles right into their online space. If you have a projector or an interactive whiteboard, have students create a puzzle all about them. They can create a collage of things they like in a presentation program, take a screen shot of it, and upload the puzzle to Jigsaw Planet. Students can put together each other’s puzzles and guess who the student is based on the pictures. This would be a great getting to know you activity!

Tips: I split students into two teams. Each team would complete a puzzle using our new Mimio interactive whiteboard, the fastest time was the winner of that round. When the puzzle was completed, students would read the rule and we would discuss in depth. This made rule day fun for the kids and much more enjoyable for me!

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Leave a comment and share how you are using Jigsaw Planet in your classroom.

Maggie’s Earth Adventures

August 19, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2995 views

What it is: Maggie’s Earth Adventures is an incredible site for teachers and students. First the amazing tools for you… Every teacher has wished for a lesson that takes little time for teacher preparation or explanation, can be used as a center activity, is a filler for students who finish their work early, serves as extra credit, is a ready made homework assignment, or can be an emergency plan for a substitute teacher. Maggie’s Earth Adventures Teachers Lounge is the place to go! Sign up for free weekly activity packets in subjects such as math, reading, science, and social studies. Weekly activity packets are sent based on age levels (emergent reader, primary, and intermediate) and a different subject area is sent each week. These are high quality teaching materials!In addition to the free weekly activities, Maggie’s Earth Adventures also features an excellent lesson plan resource, you can get an entire theme unit or a few lessons. Some lessons even have free PowerPoint presentations to accompany the lesson. The site is available in English or in Spanish making it perfect for the ESL classroom. Maggie is not just for teachers, you will find outstanding interactive games for your students too! Kids can watch cartoons that tie in directly with the lesson plans. The cartoons are packed with teaching and are interactive. In the postcard section students can choose a picture and then choose an activity to accompany the picture. Students can create a story clock, news article, description web, or postcard. In the games section students can choose from games to improve math, spelling, reading, geography skills, language skills, proofreading skills, and science. Students can also download free books (these download as a printable pdf).
How to integrate Maggie’s Earth Adventures into the classroom: These high quality lessons and activities are ideal for having on hand for students who finish work early and are looking for extension activities. They are also ideal for extra credit, homework practice, or emergency substitute plans. Use the games as practice for important skills students are working on in language arts (spelling and punctuation) and math. This is a great place for students to hone a newly learned skill. The postcard maker (which actually makes much more than postcards) is a great place to send students for story starters and creative writing assignments. This is one of those sites you will want bookmarked on your classroom computers!

Tips: Sign up to receive weekly activities and lessons from Maggie. I know you sign up for a million things throughout the year, this is one that you will really use!

Leave a comment and share how you are using Maggie’s Earth Adventures in your classroom.

Thinkfinity

August 18, 2008August 18, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment3909 views

What it is: This is a one stop shop for the beginning of your school year but will keep you coming back all year long. Thinkfinity is “the cornerstone of Verizon Foundation’s literacy, education, and technology initiatives.” The site is completely free to use and has outstanding content for educators, students, and parents. Find amazing lesson plans, interactive activities, and other quality online resources. Thinkfinity has over 55,000 standards-based k-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools, and reference materials that are reviewed by the nation’s leading education organizations to ensure the highest quality content. You will find great primary source material, interactive student resources, and even grade specific research lists to tailor materials and searches to meet your needs. Thinkfinity also provides free training and professional development. Some professional development options are online, you can search for Thinkfinity professional development opportunities near you.

How to integrate Thinkfinity into the classroom: Thinkfinity is a one stop shop for standards based lesson plans, interactive games and resources for students, maps, activities, book lists, and much more. Use Thinkfinity to support any of your lessons, themes, or current curriculum. Search for materials by subject (arts, social studies, literacy, mathematics, reading and language arts, science, and geography), by theme, by grade, or resource type. There is also a wonderful keyword search. Start out your year with lessons based on the Olympics in Beijing. Students can learn about the history of the games, sports, athletes, and even the history of Asia. This is a great site for students to complete research on. The sources are accurate and reliable and it is organized well for searching.

Tips: Content partners for Thinkfinity inlcude other top educational sites including Arts Edge, Econ Edlink, Edsitement, Illuminations, Literacy Network, Read Write Think, Science Net Links, Simithsonian National Museum of American History, and National Geographic Xpeditions.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Thinkfinity in your classroom.

Animoto for Education

August 7, 2008August 7, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment5261 views

What it is: There are some really neat online tools that I find that live in my Google Notebook for a long time (I have upward of 800 links for educational websites yet to post to iLearn Technology…and growing daily!) Some get pushed aside for my newest cool find, and some move to the bottom of the list because, while they may have educational value, they are not intended JUST for education and may have some questionable user created content that I wouldn’t want my students to stumble on. Animoto was one of these sites for me. It is an amazing and COOL tool but wasn’t necessarily geared just toward education. I got a fun email today that Animoto now has an education only site! Animoto for education is a site where students can create compelling and impressive digital content quickly and easily. It is the perfect addition to your classroom’s digital storytelling kit. It is very intuative and easy to use, in no time students have digital videos that they created! This is also an amazing place for you, the teacher, to create a video that will bring your lessons to life. You can post or embed videos on your class site or even, are you ready for this?, download for in class presentations. Animoto for Education makes it simple to mix audio and visual for a dynamic, unique presentation in no time. It is so easy to use that students could create a complete animoto presentation in one computer class.

How to integrate Animoto for Education into the classroom: Animoto for education is a great place for you to teach from. Make any lesson come to life with audio and visual, use at the beginning of the day as a ‘teaser’ for what your students can look forward to learning each day or use to teach complex concepts in history, math, science, or character education. Students will respond to new media in the classroom. Allow your students to display knowledge of a concept using Animoto. Use Animoto for Education for a beginning of the year get to know you activity. Students can each create an Animoto showcasing who they are through pictures and music. Animoto presentations are quicker to create than traditional PowerPoint type presentations making them ideal for digital storytelling in the classroom setting. Because Animoto is completely web-based, students can create videos from school and continue working on them at home. The ability to download videos is outstanding…students could save their work for offline viewing too!

Tips: Children under 13 can’t sign up for their own account. To use Animoto for Education with your students you can register your students with dummy accounts using dummy email addresses. Animoto is private to your school. This means that other people can’t come accross student videos or contact students through the site.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Animoto for Education in your classroom.

Ed.VoiceThread

August 5, 2008August 5, 2008Kelly Tenkely2 Comments3817 views

What it is: I have posted about Voice Thread in the past, but Voice Thread has added a new education community that has some pretty incredible features. Ed.VoiceThread is a secure collaborative network designed specifically for the k-12 school environment. Teachers and students can collaborate around almost any type of media including voice, text, webcam, and drawing commentary in a secure environment. Access is restricted to k-12 educators, students, and administrators to ensure safe classroom collaboration. Ed.VoiceThread is an accountable environment, which means that all users are responsible for their content and behavior. Some added features that you will find on Ed.VoiceThread are, students have individual accounts that are easily viewable to educators, students can create, edit, and manage their own portfolio, students cannot add contacts or send invitations to any users outside of the Ed.Voice Thread community, and they cannot view any content that is not created by an Ed.Voice Thread member. Teachers can quickly view and access all students’ Voice Threads. Voice Threads can be made private or public depending on the assignment and requirements. Ed.VoiceThread comes in two packages one free and the other, called Pro, for $60/year. Free users can only create 3 VoiceThreads, have 75 MB of storage, no uploading of MP3 comments, 30 min of webcam commenting, advertising will be present, single file size limit of 25 MB, and no downloads of the media. In the Pro version, students can create an unlimited number of Voice Threads, get 10GB of storage, can upload MP3 comments, have unlimited webcam commenting, 30 archival movie exports, no advertising, single file size limit of 100MB and allows downloads of media.

How to integrate Ed.VoiceThread into the classroom: Ed.VoiceThread is the ideal place for students and teachers to collaborate and interact with digital media. The added functionality for schools with Ed.VoiceThread is very useful. Students can use Ed.VoiceThread to create digital stories, documentaries, practice and document language skills, explore geography and culture, solve math problems, and much more. As a teacher, I like VoiceThread as a place to teach. Because everything is web-based, you can upload a days lessons to Ed.VoiceThread for students to refer to and collaborate with while doing homework. I well remember the days when I would sit in math class learning the days equations. Everything made perfect sense to me while I was sitting in the classroom watching problems being worked. But at home, with no guide homework seemed impossible. Ed.VoiceThread makes you your students personal tutor. The self paced learning is amazing! I love giving students tools that allow them to be in charge of their own learning. Is there any better lesson in life than knowing how to learn?

Tips: Try out the free Ed.VoiceThread account and see how it could work for your classroom. If you are like me, it becomes addicting and 3 VoiceThreads won’t be enough!

Leave a comment and share how you are using Ed.VoiceThread in your classroom.

Mapness

July 31, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment1050 views

What it is: Mapness is a site, still in beta, that students can use to make interactive, virtual travel journals. First students add points of interest to a map, then they can add descriptions, photos, and videos right on top of the map. As virtual travelers visit the map, they are led on a virtual tour depicted on the map. This is really neat!

How to integrate Mapness into the classroom: Mapness is perfect for integrating into the geography classroom. As students study different parts of the world, they can create their own virtual tour of that place by collecting photos and videos during their online research and embedding them into maps. Split students into several groups, each group can be assigned a different place to create a tour for. When the tours are finished, hold a vacation day where students can visit each other’s assigned places. This would be an ideal day to reserve the computer lab! Students can also create literary tours. As they read a book or learn about an author or genre, they can pinpoint places on the map and add descriptions and pictures. This would also be a wonderful opportunity to map out historical events. Bring events to life for your students and weave in some map reading skills while you are at it! Mapness sure beats the maps I completed as a kid, labeling places on a 8 1/2 x 11 photo copy that always looked sloppy after trying to fit in all of the requirements.

Tips: After students create an account, they can add several map tours to their account making it a nice place to save up work throughout the year. Mapness does require a working email address to activate the account. If your students don’t have an email address they can create a temporary email address at a site like Mailinator. (As a side note, if you regularly give out your email address on websites a Mailinator account would save you from a lifetime of spam.)

Check out my Mapness map of my recent vacation to California.

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Flowlight

July 30, 2008July 30, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2286 views

Well, it is taking me longer than expected to blog my recent vacation to California where I visited Apple, Google, Exploratorium, The Tech Museum, and Napa. Sorting through 800+ photos and embedding them in a virtual tour is taking FOREVER! So, in the meantime I thought I would give you a glimpse into the future. Meet the Flowlight, essentially a blackboard with lasers. I read about this concept on Gizmodo last week and I have to say, I think this ‘blackboard’ could hold students attention. Basically, “a base station would focus a laser beam 100 times a second into a point in space, creating small plasma points that glow in mid air. Users could then use the pen to draw and write, making doodles look like some sort of fantastic light show.” While I don’t think this will be in your classrooms in the forseeable future, it may be a glimpse into classrooms to come.

Updated Websites

July 24, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2410 views

Over the past week I have been re-vamping my websites. Tenkely.org is a site that I created for my students to use. I have pages for first through fifth grade with links to all of the sites that we use in class throughout the year. I also have a page for parents about how my classroom runs and tips for keeping kids safe online. The teacher site for tenkely.org has also been completely re-done. I added TONS of new goodies for teachers. Obviously, I created these sites with my students and colleagues in mind but I hope that they are a source of inspiration for you too! I am already keeping tally of links that aren’t working right so if you run across any, leave a comment so I can get them fixed up.

Capzles

July 22, 2008July 22, 2008Kelly Tenkely2 Comments2945 views

What it is: Capzles is another interactive timeline maker. I really love all the little extras that Capzles has! With Capzles teachers and students can add photos, videos, audio, and text to their timeline. Themes, colors, backgrounds, and background music can be added to the timeline making it unique and personalized. Capzles also provides options when sharing your Capzle, it can be private with a specific list of who can view the Capzle or made public for the world to see.

How to integrate Capzles into the classroom: Obviously Capzles is a great way for students to create timelines about any subject. The web 2.0 collaborative aspect of Capzles makes it very appealing to students. I think Capzles could also be very valuable in the primary classroom. Students probably won’t be creating their own timelines in Capzles at this age, parent helpers paired with students to create simple timelines would be appropriate. Becasue Capzles has the capability of adding audio, photos, and text, it would be the perfect place to record students reading throughout the year. As you assess student reading through reading records, record the students using a program such as Gabcast, Gcast, Audacity, or Garageband. Take a digital picture of the student reading. Througout the year, you can make a Capzle for each student. This is an excellent motivator for students, especially your struggling readers. Students can see their growth throughout the year in pictures, and hear their reading progress made throughout the year. You can share the Capzle with parents (they will go crazy for this keepsake!) and with the students future teacher. How much would you love getting a timeline of your students from the previous year? You would have a jump start on their struggles and strengths in reading as you quickly flip through their timelines. Cool huh?!

Tips: When assigning students to create a timeline, direct them to concentrate on the “meat” of the timeline first. Then they can go back and design their timeline with themes, colors, and backgrounds. If you don’t specify they will spend all of their time tweaking the look and run out of time to add the content.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Capzles in your classroom.