Tag: reading

Technospud Projects

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What it is: Technospud Projects are projects created by educator Jennifer Wagner that encourage the use of technology tools in the classroom. Projects can be adapted to fit your classrooms needs. They can last a class period, a school day, or be stretched into a unit. Projects change every couple of months. Currently, registration is open for a holiday card exchange. Past projects have included activities such as A Salute to Seuss where students learned to Wiki about their favorite Seuss characters and books, a Pumpkin Seed Count, and a O.R.E.O. activity to teach about tallying and averaging. The projects are wonderful and bring classrooms from all over the world to collaborate.

How to integrate Technospud Projects into the classroom: Technospud Projects are a wonderful first step into technology use for any classroom teacher. Both novice and master technology users will enjoy these projects. Jennifer makes it easy for classrooms to collaborate with other classrooms. Choose a project from the Technospud Project page to “get your technology feet wet.” You will soon find yourself wanting more!

Tips: Be sure to visit the Technospud blog. Jennifer always has fun insights into integrating technology into the classrooms and the joys and struggles that technology can bring.

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

VoiceThread

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What it is: VoiceThread brings Web 2.0 communication to presentations. Slide show presentations are no longer static, VoiceThread makes them interactive collaborative learning experiences. Features include: the ability to create voice comments, voice recording within a browser allows for recording of multiple voices, doodling which captures drawing as an animation synced to voice or text commentary…listeners can watch the process, voice threads can be embedded in other sites, one account can have many identities so a classroom can switch identities on the fly without having to sign out, media importing so slide show presentations and pictures become collaborative conversations, comment moderation abilities, and the ability to zoom in and pan images.

How to integrate VoiceThread into the classroom: VoiceThread has hundreds of uses, the following are a few that I came up with. Use VoiceThread to create a time line of the students day. Students can record themselves describing different events of the day. Parents and out of town family can see what happens on a typical day in your classroom. Debates can be hosted and conducted using Voice Thread. VoiceThread can make history interactive, for example, host an art history artist critique and discussion. Create a book group using VoiceThread where students interact and discuss their reading together. Students can read their stories and record as a VoiceThread (this also makes a special keepsake!). Teachers can use VoiceThread for math problem demonstrations, step by step science “experiments”, staff training, or to teach a second language. Computer teachers, what about creating Voice Threads to teach your students when you can’t be there? This would make life easy for a substitute and ensure that your students are on track when you return.

Tips: Go to the “help” section of VoiceThread for some great interactive tutorials.

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

Gabcast

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What it is: Gabcast is a podcasting and audioblogging website that offers an easy way to create and distribute audio content. The most amazing part of this resource is that students can actually use a touch-tone cell (yes I said cell phone, put them to good use!) or land line telephone to make their recordings. Gabcast also provides worldwide access to the sevice through VoIP. Once a student has mad a recording and had it published, a newsfeed is automatically updated to alert subscribers (like other classrooms, students or parents) to your channel.

How to integrate Gabcast into the classroom: What makes Gabcast so ingenious to me is that there is no need for fancy equipment (i.e. immediate computer access or microphones) to record a quality podcast. If you don’t have a classroom computer, or want to be using the computer for other activities or centers, Gabcast is a perfect solution for creating podcasts. Gabcast is an outstanding alternative to more ‘traditional’ methods of podcasting. Students could also easily create podcasts from home since the only equipment needed is a telephone. Use Gabcast to create a weekly radio type broadcast for the rest of the school or learning buddies, create audio books for other students, or for interviewing others. Bring along a cell phone on field trips and record audio clips (like of animal sounds at the zoo). This tool would be wonderful for auditory learners. The possibilities with Gabcast are nearly endless.

Tips: Gabcast is a toll free call, visit the overview page for the toll free phone number for your country. You can embed Gabcast on your school, or classroom website or blog.

Kindersay

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What it is: Kindersay is a website for emerging language learners. This is the new See and Say. Kindersay allows pre-school, kindergarten, and struggling language learners to learn new words through visual and auditory practice.

How to integrate Kindersay into the classroom: Kindersay makes an excellent listening and language development center in the preschool, kindergarten, or special education classroom. Set up the computer for student exploration of words. Learn adventure, alphabet, animals, arts, cities and people, food, home large, home small, movement, numbers, outdoors, parts of the body, colors, times, shapes, tools, and transport words.

Tips: For a $6 a month subscription, Kindersay allows you to upload your own images and sounds to Kindersay.

Professor Garfield: Transport to Reading

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What it is: Professor Garfield: Transport to Reading has two interactive reading games. The first is called Fishing for Phonics. Students can choose to fish for beginning or ending consonants. In the game, Garfield fishes and discovers different objects like a book. Students find the consonant that matches the object. The second game is called Orson’s Farm. Students can choose to play a game on the farm practicing rhyming words, syllables, segmenting words, blending, and deleting and substituting.

How to integrate Professor Garfield: Transport to Reading into the classroom: Professor Garfield is a nice addition to the kindergarten, first grade, or remedial reading programs. Use Professor Garfield: Transport to Reading as a center to reinforce phonemic awareness and learning in class.
Orson and his friends on the farm offer engaging, academically-sound activities at each level that will give students the opportunity to practice phonemic awareness tasks. The skills practiced while playing Fishing with Phonics can be used to reinforce ongoing classroom instruction directed at identifying sound-symbol correspondences and automatic phoneme blending. The students will love working on these interactive sites as an alternative to paper and pencil practice.

Tips: Be sure to visit the Teachers’ Lounge for really thorough instructional materials, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, writing, printable materials, electronic field trips, and educational links.

Google Lit Trips

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What it is: Google Lit trips is a new way to teach literature. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place. This is interactive learning at its best! Google Lit Trips include books such as By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleishman, My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, Traveling with P.G. Wodehouse, The Aeneid by Virgil, Candide by Volatire, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Night by Elie Wiesel, The Odyssey by Homer, and Blood Meridian by Comac McCarthy.

How to integrate Google Lit Trips into your classroom: Use these virtual trips to make literature come alive for your students.

Tips: These Google Lit Trips are best used for upper elementary through high school.

 

Vocabulary

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What it is: Vocabulary is a website where students can build spelling, reading, phonics, and vocabulary skills while playing games. The word games provide a motivation to manipulate, examine, and interact with the core building blocks of communication. There are six games to play and hundreds of options for each game. Games include: Hang Mouse (like hangman), Crossword Puzzle, Word Search, Vocabulary Quiz, Picture Match Game, and Word Scramble.

How to integrate Vocabulary into your classroom: Use the Vocabulary website to introduce new units, during phonics or center time, or as practice during a unit. The Vocabulary website offers multiple levels of each game and many themes.

Tips: Search this site for vocabulary words that tie in with your specific classroom and school themes. The site is appropriate for first through eighth grade. Find the levels that are most appropriate for your students.

 

 

Kidoons

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What it is: Kidoons brings time-honored, universally recognized stories to life. Stories include tales from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Thorton Burgess, and more. Kidoons offers both online stories and games for kids developing literacy skills.

How to integrate Kidoons into your classroom: Offer students the opportunity to use Kidoons during silent reading time, or during a unit on one of the time-honored authors listed above. The online books are not read for the students, so it is best used with independent readers.

Tips: Visit the teachers section to join the Kidoons teacher’s resource newsletter. Kidoons will alert you of any new games, stories, and ideas for your classroom.

Kidoons does have advertisements on it, use this as an opportunity to teach kids about how to spot ads on the Internet.

 

 

Podcast

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What it is: A podcast is a digital media recording that can be saved on and distributed over the Internet.

How to use Podcasting in your classroom: Use a podcast to record students reading. This can be used for reading records, for pronunciation, and reading fluency. Students, teachers, and parents can listen to reading records recorded over the course of the school year for fluency and progress made. Podcasts can also be used to share news with students and families, guest speakers, student presentations, student produced podcasts, lessons, assessment, digital stories, motivation, auditory learners, celebrating student work, interactive media center, a tool to help struggling students, to provide a “window” to your classroom for parents, and to show student growth at parent teacher conferences.

Tips: Podcasts can be created using several programs such as Apple’s Garageband (this application comes standard on Macintosh computers), Audacity which is a free open source software for recording and editing sounds, and My Podcast where podcasts can be recorded and hosted for free.

Bite Size Reading

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What it is: Bite Size Reading is part of BBC Schools. Bite Size Reading includes online deduction, dictionary, non-fiction, and poetry activities and quizzes.

How to integrate Bite Size Reading into your reading curriculum: Use the corresponding online lessons and worksheets during your reading time. Set up the Bite Size Reading site as a center that students visit as part of their reading lesson.

Tips: You can embed activities right on your website or blog with the code provided!