Electronic Field Trips with the National Parks Foundation

This morning I was scrolling through Twitter and came across a website that @bethstill tweeted about.What a perfectly awesome resource. It is Electronic Field Trips with the National Park Foundation. I looked at the first video on "Climate Challenge North Cascades National Park". Jeff Corwin is the host, and there are several park rangers with students spread throughout North Cascades National Park talking about climate change and how it is affecting the everyone in and around the park. Some of the electronic field trips have companion websites that include games, activities, and lessons to go along with the video. As the students and park rangers talk about the climate and the affects felt throughout the park, definitions pop up on the screen and then students re-phrase the definition in words students might understand better.

Some of the field trips that have been shown in the past are "Discovering the Mysteries of Bryce Canyon"; "Buffalo Soldiers: African Americans in the Frontier Army"; "Searching for Life in the Great Smokey Mountains"; and "Tails from the Tetons: Grand Teton National Park". There are several more listed that might be of interest to your class.

There is a new electronic field trip coming in February, 2011, "Gulf Islands National Seashore" that you can register for. You have to create an account, but registration is free. By registering for this electronic field trip, you and your students can call in or email to ask questions about what you are watching. What a great learning experience! Be sure to check out all of the electronic field trips that the National Park Foundation is offering. Great information, great activities, and great lesson ideas: best of all, it is all free!

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Can you INSTRUCTIFY?

The LEARN NC Interactive Conference was recently held in Chapel Hill, NC. LEARN NC has a daily blog, Instructify, that not only shares information about new tools and sites to use but also gives ideas on how they can be used in the classroom. When using technology in the classroom, the curriculum and learning should be the focus, not the tool.

Here are some of my notes from an Instructify session: Free classroom technology with Instructify. The presenters for this session were John Don Forsythe and Ross White. Below is a list of links to the FREE tools they planned to discuss. (They actually only got to talk about a few of them, but provided links to share them all with us.) The list is from the site linked above and the pink notes are from me!

Glogster: Create digital posters that integrate text, images, audio, and video. The presenters talked about Glogster. I (and some others in the room) mentioned EduGlogster as another possibility. After sharing information about EduGlogster with the group, I sent some more information and examples to the presenters.

Argument Wars: In this free classroom game students will argue both sides in several famous Supreme Court cases.

Evernote: Use Evernote to save your ideas, things you see, and things you like. Then find them all on any computer or device you use. For free. I want to try this out. Some parts of it remind me of livebinders but more is possible. You can also store files there to be in the cloud like in dropbox. There are some things you can do with Evernote on a smart phone.

Weebly: Use Weebly to easily build a classroom website and/or blog in minutes. What you’ll need — a web browser. What you won’t need — experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or Flash. Drag and drop interface to create a fully functional website. Ex: http://instructifyfall2010.weebly.com/
Here’s a sample site Jason build in about 15 minutes.

OE-CAKE physics simulator: This program is a sandbox-style physics simulation program that allows you to see how different physical compounds and elements interact with each other. If you haven’t done so already, download it here for a windows client and download it here for a mac based client.

VocabSushi is a free online application that helps students expand their vocabulary through a variety of methods including articles and games. The whole experience is wrapped in a slick and easy to use interface.

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Twitter: The Livebinders Edition

I get asked a lot about Twitter. From how educators are using it to more basics like what does RT mean or what are those funny little things called hashtags?

Over the past few days I have been going through my over 1000 sites I have saved in Diigo to find the best stuff on Twitter. I have compiled it all into a Livebinder. (If you don't know what a Livebinder is, check this out.)

In this binder you will find information on:
Getting Started
Terminology
The Art Of The ReTweet
Hashtags
#Edchat
Misconceptions
Twitter In Education
More Resources

There is something for everyone, for those just getting started to those who are experienced users.

An Educators Guide To Twitter
(The URL in case you need it: http://livebinders.com/play/present?id=34291)

Did miss something? What would add? Leave me some comments below.

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LEARN NC Fall 2010 Interactive Conference

Yesterday, October 14, I attended an interactive conference hosted by LEARN NC. The first session was on Blended Learning and the presenters were Nancy Mangum, Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at NC State University; and Bobby Hobgood, Ed.D. I had heard of blended learning before, but wasn't exactly sure what it was. What was very interesting is that the presentation modeled what blended learning is or could be. We all came up with ideas of what we thought blended learning was, shared those ideas with the group and the presenters wrote down on the SMART Board what we said, brainstormed more ideas using Bubbl.us, and then we posted the Bubble.us on Edmodo. By modeling collaboration in our "classroom", using a brainstorming tool, and some online learning, we learned more about Blended Learning. Thank you Nancy and Bobby for a very informative session.

Next was a session on Free Technology with Instructify. Instructify is a blog from LEARN NC. Jason Don Forsythe and Ross White presented this session. They talked about several of their favorite web tools that just happen to be free. The first on the list, and one of my favorites (although I use Glogster EDU), is Glogster. Glogster is a digital poster teachers and students can use for free. They also showed us Evernote and Weebly. Evernote is an online note taking application and Weebly allows you to create a free website.

The afternoon sessions were both in-person and virtual. The sessions were about what is on the LEARN NC website. Several of the items they talked about was the North Carolina digital history book, differentiated instruction, and articles on best practices.

Thank you LEARN NC for an informative conference.

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Learning Village Update

Unfortunately Learning Village is still down. We will look forward to the updates when we get this curriculum warehouse back up. We will let you know as soon as it is available again. You can try out some of the instructional tools Learning Village links to by accessing them from the WSFCS Homepage under teacher resources on the planning page right now.

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More help for using netTrekker in the classroom

Look at these ideas for ways to use netTrekker in your classroom that I found on the netTrekker Blog:

• No Time to Sight See (explains how to use the virtual field trip folder available to you as a teacher in netTrekker)
• eBooks with eResearch
• Global Portfolio (shared resources for all teachers)

On netTrekker, you can also find ideas for Best Practices (in the customer service area):

• Elementary School
• Middle School
• High School
  

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October Themes in netTrekker

I just discovered another great piece offered by netTrekker! On Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 EST, they have 15-20 minute presentations called Tip Tuesdays. Since I am not always (or at all) free at that time of day, I was very excited to find the recordings of those sessions available on the netTrekker Village http://www.nettrekkervillage.com/page/tip-tuesdays. I viewed 2 sessions earlier today and have so many great ideas to share!

One of the things I learned about today was the Global: netTrekker Portfolio which was created to share best practices, ideas, and examples with users. To find the Global Portfolio, you will need to be a teacher on netTrekker (when you are automatically taken to netTrekker on school computers, you are in the student category .... you will need to obtain the teacher code for your school to make that change). On the sidebar there is an area called My Tools and in this box, you can find My Portfolio. Inside My Portfolio, you will be able to find Global: netTrekker Portfolio.
Inside the Global: netTrekker Portfolio, you will find several folders that may be of interest. Please feel free to view information in any of these folders (I may blog about those individually later). The one at the bottom is the Tip Tuesdays Portfolio. Whenever there is information to go along with the Tip Tuesday sessions, it is placed in this folder, so if you are like me and can't make the live sessions, you can view the archive and get the materials in this folder.
The one I learned about today can be found in the Monthly Themes folder. Folders in this section are used to group together resources that may apply to some of the themes for that particular month.

For the month of October, there are resources available related to:

• National Learning Disabilities Month
• Lief Erikkson Month
• Halloween
• International Non-Violence Day
• Christopher Columbus Day

If you like these materials and/or folders, you have the option of copying them into your portfolio (you have to be signed in to do this). Once you copy materials into your portfolio, you can add other resources to the folder or even use the layout and insert your own project.

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Images We Can All Use

Yesterday on Twitter my good friend, Mary Beth, posted a video for her kids on how to find Creative Commons photos on Flickr. It is a great and simple tutorial that really anyone can use with teachers or kids.




Short and simple.

In addition to this video you could also check out the Creative Commons Search to find photos, music and video. Also check out Compfight, which is a tool that searches the CC photos in Flickr.

This post on Understanding Creative Commons can be helpful also.

Thanks Mary Beth for the great video!

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One project multiple ways ...

When I was teaching Gifted Education, I had a Donors Choose project funded and received a class set of the From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. To go along with the novel, I created a Pageflakes full of student projects ideas and activities. Since I have been learning about various web 2.0 tools, I decided to recreate that pageflakes project using Glogster.(Pageflakes now also has advertisements of sponsored content boxes and you never know what might show up).
So while recreating, I found some things I liked better in each tool. I like how you can link certain words in each section in pageflakes, but in Glogster you can only link each text box instead of individual words. Pageflakes does allow me to embed html code, so I could embed the voicethread instead of just linking to it, which I had to do in Glogster. I was able to get a video from SchoolTube and could upload a video that I had downloaded to my computer in Glogster, but some of the videos I may want to use are embeddable but not downloadable, so that could create a problem. I like the backgrounds and graphics available from Glogster. I like how I can layer pieces with Glogster. I can embed the glogs I create into my blog and wiki to share them. I do have the option to share both pageflakes and glogster glogs by sharing a link. I also worked a little bit on creating a glog for this project in EduGlogster. Right now there are some design features available on Glogster that are not in EduGlogster. EduGlogster does allow glogs to be made private, student accounts to created, and template sharing.

Here is the Pageflakes creation: http://www.pageflakes.com/mwedwards/26623315
Here is the EduGlogster creation: http://mwedwards01.edu.glogster.com/from-the-mixed-up-files/
Here is the Glogster creation: http://mwedwards.glogster.com/mrs-basil-e-frankweiler/

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Ancient Rome Was How Big?

Today I came across a very cool site from the BBC. It is called Dimensions and it takes important events in history and current events and shows how big they are over a give area on a Google Map.

For example here is an image showing how big an area the flood in Pakistan is on the East Coast of the U.S.

Kinda puts things in perspective...

Or here is an image of what the footprint of the moon would look like centered over North America.

There are lots of other types of layers. Everything from environmental disasters like the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill to just how big an area the Three Gorges Dam is in China to the size of ancient cities. There are also layers for depths and distances.

I didn't find too many limitations with locations. I used both zip codes and the names of towns.You might have trouble with specific locations like the name of a school so stick with zip/postal codes or the name of your town.

What a cool way to show students just how big an area an event or place in history is or was. So head over to the BBC Dimensions and check it out!

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Learning Village Updates

I just wanted to let you know that while upgrading WSFCS Learning Village, we encountered some problems so it is still unavailable. We are planning to have it back up Friday, October 9. Many of the resources linked to Learning Village are still available from the Planning page under Teacher Resources off the main WSFCS site.

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Atomic Learning

Do you want to learn at your own pace, on your own time? Choose Atomic Learning. Do you want to learn how to mail merge in Word, learn intermediate skills in Excel, or refresh your skills with Twitter, Skype, PhotoStory? Choose Atomic Learning. You just had a face to face with ActiveInspire or SMART Notebook and you can't remember how to use the on-screen keyboard or adding a resource to the library; what do you do? Go to Atomic Learning and watch a short video on how to do all of the above and so much more.

WSFCS has a subscription to Atomic Learning. You can learn all of the above, plus more in Atomic Learning. Teachers can log into Atomic Learning with their WSFCS email address. Atomic Learning is a tool for educators to use to learn more about different types of technology and software. These video tutorials allow teachers to view just one part of a series, several different parts of the series, or the whole series. However they want to learn. Tech Facilitators and Principals can also assign professional development to the teachers at their school in Atomic Learning.

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