Tag: Geography

Free Rice…New and Improved!

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Free Rice…New and Improved!3813 views

 

What it is: Free Rice is an amazing website that I have posted about two or three times in the past.  It has been a site where students can play a vocabulary game and earn 20 grains of rice for each correct answer.  The grains of rice are distributed to hungry people all over the world through the UN World Food Program.  Two of my students came in this morning with a printout of how many grains of rice they had earned over the weekend on the Free Rice website (we have a contest going each year to see which class and grade can earn the most grains of rice).   They were unusually excited about this bunch of earned rice because they discovered some new features on Free Rice.  Free Rice is now much more than a vocabulary game!  Students can choose the subject they would like to play.  As they increase in all types of knowledge, there is the added bonus of helping people in need.  Free Rice subjects now include art (famous paintings), chemistry (chemical symbols), English grammar, geography (world capitals), language learning (French, German, Italian, Spanish), math (multiplication), and of course…vocabulary!  Free rice is an incredible place for students to practice facts for a wide range of subject areas.  Some additional new features: now students can click on a speaker next to a word to hear it read to them and can change the level of difficulty manually!  I am so impressed with the site and impressed with my students for finding and sharing these new treasures!

 

How to integrate Free Rice into the classroom:  With all of the new subjects on Free Rice, it is the perfect place to send your students for fact practice.  Whether they are learning a new language, or need some practice with their multiplication facts Free Rice is a great place to practice.  What I love about Free Rice is the added bonus of character education.  Free Rice teaches students compassion and empathy.  My students truly play the game not for the learning taking place, but because it makes them feel good to do something for others.  Kids often feel like there is nothing they can personally do to help a cause…Free Rice gives them a voice and the ability to make a change.  It empowers them.  


Tips:  Set up Free Rice on your classroom computers as a place for students to go when they are finished early and need a little something extra.  Free Rice is also excellent in a computer lab setting and for home play.  

 

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

 

Statetris

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Statetris2750 views

 

What it is:  Statetris brings one of my all time favorite Nintendo games into the education realm.  Statetris mixes aspects of the game Tetris and geography.  Instead of positioning typical Tetris blocks, students position states or countries to their proper location.  There are 3 levels to play Statetris.  The easiest level gives students the shape and name of the state or country.  The medium level gives the students the state or country that rotates with the name of the state or country.  The hardest level gives students the sate or country rotating without a label.  The medium and hard levels can be very difficult because you get a state or country that isn’t straight up and down but may be rotated. Students can play Statetris with a map of the United States, Africa, Brazil, China, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, and UK.  

How to integrate Statetris into the classroom:  Statetris is a great place for students to learn and practice geography.  The familiar game platform is popular with students and will be a fun way to memorize geography locations.  This is the perfect place for students to study before a geography test.  

Tips:  Save this site in your bookmark bar for easy access.  This is a great site for kids to visit when they complete work early and are looking for extension activities. 

 

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

 

Maggie’s Earth Adventures

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Maggie’s Earth Adventures2984 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

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Thinkfinity3906 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

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Animoto for Education5252 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

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Ed.VoiceThread3809 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.

Websites with a Cause

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Websites with a Cause3420 views


What it is: I have posted before about a website called Free Rice.  This vocabulary game has the added benefit of donating rice to help end world hunger.  For each correct answer, Free Rice donates 20 grains of rice on your behalf.  This isn’t the only website with a cause.  Aid to Children is a vocabulary game like Free Rice, for every correct answer $.25 are donated to children in need through World Vision.  Free Poverty is a world geography game.  See how many cups of water you can donate by testing your knowledge about the world.  Each correct answer means that 10 cups of clean water have been donated on your behalf.  Free Corn is another vocabulary game like Free Rice, for every 25 visits to the website, 1 kernel of corn is donated.  Free Kibble is a trivia game.  Every day your students play Bow Wow Trivia 20 pieces of kibble are donated to Animal shelters to help feed their hungry dogs.  Free Kibble Kat also donates 20 pieces of kibble per player each day…this time students are raising kibble for cats.  

How to integrate Websites with a cause into the classroom: Each of the above websites offers a wonderful opportunity to teach students to look outside their own needs to the needs of others.  Use these websites to teach your students compassion, about other cultures, and about helping those less fortunate.  The websites will also be a great way for your students to practice vocabulary or geography.  Encourage your students to play these games from home when they are “bored” or just for fun.  See how much rice, money, corn, water, or kibble you can raise as a class.  Use these figures to teach graphing and charting.  You can also use the sites to teach persuasive writing.  Students can create a “commercial” for the site, a poster advertising the site, etc.  (I found a commercial that I made as an example for my students on Free Corn…small world!)  Using these websites with my class taught me just how compassionate and concerned my students are.  It was wonderful to see my students come together around a common goal. Using these websites with a cause in your classroom is a real life character education lesson!

Tips: Bookmark these sites on classroom computers, kids who finish their work early can sit and play one of the games while they wait for the next activity.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Websites with a cause in your classroom.

Computer Lab Favorites

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Computer Lab Favorites2212 views

What it is: Computer Lab Favorites is a collection of 50 one stop learning activities created
by Scholastic. The activities are self contained and interactive.
Students can play Dude the Dog, Scientific Labeling, Human Body Math
Hunt, Around the World, Mapman challenge, Puzzled States, Classify
This, Moon Olympics, Pick the Perfect Word, Choose a Word, and many
more. Students can spin a virtual game wheel to play a game. The site
is broken down by subject and also by grade levels k-2 and 3-5.

How to integrate Computer Lab Favorites into the classroom:
As the school year winds down, allow your students to review all they
have learned over the course of the year by playing these great
interactive activities. Students can spin the game spinner and have a
game selected for them or choose a specific subject or topic of play.
Save this site for next year, it is the perfect way to introduce a
topic or put some life back into reviews! The games are content rich
and a lot of fun to play!

Tips: This would be a good site to set as the home page on your classroom
computers. It has enough games and content to keep you coming back all
year long!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Computer Lab Favorites in your classroom.

Panwapa

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Panwapa2573 views

 

What it is: Panwapa was created by the educational experts also involved in Sesame Street to help children in kindergarten through second grade to be responsible global citizens. Panwapa works around some basic goals 1. To create awareness of the wider world, 2. Appreciating similarities and valuing differences among people of the world, 3. Taking responsibility for one’s behaviors, and 4. Community participating and willingness to take action both locally and globally. On the Panwapa website students can play hide and go seek in four languages, watch videos about other kids around the world, join the Panwapa world and learn about different countries create there own Panwapa kids and Panwapa home, and watch or download videos.

How to integrate Panwapa into your curriculum: Panwapa is a fun interactive resource for the k-2 classroom. Use it to introduce your students to the world through the videos following kids around the world. The Panwapa site is also ideal for the foreign language classroom. Students can play hide and go seek in Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, or Arabic. Use this site as an extension of your social studies curriculum, it will make it a much richer experience for your students.

Tips: Panwapa has lesson plans coming soon to the website. Be sure to check the caregiver section often for these free lesson plans!

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

Zoom into Maps

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Zoom into Maps2071 views

What it is: Zoom into Maps is an extensive collection of online maps. Maps range from 1500 AD to today. Maps include United States hometown geography, exploration and discovery, migration and settlement, travel and transportation, environmental history, military maps, pictoral maps, maps of today, and unusual maps. Each map is accompanied by a series of questions and tips on interpretation of orientation, legend, and scale.

How to integrate Zoom into Maps into the classroom: Use Zoom into Maps for history lessons, geography, and even literature lessons. These maps are very high quality and are a great way to teach students how to read a map. Create an activity where students can explore maps on their own in a center type activity or in a computer lab setting. These maps would also be perfect for displaying on a projector for whole class instruction. Print out the Graphic Organizer included on the site. Students can use this graphic organizer as they explore the maps on the site.

Tips: The maps on Zoom into Maps are zoomable and available for offline viewing as well.

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