Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Incompetech: Royalty-Free Music

Incompetech provides users with royalty-free music that they can use in just about any way they wish as long as provide attribution to the site.  One of most dynamic aspects of the search page is the ability to search for music based on Feel.  This allows you to search for music that fits the mood of your project. I have had students use this site to find music pieces to be their soundtracks to presentations about novels they have read.  They are able to find music appropriate to the mood of the novel.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Grammar Bytes

When I was teaching in the elementary grades, my students would spend some time each morning editing sentences and then we would discuss the corrections together (Daily Oral Language).  I think that if I were teaching Language Arts today, I would replace that activity with having students use Grammar Bytes.  It offers teachers and students a glossary of language terms, worksheets, presentations, and (my favorite thing) interactive exercises.  Each interactive activity comes with a handout where students can record their scores and measure their progress.  I could have students view the presentations at home on their own and then have them do the activities in class where I can support them (flipped classroom.)

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

fotobabble

Fotobabble allows you to upload an image, record your voice explaining the image, and then they provide you with a link to your fotobabble image or the embed code for inserting it on to your website, blog, or wiki.  This is a great tool for students to use to show what they know about a topic or image. Below is an example.



Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Crash Course

Crash Course is a Youtube channel that I stumbled upon quite accidentally, but boy, was I happy that I did. Crash Course provides instructional videos about World History, Biology, English Literature, and Ecology. Each Crash Course is broken up into smaller video topics. For example: World History has 42 videos that average about 12 minutes each. This could be a great resource if you were looking at flipping your classroom. Even if you are not, it would be a great resource to use in the classroom. Above is a video about Ancient Egypt from the World History course.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

gooru

The more time I spend on it, the more I am loving this site.  gooru calls itself, "A Free Search Engine for Learning," but oh it is so much more.  Sure, you can search for resources based on a key-word search like other search engines, but the heart and soul of this site is its "collections." There are several collections created that are free for anyone to use.  In these collections you will find videos, documents, diagrams, and interactive activities for such subject areas as math, science, and social studies.  As if that wasn't enough, if you create your own account, you can make your own collections that have the resources that you may have already made or collected over the years.  This could be an awesome resource for you if you are thinking about flipping your classroom.