Category: Websites

Fotobabble

Kelly Tenkely10 Comments on Fotobabble6210 views

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What it is: Fotobabble seems to be everywhere I am lately, and now that I have had a minute to play with it, I can see why.  Just upload a photo, record your voice, and send or embed away.  It is very simple to use and has really fun results!  The only downside for use in education are: 1. on the home page of Fotobabble you can see other members creations, at the time of writing they are all clean but I would hate to send my kids here without knowing exactly what content they would run into; 2. To use Fotobabble as a student, you must first sign up. This requires an email address 🙁 Which means that under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, that children under the age of 13 cannot sign up for an account on the site for their own creations.  I would love to see Fotobabble create an education version that can be used by students under 13 if monitored and signed up by an adult, and without the other user generated content on the home page.  That being said, Fotobabble is a fantastic tool for the classroom.

How to integrate Fotobabble into the classroom: Fotobabble can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom.  For students over 13, it is a great creation tool.  Students could take pictures, or find creative commons images that illustrate vocabulary that they are learning and record themselves saying the definition and using the word in a sentence.  Students could collect and trade Fotobabble vocabulary with other students in the class and embed them in a blog or wiki to create their own visual talking dictionary.  If you teach students younger than 13, have teachers or parent helpers build audio visual dictionaries that can be added to throughout the year.  How neat would it be to have a talking, visual word wall?!  This would be helpful for math, science, social studies, history, and regular vocabulary words that students learn.  The format will be so valuable to your audio and visual learners.  Did you take pictures of that field trip? Upload them to Fotobabble and students can record thoughts, observations, and lessons they learned on the field trip.  Consider creating a class Fotobabble account that you (the teacher) are in charge of.  Upload student illustrations and record a story that they have written using their own voice.  This is the perfect type of project to share at parent teacher conference time.  Parents can get a good idea of their child’s writing, reading, and fine motor skills all in one spot.  If you complete a similar project several times through the year, both students and parents can see the growth and progress that has been made during the school year.  Fotobabbles are an outstanding way to send your young students on an Internet scavenger hunt.  Along the way, record directions with Fotobabble and embed on your class website, wiki, or blog.  Non-readers will be able to listen to, and follow directions for any assignment.   Upload a picture of a landmark or map and have students record fun facts that they have learned about the place.  Send special messages from your class home to parents in the weekly newsletter.  Take a picture of a project that the class has done, or of a fun activity from the week.  Students can record a message about upcoming events, fun highlights of the week in learning, and a list of helpers who have signed up for the week.  Parents will love hearing their kids give the news updates for the week!  Are you wracking your brain for a fun Mother’s/Father’s day activity?  Why not record the kids leaving a special message to their parent with a special picture made just for them? Now that is a keepsake!

Tips: Because younger students can’t sign up for their own Fotobabble account, consider creating a class account that you can be in control of.  For younger students, having a Fotobabble recording center set up on one of the classroom computers might be appropriate.  Since you will control the account, you will be in charge of what content is added by students.

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

Heifer International: Game for Change

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Heifer International: Game for Change2839 views

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What it is: Heifer International works with communities to end hunger, poverty, and care for the earth.  Heifer International does not give hand-outs, they offer hand ups.  Transforming lives of hunger and poverty, into sustained lives of hope.  Using gifts of livestock and training, Heifer International helps families improve nutrition and generate sustainable income.  I have written about a program that Heifer International has before, called Read to Feed.  I highly recommend that you take a look at the Read to Feed program if you haven’t seen it before.  Heifer International has partnered with BeaconFire and ForgeFX to create an interactive 3D game that teaches students about hunger and poverty in a virtual world.  Through Heifer International: Game for Change, students will learn about real world conditions of poverty and how communities can create sustainable solutions.  Through game play, students will learn about sustainable options for help.  In the game, students take on the role of a 12 year old Nepalese girl in a village that struggles with poverty and hunger.  There are four tasks/missions that students must complete in the current (beta) version of the game.  Each task offers an activity that teaches a core principle.  One example is a task where students learn about deforestation that makes it more difficult to collect firewood used to cook dinner.  The lessons in the game mirror real-life happenings in Nepal with Heifer International’s partners.  The game is currently in Beta version and the creators are asking for suggestions here.  

How to integrate Heifer International: Game for Change into the classroom: Heifer International: Game for Change is an excellent way to offer your students global education, awareness, and encourage them to action.  Students will learn important lessons about issues like poverty and environmental degradation in a real, hands on, manner.  Start out with a geography lesson, encouraging students to find Nepal on a map or globe.  Use Google Earth or Scribble Maps to put a place marker on Nepal and a place marker where they live.  Talk with students about issues of poverty and hunger, exploring the Heifer International site for students where they can watch videos, do experiments, and play games.  Next, allow your students to step into the story by taking the role of a Nepalese girl living in an impoverished village.  Students should work to complete all 4 tasks in the game and keep a journal (online or off) of their thoughts as they complete the game.  Was it hard to find food, wood, water?  There are a lot of lessons packed in here, from geography and social studies, to reading and following directions and character education.

As an extension activity, students could create VoiceThreads or Animoto videos about Heifer International.  Tie in the Read to Feed program so that your students can get hands on with Heifer International.  Use their completed VoiceThreads or Animoto videos as “advertisements” for the Read to Feed program.

If your students are anything like mine, they will have definite opinions about the game.  Why not take advantage of that, and have them offer suggestions and praise that can be used by the creators?  Have students craft their ideas and send them here.

Tips: If you haven’t signed up for the Read to Feed program, it is an outstanding program.  It includes free DVD, leaders guide, poster, storybook (Beatrice’s Goat), brochures, bookmarks, student rewards, and standard based curriculum.  Get your students excited about reading and involved in their global community, it is never too early to get your students thinking about others!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Heifer International: Game for Change in your classroom.

Grammaropolis

Kelly Tenkely4 Comments on Grammaropolis5044 views

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What it is: Grammaropolis is a fun find that helps students learn the parts of speech.  In Grammaropolis, all of the characters are a different part of speech.  Students will “meet” Adverb, Linking Verb, Pronoun, Adjective, Preposition, Slang, Noun, Conjunction, Interjection, and Action Verb.  Each character is personified with personalities inspired by their grammatical roles in a sentence.  The characters interact with each other the same way that parts of speech interact in a sentence, brilliant!  Each character has a character card that tells a story about them.  Students can watch short Grammaropolis videos starring the characters (parts of speech) that live there.  Students can take Grammaropolis quizzes, complete word sorts, and color the characters of Grammaropolis in an online coloring book in the games section.  Students will enjoy the fun Grammaropolis song featuring all of the characters of Grammaropolis.  Coming soon, students will be able to read a book series starring the Grammaropolis characters.  

How to integrate Grammaropolis into the classroom: Visual learners will absolutely love this site that personifies the parts of speech.  All learners will appreciate the stories about the parts of speech.  We learn best through story.  Story gives us a framework for our understanding of new concepts and helps us to use those new concepts.  Grammar is often a subject that is taught purely through memorization of rules and drill and skill exercises.  This makes it difficult for students to really understand grammar.  Grammaropolis is an excellent solution to this problem.  Use the Grammaropolis character cards to introduce students to new parts of speech.  Watch the videos and listen to the song as a class to delve deeper into the character traits that each part of speech has.  The books on Grammaropolis are coming soon, while students await these, why not encourage your students to write their own stories that include the characters of Grammaropolis?  Do you have older students that could use a parts of speech refresher? Have them create stories using the characters for younger students.   The characters have already been developed for them!  Print out the character cards and post them around the classroom.  This will help your visual learners, when you talk about “Pronoun” they will be able to associate it with a character and story.  Set up the Grammaropolis games on classroom computers as a literacy center that students can visit to practice their understanding of the parts of speech.

Tips: Grammaropolis is currently holding a contest.  Helping Verb is lost, students can draw what they think Helping Verb should look like.  Submissions will be accepted until March 31, 2010 (so start this contest with your students today!).  Five finalists will be posted on the Grammaropolis blog on April 7 with a winner announced April 22.  The winner will recieve a gift pack, there character drawn by a professional and added to the Grammaropolis team, and receive a 20″x30″ poster featuring their character singed by the Powerhouse animators that make the Grammaropolis videos.  The winning character will debut in Action Verb’s book in the book series.

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

Stories of Learning: Story #2

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Stories of Learning: Story #21758 views

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Megan Palevich (@mrspal) was nice enough to share a Story of Learning with me yesterday.  Her story is entitled “To Kill a Mockingbird Meets the 21st Century”.  This is learning her students will remember for years to come.  I have a feeling that they will always have a special place in their hearts for the characters that they met on this social networking journey.  Thank you for sharing with me Megan!

Read the story here.

Megan has an excellent blog called Middle School 101, a great addition to your RSS reader!

Scribble Maps

Kelly Tenkely8 Comments on Scribble Maps6546 views

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What it is: Sometimes I use a website and recommend a website so often in my own corner of the world, that I forget to share it with all of you.  Scribble Maps is one of those websites.  Jonathan Wylie posted about Scribble Maps on his blog, Educational Technology Blog, last week and it made me wonder if I had ever posted here about it.  A quick search revealed I had not.  That sent me on a search through my blog of websites that I use most often with my students, and many of them have been overlooked here.  I guess I assume everyone knows about them because I use them so much.  You know what they say about people assuming things…  So, I will sprinkle in blog posts of some well known tools (in my classroom) as I realize they are absent!   Scribble Maps is a website that lets you scribble, draw, and annotate over Google maps.  Scribble Maps even lets you print your maps, save them, embed them on your website, blog, or wiki or save them as jpeg images to your computer.  Sweet, huh?!  In addition to annotating over maps, you can also add place markers with titles and descriptions, and add images to the map.  Maps can be viewed as regular maps, terrain maps, hybrid maps, or satellite maps making it pretty ideal for every classroom need.

How to integrate Scribble Maps into the classroom: The days of bulky pull down maps taking up space in your classroom are over.  If you have an interactive whiteboard or computer with projector, Scribble Maps is all you need.  (You couldn’t write on those expensive maps anyway!)  Scribble Maps is perfect for your every map need.  Whether it is a quick reference or an in depth geography lesson, Scribble Maps is easy to use, save, and print.  Use Scribble Maps in literature or history and drop place markers with descriptions on a map as students read.  Students will have a better idea of what is happening in story when they can visually see places mentioned marked out on a map.  Scribble Maps would be a great tool for those Flat Stanley projects that elementary classrooms across the country do each school year.  Create a map and plot all of the places that Stanley traveled, attach pictures of Stanley, with those he visited, on the map.  Play map games calling out geographical places and having students find them on the map and tag them with the information they know.

Scribble Maps lets you share maps via Facebook, in the high school classroom create a class page that students can become fans of and post homework help, links to educational websites, etc.

My Technology Tuesday tip of the week is for Scribble Maps.  Check out Quick Tip 14 here.

Tips: As a side note, if you are not reading Jonathan’s blog, it is one to add to your RSS reader!

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

Stories of Learning

Kelly Tenkely4 Comments on Stories of Learning3320 views

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Stories of Learning is another new blog I am launching this week.  I interact with teachers every day who are innovative, creative, and doing transformative things in education.  We need to collect these stories in one place.  Stories of Learning is (I hope) a place where we can record all of these.  Write a guest post, cross post something that you have already written, I would love it all!

Weboword

Kelly Tenkely6 Comments on Weboword3358 views

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What it is: It can be really difficult for visual learners to get a good handle on vocabulary.  Without good visual aids, the definitions behind words can feel abstract and hard to grasp.  Weboword is a fantastic visual vocabulary site that offers students illustrations that help students understand vocabulary.  I believe that everyone remembers concepts better when they are surrounded by story.  Think about a tsunami.  What comes to mind is probably not a word for word definition of the word but images, and stories about tsunamis.  You probably think about the destruction that they cause, a story you heard from someone affected by a tsunami.  Because we make deeper connections with stories, it only makes sense to offer students vocabulary words with a visual aid that will help them create story references and pictures.  Each vocabulary word is accompanied by a sketch of the word, a definition of the word, a history of the word, the pronunciation, and situational uses of the word.  There is a limited number of words pictured, but it should help students to build up a stronger vocabulary and word fluency.  Each day a new vocabulary word is featured on the Weboword home page.  Students can also review past vocabulary words on the “vocabulary” page.  Students can complete crossword puzzles based on the Weboword vocabulary.    

How to integrate Weboword into the classroom: Vocabulary and word fluency is an important ingredient for strong readers.  Begin each day with the newest Weboword vocabulary on your projector or interactive whiteboard.  You can subscribe to Webowords free daily updates to get a word each day delivered to you.  Because the vocabulary on Weboword is limited, you may not find the specific vocabulary you are looking for.  Encourage your students to create their own visualizations and cartoon sketches for the vocabulary they are studying.  Weboword is excellent preparation for the SAT’s but can also be used with younger students to build vocabulary.  My elementary students really enjoy learning “big kid” words.  The advanced vocabulary can make them feel empowered.  Webowords is also a great way to spice up student writing, when they have a greater vocabulary base to pull from, their writing will become richer.

Tips: Embed the Weboword widget in your classroom website. Students can get the vocabulary word for the day with one stop.

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

Amazing Race Staff Meeting

Kelly Tenkely18 Comments on Amazing Race Staff Meeting5876 views

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Staff meetings are generally very dry affairs. Often they become reiterations of the email memos that have been sent out.  In an effort to make our staff meetings more worthwhile experiences, I suggested that we use our March staff meeting to show teachers a different way of learning.  I didn’t just want to tell teachers about the benefits of constructivist learning, I wanted them to experience the benefits first hand.  I proposed holding an Amazing Race competition with our staff.  We would split the staff into teams, give them tasks, clues, detours, and road blocks.  The first team to complete the tasks would receive a “sweet million” (a King sized Hershey bar with a Starbucks gift card attached).

Tasks: These were things that the team had to do together.  For example one of our tasks was to count all of the biographies in the library, and subtract the sum of biographies that were less than 100 pages.  (Our 3rd grade students are required to read biographies that are more than 100 pages, the idea was to get teachers looking through the biographies, realizing the small number of appropriate biographies that meet their requirements).  Some of our other tasks included, stopping somewhere in the building and taking a silly team picture with a camera stationed there, searching United Streaming for an Animal Cracker (idioms) video, filling out a Google Form that asked questions about previous tasks, and using search tricks in Google.

Clues: These pointed the teams to the next task. We had route markers throughout the rooms and halls to point the way.

Detour Clue: These are random tasks.  Example: Find a maintenance form, substitute form, and reimbursement form and write who should receive each at the top of the form.

Road Block: These are completed by only one member of the team. For example: jump rope and have a teammate take a picture.

We started our Amazing Race Staff Meeting by giving each team colored bandannas, a school map, a bottle of water, pen, and notebook.  Before the race began, we watched a CHC Amazing Race video.  Our teams were off, teachers were running down the hallway and shouting directions to each other.  They were working, learning, and having fun together.

You can see our Amazing Race video and Google form here.

The meeting was a huge success.  Morale was boosted, staff bonds were strengthened, and teachers participated in a different kind of learning.  It was fun! I had NO idea how competitive our staff is.

What creative staff meetings have you been a part of?  What kinds of staff meetings do you find most useful?

National Geographic Young Explorer

Kelly Tenkely10 Comments on National Geographic Young Explorer4652 views

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What it is: National Geographic has fantastic resources for the classroom.  Their Young Explorer online content is not to be missed in the primary classroom.  This is an online magazine specifically for kindergarten and first grade student (I think second grade students would also benefit).  The site lets students listen and read the latest stories from National Geographic Young Explorer.  The photographs are breath taking and the reading is very accessible to beginning readers and English language learners.  Each portion of the text has a speaker next to it that allows students to listen to the text.  Click on the “More Issues” button to access past issues.  In the “For Teachers” section, you will find print versions of the teacher’s guides complete with lesson plans, discussion questions, accompanying worksheets, and more.  There is a very helpful story planner that gives you upcoming themes.  These may be helpful when planning upcoming lessons.  

How to integrate National Geographic Young Explorer into the classroom: It can be hard to find quality, accessible informational reading for primary students.  National Geographic has solved this problem with Young Explorer.  I am amazed that National Geographic is offering these online for free!  Struggling readers can listen to the text read to them and read along.  English language learners receive support for their reading of the text.  The photographs and images are nothing less than excellent.  The teacher materials that are included will help you to utilize the magazines and stories effectively.

Read and discuss Young Explorer stories as a class using a projector or interactive whiteboard.  Teach your students how to read informational text, and the comprehension strategies that will help them to understand what they are reading.  Set up Young Explorer on the classroom computers as a reading center for students to visit during reading time.  Take a look at the Young Explorer archives to see if any of the past issues will support the learning you are doing in the classroom.

Tips: In the “For Teachers” section, you will find a link to interactive whiteboard content.  This is a link to National Geographic’s premium content that can be found on Promethean Planet.  These flipcharts are fantastic and include a teachers guide, printable blackline masters, teaching notes, and offline materials.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using National Geographic Young Explorer in your classroom.