Tech Tips for Teaching & Learning

Websites for fun and teaching...

Random sites I've run across recently...

Next time you receive an email with a shocking "true" story, check Snopes, an index of urban legends and common fallacies. Do this before you forward it to your friends!

Project Gutenberg is a great source for public domain literature, offering over 20,0000 titles, including audiobooks. Speaking of audiobooks, LibriVox offers a collection of audiobooks read by volunteers, and anyone can volunteer (yes, even you or your students!).

The World Bank now offers a mashup of their data with Google maps - great for students researching countries or regions of the world. By clicking on an icon, you can see data for that country or region. Go to http://geo.worldbank.org/

Another clever mashup was created by high school teachers in California. GoogleLitTrips takes pieces of literature and maps locations in the book using GoogleEarth. Clicking on the various markers opens up more information and photographs about the locations. Better yet, it's customizable, so you and your students could contribute to the resources!

Enjoy!

Easy Test Maker

Easy Test Maker is a great little tool for creating paper tests without having to fiddle with formatting. You can create multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, short answer and true and false questions all on the same test. You can also insert instructions divide your test into multiple sections, generate answer sheets, and save your test as a Word document.

All of this is FREE! There is also an option to pay for a subscription which adds a few additional features. Well worth a try.

Try These! Fun (and useful) sites

Browsing PC Magazine's list of top web sites, I found these:

• Bubble.us is a nice little brainstorming tool that lets you quickly and easily create mind maps. I've seen programs like this used very effectively when brainstorming with students, to record and organize their ideas.
• Footnote is an amazing source of digitized copies of every item in the National Archives, from hand-written notes to FBI case files to Civil War photographs. Very cool!
• HowStuffWorks has been one of my favorites for years. It's exactly what it sounds like, but it's not just technology - categories include recipes, home and garden, and money too! Great explanations, complete with illustrations.

Check them out! And remember to have fun...

Too Much Fun!

In a recent post on LeaderTalk, John Evans wrote about some of his favorite tools for educators. This one really caught my eye: fd’s Flickr Toys  The page is a bit busy, but if you look through it, you'll see a bunch of tools that would be great in the classroom: a magazine cover maker, trading card maker, movie poster maker, and much, much more.

Think about how fun it would be for your students to make these as part of a project! I tried the magazine cover maker, and I couldn't believe how simple it was. And with the new MacBooks we have this fall, students could use the built-in camera to take photographs of themselves (and friends?) to include. The possibilities are endless. This one is definitely worth a look. You'll probably have so much fun you'll forget that these are educational tools!

Cool Tech Tools at CDH

It's the beginning of a new school year, so let's take a look at a few of the fun tech tools at CDH. These tools are already being used by many of your colleagues, and they've been proven to be effective. Give them a try! (Note: many of these resources require user id's and passwords; contact your friendly Technology staff for assistance).

• Infinite Campus is our student data management system. We use it for attendance and grading, among other things. Here you can see your class roster, create seating charts (with pictures!), take attendance and record grades. Everyone uses this one!
• Atomic Learning is an online resource for learning how to use just about any software program you can think of. These are presented in short video clips which you can watch as many times as needed. For example, here's one on creating manual page breaks in Word.
• Moodle is a fantastic resource for creating course websites. Designed specifically for education, Moodle gives you options such as assignments, weblinks and online discussion forums. The vast majority of our students use Moodle for at least one course, so chances are your students already know how to use it!
• United Streaming is a phenomenal source for high quality videos, clipart and more. With over 4000 videos and 40,000 video clips, it is the largest K-12 online digital video library available. You can search by topic and grade level, download content or view online, and create assignments and quizzes based on the content. Do think ahead for this one, because you will not be able to download or view videos online during the school day (it would bring our network to a halt). However, you are encouraged to download your video after school hours and then view it during classes.
• Quia is an online tool for creating online reviews, flash cards, learning games and quizzes. You won't believe how easy it is; just enter a list of terms or vocabulary words and definitions, and you'll have flash cards, word finds and more in seconds.

Here's a challenge: choose one that's new to you and give it a try! Remember that help is always available.