Explore Planet Earth

Have you heard about Discovery Channel’s new 11 part mini-series event called Planet Earth? It airs on Sundays at 8PM e/p.  You can check out information on the show here.  Those of you who know me well know that I rarely watch television. I don’t have anything against it, but I just can’t sit still long enough to actually watch a show (unless I’m doing something else at the same time). Now, interact with video? I love to do that…and Planet Earth’s web page allows just that. And the added bonus? They even provide a tour of some of the places on the show with their Video Tour of Planet Earth using Google Earth. Watch video, explore scenes, view pictures….it’s awesome. I could see kids really getting into these features too, especially if you are doing a project or report on animals or habitats.

(Big thanks to Steve Dembo at Discovery Education for tipping me off to this awesome resource. )

Why blog? (An incredible classroom blog example)

I’ve been watching Kathy Cassidy’s Classroom blog a lot lately. I am so impressed! She is a grade one and two teacher in Canada…and she has used her classroom blog to really open the world for her students. I ran across this interview with her on You Tube…and just had to share.

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In her video, Kathy talks about blogmeister, a blogging site created for teachers by David Warlick. You can create a site for your class there or with another blogging engine (like 21 classes or edublogs). Start small, as Kathy said, and then as you feel comfortable, you can add more features later.

Delicious!

Okay…I know I’ve cheated. I got your attention by trying to use food, but in my defense that is the name of the site I want to tell you about–del.icio.us!! I love this site (not quite as much as food…but it’s up there). It’s an on-line “social bookmarking” service.  In other words, it’s a place to save your favorite links on the Internet, instead of in your browser. You can access your favorites from any computer that has an Internet connection, and you can share your links with others. When you bookmark a site, you assign “tags” or categories to it. These tags help you find the sites you’ve bookmarked again later on, and makes searching for them very easy. This site is probably one of the tools I use the most often on the Internet. I hope you will try it out!

  • You can sign up for your own account here.
  • If you want to check out my links, click here.
  • To make bookmarking really easy, you can download special buttons to help you out here.

Quizlet–More than just flashcards!

I just found a really neat, free site for flashcards called Quizlet. I know both of my schools use schoolnotes, but this has a lot more features than the flashcards available in schoolnotes. It still shows you terms in “flashcard” form, but also allows you to practice in different ways, like dragging words to definitions and typing in words. It will allow you to print out a set of paper flashcards, and if you create an account, it will even keep a record of which terms you have learned and which you need to practice. To try out an example of one of the ways to practice, click here.

Spell With Flickr

This site, Spell With Flickr, is so much fun–my first grade teacher side kicked in! ABCDEFGH….

Enter a phrase and get back images (from flickr) that spell it out with letter pictures!

T E Antiques A C laserH

W I t H6

T neon e Polka C hNOMosaic letter LoGY

Okay, okay…now how can we really use this for school other than to create really cool titles on our webpages? What first comes to my mind are word walls, letter books, and tons of other K-2 uses. It also inspires me to go grab a digital camera and take my own pictures. Kids would love to go on scavenger hunt with the digital camera…not only for letters, but what about sight words? Numbers? Shapes? Can you think of something else? Add a comment below!

Zoho (and other free polling sites)

I made this poll using Zoho polls. Try it out.

The great news is that it is free! There are other sites that create free polls and surveys too!

Could you see a use for this in the classroom? I could…especially when you are doing units on graphing. But also, what a great way to allow students to have a voice!

ReadWriteThink

Okay, another great website I want to share. It’s called ReadWriteThink, and is a partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation. It has all sorts of great FREE resources, but my favorite is the section called student materials. It contains all sorts of reading and writing activities you can have your students do online, including Acrostic Poems, Bio Cubes, Character Trading Cards, Shape Poems, Timelines, Word Build and Bank, and much, much more! Check it out!! The one drawback to this site is that your students will have to complete and print their activities in one sitting…there is no option to save the activities for later use. For most activities, though, this shouldn’t be a problem if you plan ahead!

GWC FLASH students create two podcasts!

During the FLASH program (Fun Learning After School Hours) at GWC, six students in grades 3-5 worked together to write, record, and produce two podcasts and a promo!  The students learned how to use a program called Audacity to record and edit audio.  They also worked together to pick a theme for their podcasts and to devise segments for each theme.  They even researched information, wrote a script, and recorded audio for their own segments!  While we ran out of time and they were unable to put all the segments together themselves, they had input on how that would sound too.  They were very proud of their hard work (I wish you could have seen their faces as they listened for the first time)!  If you’d like to listen, visit the podcast section of the GWC website http://www.salem.k12.va.us/gwc/podcasts/CarverCast.htm. These podcasts were purely fun (since this was a FLASH class), but just think how neat it would be to have your students create a similar podcast on an SOL topic!  Contact me if you are interested.  If you teach grades 3-5 at GWC, you may already have an “expert” student in your class to assist!