Veezzel: Free Stock Photo Search

I try not to make a habit of re-posting from other technology integrator blogs, but I just couldn't resist when I read the post by Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers about Veezzel. Recently I did a post about the tool Behold which was a search engine for Flickr where users could check off that they only wanted it to search for copyright-friendly pics to be used for education. With Veezzel, all of the pics are free stock photos. I did a search for ice cream (must have had a craving) and all of the result were of high quality. This could be a good place to send students when they are working on their digital projects.

issuu.com Online Publishing Tool

Now you can publish your writing or the writing done by your students online by using Issuu. By uploading a PDF, PowerPoint, Word Document, or anything with a PDF, DOC, PPT, ODT, WPD, SXW, RTF, ODP, or SXI extension. Those of us using iWork apps (Pages & KeyNote) need to Export to one of the above type of files. There are several display formats that you can select such as; book, presentation, magazine, newspaper, report, journal, portfolio, essay and manual. Issuu can be embedded as a small presentation, as seen below. To be seen full screen, click on a page. Or you can also embed your presentation, book, magazine, etc., as a larger document if you select Customize. Viewers can also zoom in and zoom out when reading the your publications, as well as download or print it. Another option is that viewers can embed your publications into their blog, wikis, or webpages.

Open publication - Free publishing - More web20

How could this be used in the classroom? There are some obvious uses of this online publishing site where children can publish their own work such as;

• ebooks of student stories, poetry, or other writings
  
• the class or school newspaper
• presentations of their research

Some other, not so obvious uses could be:

• Student created textbooks
• online digital portfolios
• class literary magazine
• class book reviews

Teachers could use it to publish their own whole units of work that can then be embedded in their own websites or Moodle course. There are so many ways that issuu can be used.

Branches of Government Game

If you want to help students prepare for a quiz or check for their understanding about the Branches of the U.S. Government, then this game could be helpful. At this site users are shown a bare tree with branches labeled as the branches of government. At the bottom of the tree is a cluster of leaves that describes a branch of government. The player needs to drag the cluster of leaves to the correct branch. If they drag it to the wrong branch, it goes to the bottom of the tree for them to try again. If they are correct, it stays on the branch and a new cluster appears at the bottom of the tree. When complete, the player is told how many cluster were correct, and how many attempts they made. Could be a fun way to study with students competing to see if they can have no incorrect attempts.

Math Remediation Sites

Over the course of a school year, when I find a good online resource that I think teachers would like to use, I tend to send out an email with the link to teachers of that specific content area. Recently, a teacher approached me and asked if I would make a page with links to sites that would help with math remediation and then send him the link so that he could bookmark it. He said it would save him the time of going through all of his emails. So, here is a link to just such a web page. You will also see a link at the top of this page. Math teachers, make sure you bookmark it. I won't name any names, but Larry, if you need help with this, let me know.

100 Ways to Use VoiceThread

Last week, I made a post about using voicethread as a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments. Now there is a voicethread slideshow called,"100 Ways to Use VoiceThread in Education." So, if you are not sure how you would use this tool in your classroom, take a look at this slide show and get some ideas.

IXL-Math Practice Site

There is a good math practice website called IXL It has offers online practice examples that are all categorized by grade level and topic. Currently, there are only practice examples for K-6, but they will be adding grades 7 & 8 by fall. This might be a good resource for remediation at the middle school level.

Use Preview to go Paperless

Going "paperless" is not as difficult as you might think. It becomes a whole lot more simple when you realize that anything you can print, you can save as a pdf and everything that is a pdf can be annotated in Preview. Going paperless becomes even more doable if your students have access to their textbook in a .pdf format. If you are a math teacher who assigns page 252, examples 1-18, students can "print to pdf" that page of their math text, open the page in Preview. Students then use the annotation tools in Preview to enter their answers and then save the document. They can then email their teacher with the completed document as an attachment By emailing the document as an attachment, you are also making a backup copy of the document. When you think of all the teacher-made or online documents that students can complete without ever having to use a single sheet of paper or printer ink, it blows the mind.
(Note: In order to do full text annotations, you need to be using an updated version of Preview that comes with Snow Leopard. The new MLTI image for 2010-11 has this updated version. In current MLTI image, students can add annotated notes that appear on left side bar.)

Fuel The Brain

The Fuel the Brain site has a nice collection of educational games, interactives, printable and cutomizable (is that a word?) sheets and teacher guides for elementary and middle school math. One cool feature is that you can place a Fuel the Brain Game Widget on your own site or blog. (See below) This way you don't have to send students to another website, they can simply go to your site, blog, or Moodle course to play an educational math game that actually has something to do with math.

National Geographic Maps: Tools for Adventure

National Geographic Maps: Tools for Adventure: The site was created by the Children’s museum of Indianapolis. Maps are presented as the keys to adventure. Students learn to use maps to find their way, share information, look at patterns, and solve problems. There are six excellent interactive games for students to practice putting their math skills to use. Students can explore a pyramid by guiding a robot to hieroglyphs, find sunken treasure, explore Mars, go on an adventure, see GIS in action, and visit Adventure Island.

New! Tool Videos

Today I did not list a new technology tool. What I did do was spend a good chunk of my working day putting together lists of videos for various tools on the Tool Videos page. Now there are links to pages for: Nettrekker, Home Page Construction Kit, Moodle, and Backing Up, each with several video tutorials linked to them. Hopefully, readers of this blog will use the Tool Videos page as a resource when they want to learn how to use a tool more effectively or find out more about what the tool will do.

Interactive PBIS Tutorial

If you are looking for a way to learn more about PBIS (Posititve Behavior Intervention & Support) then try this online interactive tutorial created by the University of Kentucky.

Upon completion of this tutorial, you will be able to:

1. Understand "behavior" from a behavioral model.

2. Identify and apply the elements of a behavioral model to students with challenging behavior

3. Communicate professionally about positive and negative behavior

4. Identify what behaviors require intervention and when intervention is necessary

Below is a list of some additional links to sites about PBIS:

• OSEP Technical Assistance Center on PBIS
• PBIS Videos
• Coach and Trainer Resources
  

Quizlett

While memorizing vocabulary does not involve higher order thinking skills, nor is it very 21st Century, there are times when we ask students to do memorization. Whether it is Spanish, biology, history, English vocabulary, Quizlet is a great tool that can take the boring out of memorizing. This is one tool that I use with my own two boys when they need to study for quizzes and test that involve vocabulary, people, or events. My oldest will even create his own flash card sets, (which little does he know, helps him study) studies them, then will use the terms in his set and create a test for himself. Some of the cool features of Quizlet that go beyond mere flashcards include:

• the ability to search for sets already created by other users and export them to use as your own.
  
• the auto fill option (type in a term, click auto fill, choose a definition already used by someone else who included the term in one of their sets).
  
• There are a couple of games users can play to help them memorize their terms.

Voice Thread

With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install.

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

Click this link to view an introductory video on how to use ed.voicethread.

Moodle Video Tutorials

Here is a link to a series of video tutorials for teachers who use Moodle. These videos were created by Shawn Brandt, a technology integrator in New Prague, MN, who publishes a blog called Technology Tip. They are very well done and go from the very basic to the more advanced functions of Moodle. If you are looking at using Moodle to hold your entire course, or if you merely want to put a unit of study on it, then you may want to take a look at these videos.
http://www.np.k12.mn.us/TechIntegration/?page_id=181

Below is a link to the Moodle Features Demo Course that is on our own (MSAD#61) Moodle Server. Here you will find just about anything you'll need to set up your own course including video tutorials helpful documents and links to resources.
http://msad61.npv.com/course/view.php?id=9

Behold: Visual Image Search

Behold is a search engine for images. It searches through the million+ images on Flickr, but has a different twist to it. It can search for images based on what is in them, rather than the words used to tag them. For example: you can type in the term baseball, and you will get results that usually have green or grass in them.

Here is a link for a couple of videos that show how to use this impressive Image Search Engine.