Websites – Page 71 – iLearn Technology

Education Diigo

November 17, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2174 views

What it is: Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts! The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related. If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web. Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.

How to integrate Education Diigo into the classroom: Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together. Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo. Students can collaborate online to solve the problem. Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.” This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web. Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!

Tips: Your Education Diigo account must be approved so sign up today!

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

Build Your Wild Self

November 13, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3097 views

What it is: Build Your Wild Self is a website I heard about on A Geeky Momma’s blog (which I thoroughly enjoy!). The site fits perfectly into my classroom this week as our Book Fair theme this year is “Safari”. The site, created by the New York Zoos and Aquarium, lets students create a character called their “Wild Self”. Students can choose a character and then add crazy hair, arms, legs, etc. to make them wild. There are even fun sound effects for the different backgrounds they add!

How to integrate Build Your Wild Self into the classroom: This would be a great site to use with students after reading a book like “Where the Wild Things Are”. Students could create their own Wild Things and write themselves a Wild Things story featuring themselves. This is also a great site to use with kindergarten and first grade students who are learning about different animals. As they build their Wild Self they can name what animal the crazy part belongs to. Older elementary students also enjoy working on this website, my students created a wild self for their safari passports for our book fair this week and really enjoyed it from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Tips: The Wild Self can be printed out, sent to a friend, or saved as a desktop.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Build Your Wild Self in your classroom.

Lunarpages Free Education Web Hosting

November 13, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2710 views

What it is: Lunarpages is a web hosting web service that offers free hosting to k-12 educators and schools! The free web hosting is intended to be used by teachers only (individual student web hosting is not available). Lunarpages will provide a free web builder, free unlimited phone and email support, unlimited email addresses and FTP accounts, 500MB of storage, 20GB data transfer, and one free domain name registration for each account. The only stipulation? You must have a banner ad somewhere on the site that says that Lunarpages donated the site…thats it!

How to integrate Lunarpages into the classroom: Lunarpages hosting is an excellent option for those of you who enjoy building your websites with software like iWeb. It is also an excellent option for a class website built with the web builder Lunarpages provides. Classroom websites are an outstanding way to communicate with parents and students about the goings on in your classroom.

Tips: The free web hosting is only available for k-12 public schools. Learn about how to get your free web hosting with Lunarpages here.

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

Middle Spot

November 11, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3128 views

What it is: Middle Spot is a spectacular new search engine for teachers, librarians, and students performing research. Middle Spot lets you see your results, you can pan and zoom individual website results. Workpads allow you to save and annotate results and sort by collections. Workpads can also be shared with others (colleagues, students, or professional learning communities). What I love about Middle Spot is the blending of the traditional search results (listed along the left side of the screen) with the snapshot results where you can see the results. When your cursor scrolls over a screen shot, the related traditional result and information is highlighted on the left making it very quick and easy to find exactly the results you are looking for. Middle Spot allows you to search the web or search images, very handy!

How to integrate Middle Spot into the classroom: Middle Spot is a great place for students to do research because of the ability to organize their finds and ideas right in the search engine with workpads. If students are working on group projects, they can share their findings and workpads with others in their group. Middle Spot is also ideal for teachers, collect your search results in one place based on topic or curriculum objectives and share with colleagues. Create your own “webquest” with Middle Spot by creating and sharing a workspace with your students. Make workpads for whole class lessons with an interactive whiteboard or projector to save yourself from typing in each url for the activity individually.

Tips: Middle Spot is truly my new favorite search engine. Your students will love the ability to take notes about websites and cite their sources as they go in the workpads. It really is well designed for the classroom setting!

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

Big Ideas for Education

November 10, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2891 views

What it is: Big Ideas for Education is part of the Landmark Project created by David Warlick. The purpose of the site is to collect “priority actions that might be taken by a new Department of Education that would promote shifts in education that are relevant to today’s students and their future.” After ideas have been collected, the submitted statements will be linked according to topic to pare down all ideas into no more than 20 basic action statements. The final action statements will be posted on Big Ideas for Education for educators to share insights about their favorite statements. You will be able to order the action statements in order of importance to you.

Head over to Big Ideas for Education and share your big idea. It only takes a minute; but if we educators come together and start discussing some of these great ideas, we will start seeing a shift in education.

My big idea is to: Shift teaching away from teacher as lecturer toward constructivism where students are constructing their own knowledge. (id 158) Technology and 21st century learning skills naturally flow into the constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Using technology within the context of the traditional classroom is always going to feel like you are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, it doesn’t flow naturally. Make sure to copy and paste your big idea into the comment section here…we want to know what your big ideas are!

Daft Doggy

November 7, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2717 views

What it is: I found Daft Doggy several months ago and put it in my “explore more” folder. The Daft Doggy site is in beta version and it isn’t obvious upon first visit what exactly it does. Today I had a little bit of time to go and explore the site more and I am glad I did! Daft Doggy is a free service that lets you record web browsing sessions, play them back, and share recorded sessions with others. It is very simple to use (only 2 clicks to start recording!) You type in the starting point URL and Daft Doggy keeps track of all subsequent URL’s along the way. Daft Doggy doesn’t record everything you do, it only remembers each separate URL you visit in a sequence, it does this both within the site or a separate external site. When students or teachers view the session, a blue bar at the top of the page shows the URL along with reverse and next navigation. Each recorded session is assigned a unique link making it easy to share with students or other staff. After you have recorded the sequence of sites, you have the option of labeling each site and even adding a voice recording that will play when that site is being viewed.

How to integrate Daft Doggy into the classroom: Daft Doggy is a great way to lead students through a series of activities on the web. Younger students especially who would have trouble keeping track of and typing mulitiple URL’s would benefit from a lesson recorded with Daft Doggy. Daft Doggy is also perfect for whole class instruction with a projector when mulitiple sites will be visited. The recorded session will keep you on track and keep you from having to type in multiple URL’s while teaching. As a computer teacher and technology integration specialist, I like Daft Doggy for the ability to make quick guides for students and teachers as well as tutorials. The Daft Doggy recordings are quick and easy to create making them ideal for quickly answering web questions or leading colleagues/students through websites. Make your own online virtual field trips or webquests for students using Daft Doggy. Student projects can also be enhanced with Daft Doggy. Students can create web presentations with site to share with peers. This would also be a great site to use as students are researching. Instead of trying to remember the exact search words and links they used to find a site, they can record their research so that they can re-trace their steps at a later time if needed. So cool!

Tips: This beta site definitely doesn’t have any frills, it is very basic but it gets the job done easily and quickly. To get started just create a login and you are ready to go!

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

Free Reading

November 6, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2748 views

What it is: Not all technology resources require students on a computer, some technology resources are specifically for you, the teacher, to enhance curriculum or for professional development. Free Reading is one such site. This incredible open source instructional program helps you teach early literacy. Free Reading provides a 40 week scope and sequence of phonemic awareness and phonics activities. The goals of Free Reading are to help you teach kids to read, to make quality research-based instruction for reading free, and to provide a community of educators with a common goal of reading intervention. Free Reading is really, truly free… downloads, prints, teaching materials are all completely free!

How to integrate Free Reading into the classroom: Free Reading is ideal for the reading intervention classroom, or for small guided reading groups. The program is an excellent reading program for kindergarten through third grade and for pullout programs for struggling readers. Even if you have a reading program in place, check out Free Reading. You will find excellent tools and materials that can be integrated into the current curriculum.

Tips: Free Reading has some great live sessions, be sure to check one out! (It is, of course, free!)

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

The Cool Teacher Podcast

November 5, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2478 views

What it is: The Cool Teacher Podcast is a podcast by educational technologist Chris Haskell who is an instructor for pre-service teachers in methods and applications of technology integration in the classroom (notice any similarities to iLearn Technology?). The podcast “delivers cool tools, techniques, and tactics to transform your teaching.” In episode #7 that came out yesterday, Chris gives a shout out to iLearn Technology’s post on Glogster (thank you Chris!!). The podcasts are very entertaining to listen to and give great ideas for using technology in the classroom!

How to integrate The Cool Teacher Podcast into the classroom: The Cool Teacher Podcast is a wonderful stop (in addition to iLearn Technology) for great ideas and tips for integrating technology into your classroom. You can find the Cool Teacher Podcast at the links here as well as on iTunes in the iTunes store (it is free to subscribe to). Listen to these great podcasts while you are grading, on the drive home, or while you are cleaning up your classroom for the day…just be sure to keep a pad and pencil handy to jot down the great ideas you are sure to hear!

Tips: Chris also has a blog related to the podcasts, you can check that out here. Thanks again Chris!

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using The Cool Teacher Podcast in your classroom.

Kids and Cookies

November 4, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2195 views

What it is: Kids and Cookies is an online flash game that teaches elementary students about fractions in a game setting. Students choose characters to be their “friends” and then choose how many cookies they have. They have to evenly share the cookies with their friends and can use different cutters to divide the cookies. The site provides a great introduction to rational number fractions.

How to integrate Kids and Cookies into the classroom: This is a great site for introducing your students to the concepts of fractions, especially those at the “sharing” and “fair” age because of the way that they have to share and split up the cookies fairly. This would be a good whole class activity with an interactive whiteboard or a projector where students take turns sharing their cookies. As they share the cookies, talk about the fractions of cookies (for example when they split the cookie in half or in thirds.) This would also be a perfect site to use as a math center. Students can visit the center in groups and discuss their findings as a whole class after every student has had the opportunity to interact with the site.

Tips: You can find more advanced (much more advanced) flash math games and activities on the Center of Technology and Education site where the Kids and Cookies game is hosted. This is also a great game for those of you who don’t have Internet access in your classroom because their is a free downloadable version of the game for Macs and PC’s…cool!

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

Learning Clip

November 3, 2008November 3, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2584 views

What it is: Learning Clip is a wonderful FREE math site out of the UK that provides short learning clips to be used in primary math classes. The short video clips are explanations of math concepts. Each video clip is followed by a game or activity where students can practice the new concept. The whole site is intended to be used in whole class instruction with an interactive whiteboard (although they could be used just as successfully with just a projector or computer/TV hookup). Many of the activities have been integrated with the Active Vote system. If you are lucky enough to have an Active Vote set in your school this is a must see site! The videos and activities are appropriate for first through fifth grades. You do have to register to use the resources on this site, but it is free to register and a very quick process.

How to integrate Learning Clip into the classroom: Use this site to introduce your students to new math concepts. Use an interactive whiteboard, projector, or TV to show the videos. Let students take turns “controlling” the computer during the activity portion. If you have an Active Vote system be sure to actively involve your students in math learning with the integrated activities. This site would also be appropriate for the one or two computer classroom. Set up Learning Clip as a math center for students to visit while they are working on new math concepts or practicing old concepts.

Tips: This site was created in the UK so money and measurement clips may not work in your classroom. The other concepts should blend with your curriculum seamlessly.

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