NASA Do It Yourself Podcasts

If you ever wanted to interview an astronaut, you need to check out NASA Do It Yourself Podcasts.

NASA is providing video and audio clips and encouraging students to remix their own podcasts. Right now, students can create podcasts on Lab Safety, Newton's Laws, and Spacesuits.

NASA also publishes a blog devoted to these podcasts.

Valentine's Day or Chocolate

Being a computer nerd, Valentine's day was never one of my favorite holidays. Now that I am married with kids it is starting to grow on me. For the record, I ordered their presents from amazon on my iPod Touch.

This week would be perfect to have a Valentine's day post, but I am not going to do it. Instead I am going to write about Chocolate.

On Hershey's Making Chocolate site you will find a video tour of the chocolate making process and they also have a print version. I have been lucky enough to see the tour live in Hershey PA, thanks Mom.

Search for "chocolate" on Discovery Streaming and you can find...
24 full videos
50 video segments
17 articles
6 images
2 quizzes
2 songs
2 writing prompts

Still need more ideas, check out Mrs. McGowan's site for Chocolate Integration Tips. Be sure to check out the Name the Candy Bar Quiz.

Special thanks to Donna Rudisill (an awesome tech facilitator in Catawba County) for this post.

Picture Citation
Chocolate. Jupiterimages Corporation. 2006.
Discovery Education. 9 February 2009

Abraham Linclon

"I view [education] as the most important subject which we as people can be engaged in."

--Abraham Lincoln

February 12th will mark Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. On lincolnbicentennial.gov, you can find out about the plans for celebrations all over the country. I didn't see any celebration planned in North Carolina, but that doesn't mean you can't have a celebration in your classroom. On this site, you can find lesson plans, an Honest Abe Quiz, coloring pages, podcast, and a whole lot more.

If you subscribe to Discovery Streaming you have access to...

• 47 full videos
• 115 video segments
• 40 images (including the one in this post)
• 5 writing prompts
• 1 song

If you still need more, check out these sites.

Whitehouse.gov Biography Here you will find a quick biography of Lincoln.

Lincoln / net Here you will find historical materials from Lincoln's years in Illinois (1830-1861). Included are Lincoln's writings and speeches.

Library of Congress Here you will find over 20,000 documents. There are special sections for the Emancipation Proclamation and his Assassination.

Picture Citation

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States. IRC. 2005.
Discovery Education. 9 February 2009

Make-a-Flake

My daughter loves cutting paper. One day, I showed her how to make snowflakes. She had a ball. My daughter hates cleaning up. I cannot begin to tell you how much little snips of paper were on the floor.

Luckily, my daughter also loves to "work" on the computer. Next time she wants to make snowflakes, I am sending her to Make-a-Flake.

http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/

Make-a-flake is a snow flake maker by Barkely Interactive. This flash games folds the paper and gives you a virtual pair of scissors. Snip away at your paper and you have a snow flake. There is a preview option and even an undo button.

After you have perfected your snowflake, you can save it to their gallery, email it to a friend, or save it to your computer. When saving it you have two options, .jpg or .eps. The .eps file can be opened and manipulated in PhotoShop or Illustrator.

The best part, no clean up!

LIFE Pictures Available on Google

Babe Ruth

Google partnered with LIFE and is now in the process of digitizing their photos. Some of these photos date back to the 1750's. Odds are you won't recognize most of the pictures as they were never published. Right now, only 20 percent of the collection is availabe. Over the next few months the entire archive will be online. That is 10 million photos.

LIFE photo archive

Google's blog post

Where the Wild Things Are

In 1963 Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are. A story of Max, who is sent to his room without supper. In his room, Max’s imagination takes over and he journeys to the land of the Wild Things. It has been a beloved children’s book ever since.

Discovery Education Streaming has the Where the Wild Things Are video. The video is just over 7 minutes long and a teachers guide is also available. Both the book and the video are appropriate for grades K -2.

After showing the video or reading the book, take you kids to buildyourwildself.com to, well, build your wild self. I turned myself into a Gaz-ossa-rusa-frog that likes to play guitar. The site was created by the New York Zoos and Aquarium. Students will have a great time creating themselves into a monster. Since they are using parts from an actual animal, it is easy to bring in science into the lesson. Talking about the places the animals live brings in social studies. Math can be integrated by sorting the monsters. Fans of the Madagascar movies may enjoy that the site was recently updated with Madagascar parts. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize the animals, there is a short explanation at the end. Buildyourwildself.com allows you to save, print, and send your wild self to a friend.

Map of Future Forces Affecting Education

KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future have a very cool interactive map of the trends that will shape the future of education. You can click the Go to the map to explore an interactive map or you can download a printable version. Be sure to read the legend at the bottom to understand how the map works. Spend some time clicking around - it is fascinating!
http://www.kwfdn.org/map/
They will be coming out with a 2009 Education Map in January!

Wordle in 6th Grade Humanitites

In our middle school we have a Humanities class (SS and LA combined) at each grade. These teachers are doing some really fabulous projects. One of the ones is the use of Wordle to help students explain the 6 Big Ideas of History - Science and Technology, Government, Culture, Geography, Belief Systems, and Economics. The products completed by the students were printed and put on a bulletin board and will be used throughout the year for them to reference as they study any event in history.

The Process:

Students had to brainstorm 20 different terms/keywords that were associated with their Idea. They then prioritized those ideas by which were the most important in describing their Idea. Next, the students typed their keywords into Word (spellchecking was needed) - they would type the most important terms multiple times (Wordle uses the frequency of a word to determine it's size in the final presentation), so "ScienceandTechnology" (all one word) was typed 5 times while a lesser term to describe it say "computers" was only typed 3 times. Each word needed to be separated with a space. The students then copied and pasted their text into Wordle and adjusted the design/colors to suit their tastes and then published their work! We were able to print them off and the students also pasted the url of their published work into their class forum so that everyone could see and comment on them.

Great Blog Post with Free Resources for Regular and Special Education

Many of these are resources I use regularily. Some of them I've never heard of. This is truly an amazing list and much thanks to Paul Hamilton for posting it!
http://paulhami.edublogs.org/productivity/

Plagerism Videos from Rutgers University

Rutgers University has a great group of 3 videos explaining Plagerism. While they are geared for university level I can see applications at Middle and High School level.
http://library.camden.rutgers.edu/EducationalModule/Plagiarism/

Enjoy!

Tablefy

I came across this site while reading lifehacker. Tablefy is a site where you can create a table to compare any number of items. I just gave a presentation on iPods and was looking for an easy way to compare them. Too bad I didn't know about this.

I ran through it quickly. It is simple and was a breeze to do. Beside just adding text, you can give a url of an image. Tablefy will automatically create a thumbnail for you. It is also possible to add a youtube video, among other media.

The site also allows you to save your own tables to edit later. You can also search for other comparisons and leave comments. I can see great uses in education, like comparing characters, geometric shapes, and plants and animals.


go to the table!

The best part, you can embedded in your own wiki or website. There is an also an option to keep your table private, if you don't share well.

SlideShare

From Katie's post, you know we just finished up our Summer Tech Conference. I would have to echo Katie's sediments, it was wonderful. On our wiki this year, we decided to post our PowerPoint presentations. We also did this last year by saving the presentation as jpegs and uploading them to Picasa web albums. We could then embed them as a slideshow.

This year I decided to give SlideShare and Scribd a chance. Both sites allow you to upload PowerPoint files, along with PDF and some open office file formats. Scribd adds support for Word and Excel too. I uploaded my presentation ppt file to both sites. I used a non standard font and both sites changed my font to standard font, not what I wanted. Since both sites allow PDF uploads, I used CutePDF to save my presentation as a pdf file. I once again uploaded them to both sites. Slideshare worked perfectly, but Scribd never took my pdf.

Needless to say, I have become a fan of SlideShare. Even more so, when they featured my presentation on their homepage.

| View | Upload your own

Summer Tech Conference '08

We just finished our BCPS Summer Tech Conference '08! It was fabulous. We had a huge response and doubled our numbers from last year. Participants also enjoyed the conference and we have received great feedback that we will be posting on the wiki soon. To see what we did and get resources from our sessions go to the wiki! http://stc08.wiki.burke.k12.nc.us/

Into The Book

Check out this interactive site about reading comprehension strategies:

Into the Book: Wisconsin Educational Communications Board
http://reading.ecb.org

Explore eight reading strategies for K-4 students and teachers in this
interactive and in-depth reading comprehension site:• Make meaningful
connections to climb to the summit of the Mountain of Understanding • Summarize
the thrilling life of a talkative pirate • Evaluate books to successfully
explore a distant solar system • Infer the real news in letters from pen pals •
And much more!

Students can watch online videos, play learning games and interactives,
and share their creations with friends and family. Teachers can delve into rich
information and teaching resources, lesson plans, video and audio clips,
downloads, and more.

Both the student and teacher sections of this site allow unique log-ins (that don't require any sort of registration or email address) so users can access prior work within the site.

The student section is very interactive and includes tasks for each comprehension strategy. The teacher section includes lesson plans, short videos, pdf posters, and even songs.

I was very impressed with this resource! Check it out!

Going to the Moon.

Think your students might want to go to the moon? Well, they can! Or at least their names can!

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO spaceship) will be taking an exploration journey in preparation for NASA's return to the moon.

You can add your name to a database that will be placed on a microchip to be embedded into the spacecraft. Visit http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/index.php to add your name (and print a certificate, if you wish).

I've added my name!

The LRO website has lots of information and resources to share with your students.
http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Encyclopedia of Life is ALIVE!

"The new Encyclopedia of Life portal has gone live with more than one million species pages!

In celebration of this big event, our first EOL newsletter is available at:
Click here to read the newsletter.
You can see the new pages at http://www.eol.org/. We also invite you to take the survey at the site so you can help us improve.
We thank you for your interest and support over the past year. Enjoy."

Just got this email from eol.org! It looks awesome can't wait to check it out more!

Geo-Green and Titan Wealth

Today I got sent a great link to an audio file of a Keynote presentation Thomas L. Friedman gave at NC State University for the 2008 Emerging Issues Forum. I really, really can't wait for his new book now! The direct link to the audio is: http://ncsu.edu/iei/forum/2008/audio/friedman.mp3

I listened to this great Keynote and was then looking through my Google Reader and ran across this post by David Warlick, "A Bubblin' Crude" about the amazing amounts of hydrocarbons found on Saturn's moon Titan.

Take a listen and read! Share with your students!

Climate Alive!

"The need has never been greater for accurate and understandable information about climate change and its impacts."

Check out this website and the wonderful 7 minute video on how Asheville, NC is poised to lead this change!

http://www.climatealive.org/

Pretty cool and if I do say another great example of digital storytelling!

The Simpsons Math

I first started watching The Simpson when I was in middle school. I thought is was just a simple, funny cartoon. As I grew older, I realized the show was anything but simple. I started picking up on the quick humor and some of the references to every imaginable subject. Not all of the refences, some still go over my head.

Luckily for us, Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald, from Appalachian State University, and Dr. Andrew Nestler , from Santa Monica College, picked up on this too. They have created a website called Simpson Math

http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/simpsonsmath/

On the site you will find a guide to the math on The Simpsons, the mathmatical background of the shows writers, and even some activity sheets. You won't find any video clips, you will have to find those somewhere else.

Interactive Activities - Polygons 5th Grade

Geometric Solids – one of my all time favorites!http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=70

Rainforest Maths – click on 5th Grade and then look at the bottom of the page at the Space activities – 3d shapes and 2d shapes.http://www.rainforestmaths.com/

BBC School – Shape activities, revisions, and quiz.http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/maths/shape_space_measures.shtml

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives – all kinds of virtual manipulatives… scroll down the page.http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/category_g_2_t_3.html