Spotlight

In a recent eSchool News Online article, there is a story about museums, historical locations and others are creating a virtual look back at land formations, structures and lifestyles. This is done through modeling the dimensions of the ancient structure and animating the changes over time. It could be done by way of kiosk, or large movie screens or a virtual tour of an old village uncovered during an excavation.

As described from the site: "StudySphere provides fast, easy and free access to a wide variety of research-quality child-safe websites organized for education online from home, school, study abroad and home school. StudySphere’s goal is to help students, teachers, librarians, and other researchers find both highly targeted and closely related information quickly."

At this site you can review other teacher's ideas, or submit one of your own. They are free and look pretty good. As always, read the whole description before printing for your students.

This looks interesting, but I am not sure if there is or is not a cost involved. Here is the description from the site: "Over the last decade, the emphasis placed on global education has significantly increased in primary and secondary education. Students and educators are no longer limited by the geographic locations of their places of learning; new technologies can literally bring the world to the classroom. Through the Internet, ProjectExplorer provides students with access to peoples and places around the world."

I was watching tv last night and StumblingUpon different websites, I came across this site which has reviews of many FREE book sites, including digital resources. The comments from other readers are interesting too. If you are looking to start a digital book collection, but don't want to spend a lot of cash, try this site first.

Stanford University, Penn State, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT have all become part of iTunes U. That means hat you can listen to programs produced by these and other universities for free. The content includes sports highlights, campus tours, language lessons, lab demonstrations, class lectures and special programs. Be sure to click on the faculty and student tabs to see how schools are using ipods and podcasting in education. With this channel available for universities, can a K-12 public school channel be far behind?

Senior pole vaulter Allison Stokke has had her photo hijacked. Read this article by Eli Saslow in the Washington Post to see how a simple sports photo has caused this 18-year old her privacy. She has maintained her dignity through it all and has set many high school records in California. You Rock Allison, don't let them get you down.

Schools all over the country are under attack to find extra graduation tickets for those unexpected out of town guests. But now you can offer from the comfort of your own air conditioned home "Gradcast". Several districts have teamed up with their local cable company to offer a live feed of the ceremony. In addition, some schools go as far as to stream it through the internet. Remember, federal law requires that cable companies offer free services to public education, so take advantage of this offer.
To read the rest of this article from the Houston Chronicle click here.

Need a quick graphic organizer for tomorrow? Then look at this site: Freeology and find organizers, posters, journal topics and award certificates.

There are 190 fun math problems you can use as a classroom opener. Put one on the board while the class is arriving and getting settled. Here is a sample: "One hundred ants are dropped on a meter stick. Each ant is traveling either to the left or the right with constant speed 1 meter per minute. When two ants meet, they bounce off each other and reverse direction. When an ant reaches an end of the stick, it falls off." You have to visit the page for the answer!