Spotlight

If you are looking for information of the internet and are tired of the way Google, Mamma or Yahoo gives you a "hit list", then try Grokker. You will get your information returned in a categorical circular view as shown here. This is the same word as searched for in VisuWords in a previous link, below ubiquitious.

Quoted directly from Jim Gates Tipline:
"This article talks about the college entrance exam for perspective science undergrads at a Chinese university. It specifically shows two math questions that.. scare me! Ok, not really, but they do make me wonder how many students actually get them right. Then I wonder how many American kids would get them right. Check them out. Especially you math teachers."

If you like to see connections between words, then try this visual dictionary called VisuWords. It will show the connections between words and identify the part of speech by color. By passing your cursor over one of the circles, a word box appears with more information.


This is another great resource from JimGatesTipline.
For a visual word thesaurus, try Visual Thesaurus. This site offers a home version- $39.95 or an online subscription for $19.99 per year.

Do you need to find a map of Oceania or the population density of Asia? Try JustMaps website for some quick answers and visuals for lessons. What is really shocking is the Literacy Map. There are flags of the world for you to use too.

If you re trying to show your students quantity vs. quality of food choices, try this web page for nutritional values. Not only does it show the size of a 200-calorie pile of doritos, or kiwi, but the photos are colorful as well.

Another good web2.0 tool is Blinklist. It is a website that will collect any web pages you designate by clicking on a button you install in your browser. OK that sounds like a lot of information right there, but once set up, you may find it easy to keep track of certain links. I have installed my blinklist on the left sidebar so you can see some of the sites I use weekly.
So far I have 37 sites I would consider my important resources for integrating technology into education. My del.icio.us account has ALL the links I find that I want to return to for further reading. That account is up to 437 links, but it contains information for school, home, my kids, family vacation links and other fun things people send me. Click on my del.icio.us account or blinklist on the left and search around.

I was using StumbleUpon.com to search the web this weekend. I was really in a daze if I was doing this! Anyway I stumbled upon this photo of cloud formations and I couldn't decide if it is real or a PhotoShop enhanced photo. You decide.

I didn't even know there was such a thing! Apparantly this is equal to the Oscar Awards, but for educational programing. So the envelope please......and the winners are:

Go HERE for the answers!

Thanks to Jim Gates Tipline for this and the following post.

This link takes you to some breathtaking photos by some of NASA's recent astronauts. I can't believe the clarity of the detail from so far away! I have a hard time keeping my kids in focus from 10 feet! When you arrive at this page, click on photo gallery to view the slide show, it's awesome.

We use Keynote as our instructional tool to teach students how to create presentations. Here is a great website, ETC to find that perfect background or theme for your presentation. There are hundreds of FREE colorful themes from which to choose. You could spend hours downloading and viewing these. I usually make one presentation and take a sample from each theme, so I have a complete library of the themes available on my computer. It's a quick way to search for something special. I also make a notation of how many templates or master slides are included. Presentations ETC is a part of the Educational Technology Clearinghouse and is funded by a grant from the Florida Department of Education, Office of Instructional Technology. Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida.
To see a short slide show of the themes I collected from this website click here and look for the New FREE Themes Preview link.

If you want your students to test their knowledge of world locations, try this Geography Knowledge Test.

If you can't catch a plane, try this 360 tour of Eiffel Tower. Be sure to look up and down too.
There are links on this page to other 360 tours.

You can see how educators are using Google Education tools by visiting GoogleEducation. Google is looking for educators to share lessons with others using some of their tools. The obvious one is Google Earth, but I am sure there are others of equal importance.

Now on Creative Commons the Academy Award Film: A Story of Healing. It is a 1997 international film about the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. To see it and read the rest of this story, visit BoingBoing.

If you want students to do real time analysis of world events, visit RSOE EDIS to see what is happening around the globe. This organization is located in Budapest Hungary and in cooperation with other scientific groups produces this interesting animated map. You can follow disasters, and natural events from all over the place. Currently there is a flood in Ethiopia wiping out homes, a power outage in Maine, an active volcano in the Atlantic, and a biohazzard emergency in Vietnam. This could be used in geography, math, science and language arts classes. Be creative!

So I had my homeroom each select a turtle to follow and they love it! Several teachers here told me their homeroom(we call it Prime Time) is following the turtle migration too. I even heard the announcement on the "TechBytes" segment of the morning news(WPVI-6). There are blogs and widgets for each of the turtles which talk about their journey from the turtle's point of view. Here is an example of the widget. Of course it is Purple Lightening!

Again, this is from Jim Gates Tipline and may not seem like a tech link, but visit the website of The Great Turtle Race and you will learn about Leatherback Turtles. You can see photos of the turtles, and the best part is that you can follow their migration! That's because some researcher put electronic tracking devices on the turtles for scientific purposes, but some geeky person has turned this into a great learning activity. So choose a turtle and follow it for the next 12 days! They are already 2 days into the swim. I am cheering for Purple Lightening! Each turtle has a sponsor and trading card.

OK, not all the posts have to be about techie stuff! Jim Gates had this link on his tips. I know there are a lot of bug phobics out there, but this is harmless! Check out this link to the BugGuide. This image is from the website. This is about as close as I want to get to a lot of bees!

I have to prepare a presentation for an online course about copyright. There is so much information to digest about text, sound, media, intellectual property published or not published it could take weeks to weed though it all. But as I read thorough it all I find that intent is as much an issue as what is done. There are so many great websites that digest the information and organize it in an easy manner in which to understand. They include:

http://www.mediafestival.org/copyrightchart.html

http://www.cyberbee.com/cb_copyright.swf

http://sos.its.psu.edu/copyright.html

http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/teachact.htm

http://techlearning.com/copyrightguide/index.php

http://www.cvschools.org/departments.cfm?subpage=15085

ProProfs is offering free online quizzes, educational blogs, flashcards, and web tutorials. Quizzes range from K-12 and SAT, GRE prep and general trivia.

I receive this newsletter about organization from Get Organized Now. There are often tips that can be used in the classroom as well as home. Sometimes there are some ads for products, but you might want some of them.

A recent story in Technology and Learning magazine(which is FREE), describes the one-to-one program in the state of Alaska. Students in 6th grade are issued a new iBook. The created the infrastructure for T1 connections, staff development, and a new curriculum to meet the needs of their students. Visit the Consortium for Digital Learning for details, or the Denali Borough School District. You can also read their story at Apple.com.

Teachers are still assigning the "create a political cartoon" homework. Why not give it a new angle and show kids how to use ToonDoo to make a comic! There are many examples to view before creating.

If you have ventured into the virtual world of SecondLife, then you might like the enhancement due this fall-----voice communication. This is reported on the www.techlearning.com website, March 2007. I must tell you that I created an avatar and did the tutorial, but lost interest in moving around the SL worlds. I can't play a Gameboy either!

I came across this product while reading my GoogleReader blogs. It is called Democracy and can manage as well as download videos. This link will take you to a biased discussion about Democracy vs. iTunes. You be the judge.
By the way if you read more than 5 blogs, then you might want to manage them through GoogleReader. I wasn't sure I would like this free service, but now that I have about 9 blogs collected there, I love seeing everything all in one place (Gmail, GReader, GoogleEducator).

If your district is considering allowing blogging, perhaps a visit to this site by the EFF will provide some information about what is and not protected. It is NOT a legal document, but there are some good guidelines to review.

In addition to blogging, what about online stalkers? Here are some resources from the Stalking Resource Center.

I wanted to learn about using a wiki, so knowing that students would have fun with this, I started the TechSeminar wiki at wetpaint.com. There are times that students have better insights about technology than adults. This is a place where they can comment, create and critique various technologies that I post. I have tried to encourage them to find new technologies to post, but just like a typical middle school student, they posted what is important to them! Disney, All About Bugs, and Bears were the pages they created. Even though this has nothing to do with technology, I left the pages for others to leave comments.

Some of their comments about inventing a technology are very good. Enjoy the read.

In a story reported by eschoolnews.com, Michigan legislators want to put more money into educational technology. The media however, reported that they wanted to buy iPods for every student in the state. You read the article and decide.

"It would open up a different way of teaching," Pominville said, noting that Apple's iTunes online store has free educational audio and video content for students. "Kids will love it. This is what they use all the time." He said teachers have approached him about doing podcasts and recording lessons, but the district doesn't have the money.

What caught my eye was the fact that Apple's iTunes would be making more educational content available to K-12 schools the way it does for colleges such as PennState and Harvard, also known as iTunes U.

Quoted from the article on eschoolnews.com:
NEW YORK--April 10, 2007--Spike Lee and HBO's epic documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," is the centerpiece of a new curriculum package that will be available this fall for high school, college and community educators. The documentary, for which Lee and Sam Pollard recently won the 2006 George Polk Award for Documentary Television, will be accompanied by a multi-disciplinary curriculum guide, "Teaching The Levees: A Curriculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic Engagement to Accompany the HBO Documentary Film Event," published and distributed by Teachers College Press.

Available free to educators, thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the curriculum package, which includes a complete version of the documentary in a two-disk DVD set and a complementary curriculum guide, can be requested at www.teachingthelevees.com while supplies last.

The lessons are aimed at three audiences: high school social studies students, college students in history-related courses, and adult learners in civic, religious and community groups. The documentary, "When the Levees Broke," was rated TV-14 when it was aired by HBO; the curriculum is intended for 11th and 12th grade high school students, college students and

Have you been watching the Planet Earth series on Discovery Channel? Here is a webinar with the producers of the program:

http://discoveryeducation.typepad.com/pennsylvania/2007/04/bring_planet_ea.html

Scheduled for April 24, you can have your own class ask questions of the program producers. Read this blog link for all the details.

Click HERE to register.

On this site, Rare Book Room, you can view and read many photographed classics from Shakespeare to Gutenberg's Bible of 1455, documents such as the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac.