Sumanas Science Animation Gallery

Sumanas Science Animation Gallery provides users with a nice collection of animated tutorials for various science disciplines. Some use Flash, while others are QuickTime movies. Some include audio with captions of what is being said while other contain no audio with explanations of what is being shown to the viewer. While you may not have access to every scientific concept, process, or phase, it is a good collection that will hopefully increase over time.

Conceptua Tools for Teaching Fractions

If you are a math teacher who needs to provide instruction on fractions, then conceptua math may have some tools that would help improve that instruction. There are tools for Concepts to Procedures and well as Higher Order Thinking. Each tool includes a video tutorial, a list of NCTM standards covered, Common Core Standards covered, vocabulary, and some possible IEP Goals. Take a look at the video embedded below to learn more about conceptua math.

President Obama's "Back to School" Speech for 2010

Yesterday afternoon, at about 2:30, I discovered that President Obama had made his second annual "Back to School" speech at 1:00 PM. I was very disappointed because, even though his speech last year was considered controversial because the White House put out a list of discussion questions teachers could use with their students, I found his speech to be uplifting and inspiring last year. I wish I could have let teachers know ahead of time that it was occurring and even arrange to have it broadcast on our television system in the school. But regardless of my disappointment, I missed the boat. Luckily, the White House Website has the video available to those who wish to embed it into their Blog, Wiki, or Webpage. I have embedded it below. Have a look at it. Hopefully, you will want to share it with your students.

AnswerGarden

AnswerGarden is a great way to get feedback from others. It allows you to post a question on to your webpage, blog, wiki, social network, etc., and viewers to post a response. The more people who visit or see the question, the more responses you'll get. This could be used with just your students as a quick survey tool, or as a means for finding out what they know about a topic. For example: have students list adjectives that describe something. Like, Apples are.... Here is an actual example. Have students estimate how old something is. Like, How long ago was the Great Depression? The possibilities are endless. Take a look at the example below:

How might you use AnswerGarden in your classroom?... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a great tool for students to use prior to passing in writing or research papers. It can act as their own personal proofreader. It is also a great tool for teachers to use to check quickly for writing errors and plagarism. By uploading text to Grammarly, text is checked for grammar, punctuation, and plagarism. The text is checked for over 150 different grammar rules, provides easily understood explanations about the errors found. Grammarly also spots errors in spelling and finds words and phrases inconsistent with context or style of your document. Grammarly also looks for text borrowed from other online sources and provides links to those sources. Grammarly also helps you to write more eloquently by providing context-optimized synonyms that make more of an impact. Grammarly also is a time saver by allowing you to see all your mistakes at a glance without having to scroll through the entire document.

Print What You Like

Times are tough, as well all know, when it comes to school budgets. But did you know that toner and ink for printers is at the top of the list when it comes to cost per ounce.? Something to think about when students do research on the internet is all of the ink and paper that is wasted. They often print unwanted or unnecessary pages, pages cluttered with ads, and other "junk." Print What You Like allows you to select a part of a page and print it easily. You can even install a bookmarklet in your browser to make the process easy. If plan on having students do research involving internet resources, I recommend experimenting with this tool. It might save lots of precious trees and ink!

A Vision of Students Today

Today I put the results of a technology integration self-evaluation into a NoteShare document. I will spend much time going over the results so that I know where to begin helping my colleagues develop the 21st Century Skills of their students. As I started looking, I thought about how much has changed about teaching, information, media, and literacy since I was a kid. Kids today are an entirely different type of animal when it comes to school, information, media, and communication. Teachers who are just entering the profession may be better able to empathize with today's students. But, for the many educators who were not raised using technology, integrating technology into their teaching pedagogy is not as natural. For those of us who are not digital natives, the video embedded below can be a real eye-opener. While this is not my usual type of post (having no tool for you to use) it could be a good discussion starter with students, between teachers on a team, or during collaboration between teachers of the same content area.

10 Incredibly Inspirational Videos on YouTube

YouTube can be a powerful tool to use in the classroom regardless of what subject area you teach. If you teach Social Studies, then this resource may be of particular interest to you. The newssite Mashable has collected ten videos of some of man's most inspirational moments caught on film ranging from the late 1800's to 2008. These videos could make for some interesting and inspirational lessons. It would be interesting to create a video timeline using these videos possibly using an online timeline maker like Dipity. You may even want to turn all ten videos into one long film using the tool Dragontape.
I have embedded one of the videos below:

Readability

This morning, Kim Cowperthwaite and Paula Eppich did a Language Arts presentation for the staff. One tool that Kim shared with her colleagues was Readability. Readability is a tool that allows you to read and print articles online more easily by removing the clutter of graphics, adds, and other distracting items found on a website. The Readability website provides instructions for setting up your browser to make use of this tool. There is also a FireFox Readability Add-on that can be installed. This tool can make it a little easier to keep students focused on the text at hand.

Another staff member asked me to share the tool QuietTube which can be used to display a YouTube video without all of the other distracting clutter on the page. Click here to read my post about QuietTube.

Wall Wisher: Online Sticky Board

Yesterday, the principal passed out paper to the teachers in the first staff meeting of the year. He then asked people to generate lists of their favorite pedagogical practices to use in the classroom. Teachers were then to find out what others at their table listed and then select one practice they had never used before to try out during the year. As we did this, I was thinking about how we could have used a Web 2.0 tool to complete this task and collaborate not just with the people at their table, but all of the colleagues in the room. I then recalled the site WallWisher.com which allows a user/presenter to create a blank wall, give access to participants, and then participants can then place sticky notes on the board. Once the presenter and parents click Refresh, they can then display/see all of the posted sticky notes. WallWisher is a great tool to use for brainstorming in class, or for back-channeling. Below is a slideshow about WallWisher, created by Tom Barrett, as a part of his Interesting Ways Series.

Back to School

If you are returning to teachers technology toolbox, welcome back! If this is your first time visiting my blog welcome. Throughout the course of the school year I hope to post several times a week to this blog, some of the dynamic online tools that are available to educators that will help students develop some of their 21st century skills. I would love for those who read/subscribe to my blog to provide feedback about these tools after they have used them, or if they have used them before, so that we can all benefit from your experiences with using them in a classroom. As I write this, realize that some of you may not know how to "subscribe" to this blog. If this is you, take a look at the video below:

Trying Out DocStoc.com

I am trying out DocStoc.com because a teacher in the Blog session of our Summer Technology Institute asked if she could post her classroom newsletter to her blog so that parents could see and download it. So, I am giving it a try. Hopefully, you will see my test below.
The document I chose to make available is Richard Byrne's "Google For Teachers" document

Google+for+Teachers -

PollEverywhere

During the summer technology Institute, I learned about a cool tool for getting data from students. We used a polling tool called Polleverywhere.com which had us use a cell phone to text our response to a question that was on a presentation. When we finished texting, the presenter hit refresh and suddenly all of our results appeared in a bar graph on his presentation. Very Cool!

Replace audience response hardware with Poll Everywhere

Dragontape - Education Today

Dragontape - Education Today

This is my first time using Dragontape, which allows you to take several YouTube videos and combine them into one. You are then given a link to the now larger video and you can (as you can see) blog the To try this out, I took a couple of videos that I have seen this summer which illustrate how education has changed since the time that most teachers were in school themselves. You could use this tool yourself by putting together a series of videos for students to watch on a topic you are teaching. You could have students create a DragOnTape video of "Greatest Hits" for videos they found about their research topic.

Trying Out Twitterfeed

Since creating this blog, I have been tweeting each new post by logging into Twitter, or starting up TweetDeck and then manually writing each new post so that those who follow me on Twitter get informed about the new post. Tim Hart shared with me the use of TwitterFeed.com which will look for any new posts I make and then automatically tweet any new posts I write on my blog. Hopefully, it will do so once I post this. Let's find out.