What it is: NASA has such cool exploratory websites for kids. NASA @ Home and City is no exception. On this site, students get to explore 3D environments where they discover common household and city items that have roots in space exploration. Students can click on various objects in the house or city to learn more about how space travel impacted the items creation or use. Each item has a brief description and a short video included. If students are particularly interested in an item, they can click to learn more about it on NASA’s Spinoff database site. Students can take part in a Spinoff challenge where they explore technologies and answer questions; when all have been answered, students will unlock special downloads.
How to integrate NASA @ Home and City into the classroom: NASA @ Home and City is a great place for students to learn more about space as well as how the science and discoveries made in space impact their daily lives. I love the way this site encourages students to discover and uncover learning. NASA @ Home and City would be a great website for students to visit in partners or small groups on classroom computers. Each student can take a turn exploring for the group and acting as guide.
If you don’t have access to classroom computers, explore the site as a class using an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer. There is enough content for each student to have a turn directing the exploration. The 3D feel of the house and city would be fun on the big screen!
I like that this site is appropriate for a wide range of age and developmental levels. Young students will enjoy exploring and viewing the videos for information, while older students can really dig deeper with the Spinoff challenge and additional information links.
Tips: Make sure to rotate around the home and city, there is more to explore!
Please leave a comment and share how you are using NASA @ Home and City in your classroom!
What it is: This site has been around for a few years, I am constantly using it with students and assumed (wrongly) that I had shared it on iLearn Technology. I think sometimes I use a site so often that I think that it is common knowledge or that I have already posted about it. I’m redeeming myself today and sharing the truly INCREDIBLE site, We Choose the Moon. The site drops students right into history where they get to witness, and take part in the Apollo 11 launch and mission. Time travel might not exist yet, but I’m telling you, this site is the next best thing. Students actually hear all of the chatter from Mission Control, control the launch, view all 11 stages of the mission, read mission transmission, and follow the mission in “real-time”. I cannot say enough about how truly awesome this experience is for students. At each stage, students can explore more in-depth by looking through actual pictures from the mission, videos (including JFK’s We Choose the Moon speech), and a “map” of the stages Apollo 11 took to get to the moon. I wasn’t alive to witness this piece of history first hand, but I can tell you that this interactive gives me goosebumps, makes me appreciate the giant leap that our country took, and makes me swell with pride. Not something a textbook can deliver.
How to integrate We Choose the Moon into the classroom: We Choose the Moon plops students right in the middle of the action. Students can experience this solo in a one-to-one computer lab setting where each has access to their own computer. Students can explore at their own pace and “rabbit trail” for more information as needed. My favorite use of this site is as a whole class using a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard. The site has such a sense of nostalgia and it gives the opportunity to remember how the nation stopped and focused on the monumental moment in time. Children everywhere were riveted to their TV sets watching men being launched into space to travel to the moon. Students born after the era of the space race have a hard time recognizing just what an event this was. Viewing the site as a class gives students the opportunity to discuss the fashion, technology, and viewpoints of the day. It gives students the opportunity to “witness” history first hand as if they have traveled back in time. Take time to look through the photos, watch the videos, and reflect with students. Turn the interactive into a creative writing opportunity where students choose a view-point (of JFK, a child, an astronaut, someone in mission control, etc.) and write about their reflections and thoughts as they witness and are a part of this history.
Don’t be afraid to let your students “rabbit trail”, click here to see where students I worked with took the learning.
If you have students who are still crazy for more “moon” experience, check out Google Moon and NASA’s Moon virtual tour. I cannot get over how amazing technology is! Do you ever just stop and marvel at what we have at our finger tips? Wow.
Tips: Do you have parents or teachers who fail to see the brilliance of technology in the classroom? I defy any parent or educator to experience a site like this and not have their minds changed. This is one of those sites that upon stumbling on, I immediately sent to my dad. He LOVED it.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using We Choose the Moon in your classroom
As 2010 winds down, I thought I would do a quick recap of the top 10 most popular posts on iLearn Technology this year (because who doesn’t love a good top 10 list?):
As it turns out, your favorite posts are my lists and content that I created…nice!
Remember you can buy a pack of all of my Bloom’s posters here ($.99). Or get the Bloomin’ Peacock on a variety of items. All sales in the month of December will be donated to a Donor’s Choose project. ***UPDATE: Bloom’s Posters are now only available through my Kickstarter project!
I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and holiday season; I hope it is filled with family, good memories, love, and of course…technology! 😉
The following is a re-post from my other blog: iPad Curriculum. I shared Send Felicity a few weeks ago as part of my advent collection but thought I would give everyone a little more information about this incredible site and invitation for play. Even though Send Felicity has an iPhone/iPod Touch app, the app isn’t necessary to engage in the creative play which is also available on the Send Felicity website and Facebook page. I encourage you to offer your students opportunities for play. I deeply believe that play is a strong catalyst for learning.
What it is: Everyone could use a little more magic and enchantment in their lives and Send Felicity brings students (and teachers/families) just that. Take a look at the video below to watch some of that magic unfold.
Felicity is six and three-quarters years old. She loves imagination, making things, and magic. She comes from a magical place called Thin Air. Felicity invites children everywhere to join her in play. Every day there is a new special surprise waiting for children. Each surprise invites students to engage in creativity, play, imagination, and learning. It is an enchanting-ongoing place that involves technology, imagination, and the real world in new ways. The artists, geeks, and minds behind Felicity are deeply committed to keeping the childhood experience one of magic, imagination, and exploration. They bring these values to life beautifully as an application, website, and social experience. What I love about the Send Felicity experience is the storyline behind Felicity, and the invitation to be part of something that is engaging, meaningful, and magical. The combination of the three makes Send Felicity a unique learning and interactive experience. So, how does Send Felicity work? Children can visit the application or website to learn of a new craft (adventure) to take with Felicity. Felicity takes every day objects like paper plates and makes them magical. Children follow the adventures and create and pretend along with Felicity. Children can take pictures of their finished masterpieces and upload them to the Send Felicity website, sharing the creative experience with others. The application is truly unique and takes what is real and adds a bit of magic (as you saw in the video).
How Send Felicity can enrich learning: Play is an important part of learning. It provides the building blocks for self-regulation and executive functions, promotes creativity, imagination, and divergent thinking. Unfortunately play is often stripped from the classroom. Send Felicity weaves together a wonderful tapestry of play and learning in the form of an application, a website, and a social movement. Felicity uses open-ended play and experimentation that leads to an attitude of fun learning. Felicity helps your students turn ordinary objects into creative works of magic. Use Felicity’s daily dose of magic to spark your students imaginations. Set aside some time for your students to do a little creative play. The benefits that play has on the rest of the learning day will be well worth the time invested. Go beyond the crafts and invite your students to write stories, poems, or secret letters in connection with the imaginative play of the day. Activities for Felicity are open-ended and include art, language arts, literacy, and even math and physics. Send Felicity marries technology and real life in new fun ways. The application is just a piece of the bigger picture. The application takes students physical creation and adds a little magic to it.
Today we are boldly making mistakes.Today, our children will make a small mess.
Today, we’ll set out on an adventure and begin with an “oops” and end up in a place where we can look and wonder. Together, we can do something mistaken and wrong; and audacious and wonderful to surprise everyone.
This project shows children that it is okay to make mistakes, and that, in fact, those mistakes can be turned into something wonderful, new, and meaningful. Students don’t hear often enough that it is okay to make mistakes and that it is indeed an important part of the learning process. Take a look at what these beautiful oops turn into:
The Send Felicity App has not yet been released to the iTunes store, but don’t let that stop you from using Felicity in your classroom right now, the Send Felicity website is full of fun activities, instructions, and even a bit of magic. You can also check Felicity out on Facebook where she shares creations made by children from around the world! Send your students home with a wonderful gift this holiday season and point them toward the Send Felicity website. Students will love the opportunities for play and imaginations, parents will love the ideas to keep their kids learning and playing. Let parents know about Send Felicity along with this article from Geek Mom for a little explanation.
The wonderful people over at Send Felicity are so passionate about creating a world of wonder and imagination for children to play in that they have made the technology that Send Felicity is based on open source. Interested parents, educators, and developers are invited to sign up to play along with them.
Devices: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch iOS 3.1.3 or later
What it is:Collaborize Classroom is an online learning platform developed for classroom discussion and engagement. Collaborize lets students and teacher collaborate in online discussions. It can be used for meaningful conversations related to classroom curriculum, to ask and answer questions, to collaborate on projects, to vote on ideas/issues, and more. Teachers can continue valuable discussions, facilitate online learning groups, encourage the sharing of resources, and provide students with space to engage in collaborative learning. Collaborize is easy to set up and navigate for both teachers and students. Questions can be posted easily including multiple choices, yes/no, vote or suggest, and forum. After the questions have been answered, the results of the discussion can be published on a results page. Collaborize has great teacher features. Add attachments to any question including photos, videos, and documents. Send a message to students using the built-in messaging system. Participation reports track each student’s activity on the site including number of logins, votes, comments, and replies. Activity reports can be sent to your email daily for review. Set up a watch list to follow a discussion more closely. Collaborize has fantastic supporting materials including lesson plans, helpful tutorials, and research articles. If you sign up for Collaborize before November 15, 2010, the product is being offered at no-cost (read FREE) for the 2010-2011 school year! In partnership with Democrasoft, The Kids in Need Foundation made this free year possible…take advantage of it before the 15th!
How to integrate Collaborize into your curriculum:Collaboraize is an awesome tool to facilitate discussions in (and out of) the classroom. The format of Collaborize makes it flexible enough to use in any classroom and in a way that works for you. Use Collaborize to facilitate discussions and literature circles, plan a science lab or experiment to be conducted in class, practice second languages with online dialog, post current events for students to reflect on, work with classrooms around the world to discuss and debate any topic, pose a math word problem and ask students to discuss the different ways the problem could be approached. Collaborize is a wonderful tool for student discussion and collaboration, but the teacher tools are what make it such a perfect fit for the classroom setting. It is easy to sign up, get your free year today!
Tips: Collaborize has really helpful resources for teachers. Learn about the do’s and don’ts of student forums, the art of asking questions, lesson and activity ideas, rethinking your role in the classroom and much more. Even if you don’t sign up for Collaborize, I recommend spending some time checking out these free documents, they have great tips that can be applied to a variety of web collaboration tools.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Collaborize in your classroom!
Today I am sharing a guest post that I wrote for Inspired Classroom: 34 Free Productivity Tools That Will Help You Eliminate Expensive Software. These are my favorite free productivity tools to use in the classroom. Here is the first paragraph, hopefully it will convince you to go take a look at the full article 🙂
Software can be an expensive burden for schools to carry year after year. This expense can result in a decreased use of technology because schools can’t purchase the tools that make the technology worthwhile. Lack of budget doesn’t have to stop you in your tracks. There are thousands of free technology resources and online tools that will keep your students learning even without a large software budget. Below are a few of my favorite free online productivity tools that offer excellent alternatives to their expensive software counterparts.
Yesterday, Silvia Tolisano of Langwitches Blog (The Magic of Learning) shared an incredible story of learning. After reading through her post I asked if I could share the story here and she graciously agreed. Siliva and the fifth grade teacher she worked with did an incredible job of letting her students take charge of their learning. It has been so successful that her students want to continue learning and connecting their knowledge about Christopher Columbus. I love that Silvia’s story of learning begins with a glimpse of what the planning for the learning looked like. Silvia lets us peek inside the intentional planning and organizing of the learning. Using an iPad and the iThoughtsHD app, Silvia and the fifth grade teacher planned a unit on Christopher Columbus that went beyond the textbook and exposed them to authentic research, multiple perspectives, and the opportunity to come up with their own conclusions about the “hero” status of Christopher Columbus in the United States. The results are truly incredible. You can read this awesome story of learning at my blog Stories of Learning or directly from Silvia’s blog.
Yesterday I was the guest moderator for #NTchat on Twitter. For those of you who are unfamiliar, #NTchat is a chat held on Twitter. The chat happens weekly on Wednesdays and is geared toward New Teachers. To participate in the chat, anyone who wants to join in uses the hash tag #NTchat at the end of their tweet. @teachingwthsoul asked me to talk about how new teachers could utilize iLearn Technology. You can see the archive of the chat here. As I started tweeting, I realized that many of my readers probably don’t know the history of iLearn Technology. For those of you who are interested, this is how it all started…
Out of college, I taught in a second grade classroom. As a new teacher I had very few resources (no file cabinets full of lesson plans and activity ideas), very few learning games, few books in my classroom library, and as a newly wed out of college, very few funds with which to purchase said items. I was also frustrated, it wasn’t fair for students in my classroom to have fewer resources available to them just because I was a new teacher. In college, I stumbled upon abc Teach and Teach-nology. That first year of teaching, I frequented both sites regularly for printables, games, and lesson ideas. A few months into the year, I read my students Jan Brett’s The Mitten. They were enamored with the book and I wanted to take advantage of it. I didn’t have any resources to accompany the book so I wandered online to see what I could scrounge up. I found Jan Brett’s website and couldn’t believe what I found. She had SO many printables for the classroom, from bulletin boards to flash cards, and calendars. She also had a teacher’s kit and sent my students monthly postcards about new projects she was working on.
I quickly realized that the Internet had a lot of resources that could help me through my first year. One night I was on the hunt for some additional phonics resources that I could print out and use with my students. A Google search introduced me to Starfall. I was gobsmacked. I couldn’t believe the printables, activities, games, and online stories available. It was truly like finding a treasure trove! Back in the day, Starfall would send their work journals and cut-up books for FREE along with Starfall pencils and stickers. I ordered enough journals and books so that every student could have their own. My students really enjoyed the print materials from Starfall, I knew they would love the online books and activities as well. I was lucky enough to have two computers in my classroom. They were old and didn’t do much outside of run a word processor, but they were connected to the Internet. I couldn’t wait to show my students Starfall. I wish that I could have bottled up their excitement over Starfall. They were thrilled to be using the computers and loved the fun stories and activities on Starfall. My students that were struggling with phonics seemed to suddenly get it, Starfall made it click.
This was the beginning of my addiction to the Internet. After seeing what Starfall did for my students, I was eager to find more sites that could make learning fun and engaging. I found Gamegoo and Book Adventure and soon had my students cycling through those two computer centers throughout the day. My students were eager for literacy every day and couldn’t wait for their rotation through the computer center. As the year progressed, I added a few new learning sites each month as a center in my classroom. I saw the impact that technology made on student learning. I saw how excited my students were about learning.
The following year, I took a position as a computer teacher at a local private school. They were desperate for a computer teacher, and I was eager to learn more. I spent my summer creating a scope and sequence (there was no computer curriculum), writing lesson plans, and searching for resources. I had a handful of ideas based on what I had done with my students the previous year but knew it wouldn’t carry me through the whole school year. As I was searching for online resources, I discovered that there were excellent lists of websites that could be used with kids. The problem was that they were literally just lists of links to sites. There was no description, no organization, it was cumbersome and took a long time to find the really good sites. I started collecting sites in iKeep Bookmarks, writing detailed descriptions and ideas I had for using the resource with students. It was my husband who suggested that I start a blog of all the sites and ideas for their use. If I couldn’t find one comprehensive collection that was well-organized and had clear descriptions, chances were that others had run into the same. I didn’t really think anyone outside of myself and maybe a colleague would ever use the site. It really was a place where I could keep track of everything for myself. Several thousand resources later and here we are 🙂
If you are looking for a resource that will fit your specific needs, you can search iLearn Technology in a few ways. The first is by using the search tool bar in the header. Enter any subject or keyword related to your needs. I try to tag each post with keywords that I would search if I were looking for the resource. The second is to use the multi category search in my sidebar on the right. You can choose a category from each drop down or choose from only a few categories. For example you might be looking for a science resource for your 2nd grade students. You could choose “science” from the subject drop down and “Primary Elementary” from the Grade Level drop down. Every resource on iLearn Technology that matches that search criteria will be displayed.
If you aren’t currently involved in Twitter education chats, I recommend you choose one to participate in. They are always a source of great conversation, thinking, and camaraderie. Check out @Cybraryman1′s Twitter Chat list here. Find one of interest and join in the conversation!
ISTE 10 was an incredible conference and experience. Learning didn’t only occur during the sessions, it happened in the conversations and collaboration between the sessions. As I mentioned in my last post, it was so much fun to meet members of my PLN in person. We seemed to fall into conversation and joking like old friends (which I suppose is what we are). Edublogger Alliance member Buzz Garwood orchestrated some excellent conversations that can be viewed in the following videos:
I was honored that Buzz included me in these videos, but absolutely floored that I got to be in a video with David Warlick. David’s blog, 2Cents Worth, is the first educational blog that I read. Corey, Amy, and I got a mini keynote right there while we listened to Buzz interview David. Once again, as I listened to my peers speak about teaching, learning, and technology I was overwhelmed by the greatness I am surrounded by daily in my PLN. You guys are amazing!
There are two parts to our video: 21st Century Classroom. In part one we share our insights on teaching and learning in a digital age. In part two, we discuss the challenge of using IT to make the classroom relevant and engage students in a learning lifestyle. (As a side note, I love the idea of ditching the phrase life-long learner for learning lifestyle.)
Personal Learning Networks is another video that Buzz took during the conference, in it he interviews some of the members of my PLN as well as members of the iLearn Technology blogging alliance.
Thank you Buzz for collecting all of this on video, it was a pleasure to meet you and work with you in person!
And Now for something completely different, take a look at this ISTE10 fashion video that my colleague Amy and I got roped into. Good for a laugh anyway!
