Sunday, March 25, 2012

District Wide Information

Big Book Babble - http://www.bigbookbabble.co.uk/
Big Book Babble is hosted by London's childrens' comedian, James Campbell.  The focus of this program is to encourage your students to read.  Children's authors are interviewed with the program running approximately 30 minutes aimed for students aged 7 - 11 years old.  The featured author on Tuesday, March 27th at 11 AM is Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Alex Rider series.

WatchKnowLearn.org - http://watchknowlearn.org/
WatchKnowLearn is a resource for over 33,000+ free educational videos for educational subjects in elementary and secondary learning.  This is another great repository for videos to enhance your teaching.

 


Sunday, March 18, 2012

District Wide Information

ReadWorks.org - http://www.readworks.org/
The mission of ReadWorks.org is to improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement by providing K‐6 educators with a proven online reading comprehension curriculum and methodology.  Like Reading Rockets.org and Adlit.org, this site has many standards based lessons for comprehension including novel units for grades 5 and 6.  There are short video tutorials about this site at the following link http://www.readworks.org/full-site-tour#part5Here the videos highlight the following Part 1: Finding the Lessons (3 min.); Part 2: The K-4 Units (4 min.); Part 3: The Non-Fiction Reading Passages (3 min.); Part 4: The Elements of a Lesson and Standards Alignment (6 min.); Part 5: The 5th-6th Novel Units (4 min.); Part 6: Sharing Lessons and Searching by Standards (6 min.)

HippoCampus.org - http://www.hippocampus.org/
HippoCampus offers free multimedia study materials and educational information to high school students. Subjects include algebra, statistics, calculus, biology, physics, chemistry, Earth science, economics, history and government, psychology, and religion. Users can “mix” their own multimedia playlists, find existing playlists, and share their playlists with peers. Teachers can create playlists for easy student access. This is another great teaching resource using NROC (National Repository of Online Course), Khan Academy, PhET Interactive Simulations, and NOAA Collections (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). 
HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) and was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. (HippoCampus requires Adobe Flash.)

Sunday, March 11, 2012

District Wide Information

Profile for Technology Literate Students


This week's example is from the Profiles for Technology Literate Students for grades 6-8.

1. Describe and illustrate a content-related concept or process using a model, simulation, or concept-mapping software. (1,2)

For teachers interested, my FLY presentation relates to this.  I am presenting four resources by WETA (Public Broadcasting for Greater Washington) and funded by the U.S. Department of Education.  These four website resources provide reading strategies, best practices and other resources.  These will help with the profile above which is indicated for grades 6-8, but the websites are for PK-12.  Check out http://www.adlit.org/ for grades 4-12, http://www.readingrockets.org/ for grades PK-3, LDOnline for help with students with learning disabilities or ADHD, and Colorin' Colorado for resources for ELL students and families.

Formative Assessments and Technology
I attended the SW/WC Technology Conference on Friday.  One session was titled Formative Assessments and Technology.  I will highlight some of the technology tools that I thought were interesting.  If anyone would like a copy of the hand-out I received to try other technology tools for formative assessments, just send me an email.
1. Educreations - http://www.educreations.com/ or Educreations app
This is a recordable virtual whiteboard that can be used to create video lessons or explanations and then uploaded to the Educreations website. These lessons can be emailed if needed.
2. Socrative - http://www.socrative.com/ 
This is a response/assessment tool.  Teachers create questions and students access them through a wireless device with a web browser.  Socrative provides color-coded reports of student performance so you can analyze student performance results quickly and easily.
3. PaperRater - http://www.paperrater.com/
Paper Rater is a free tool that gives students feedback on writing assignments including a grammar checker, plagiarism detector, writing suggestions and a tentative grade based on word choice, spelling, grammar, and more. 




Sunday, March 4, 2012

District Wide Information


Profile for Technology Literate Students

This week's example is from the Profiles for Technology Literate Students for grades 9-12.

2. Create and publish an online art gallery with examples and commentary that demonstrate an understanding of different historical periods, cultures, and countries. (1,2)


The following website is an engaging art resource to make the connections as described in the above profile.  Art offers a visual understanding of the historic period and the culture of that time.


Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic supplement  for the traditional art history textbook. As of October 2011, Smarthistory is a part of the Khan Academy.  Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker are the creators of the podcasts and screen-casts found in Smarthistory.org.  These conversations discuss the works of art.
http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/


1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts




K-12 Tech Tools - http://edutechdatabase.wikispaces.com/home#.T1QpMYePW18

K-12 Tech Tools is a fantastic resource!  It includes many websites as well as iPad apps organized by subject area or grade level.  Check this out for new ideas!