Instructional Technology

May 17, 2010

Looking for last-minute reviews or educational activities to keep kids focused during these last days? How about for those times when students have finished a project early, are waiting for their turn at a center, or have a few minutes before it is time to pack up for the day and go home… in these instances it is nice to have a game that is fun, keeps students thinking, and is quick to complete. Moppet Games are fun, quick games that students will enjoy. 

Students can play a photo hunt where they discover differences between two sets of pictures (like the picture hunts in Highlights magazine), memory with shapes, hangman, word search, or math worm.  The math worm game is one that students will enjoy for practicing their math facts.  In the game, students play a worm who must keep from getting eaten by a bird.  To move the worm, students must quickly answer simple addition and subtraction problems.  As they are working, the bird gets ominously closer, they have to be quick with that fact recall! There are two game levels for math worm: easy and hard.  The easy version quizzes on facts less than 10 and the bird moves slowly.  In the hard version, the facts are a little more challenging and the bird moves much more quickly toward the worm.

If you have access to an interactive whiteboard, make the math worm game into a whole class relay.  Line up students at the board, each student completes a problem and then passes the pen to the next student in line. See if your class can outsmart that hungry bird!  Use the other games as a fun incentive to line up quietly.  Put one of the activities up on the interactive whiteboard and call students who are quiet and ready to line up to come up and solve part of the puzzle.  By the time the puzzle has been completed the class will be lined up and ready to go.  The students who miss out on helping to solve the puzzle are those who weren’t following directions or chatting when they shouldn’t be.  This has been a great classroom management incentive in many classrooms, because all of the students want to be involved in the game.

http://www.moppetgames.com/

Happy almost last week of school!

May 10, 2010

May is a time for reflection, appreciation, review, finals, graduation-- beginnings and endings all rolled into one. As this school year comes to an end, you may find it interesting to see what lessons your students and others consider memorable and important.

EducoPark lets you write about a “life lesson” you learned and how you learned it, as well as begin an online discussion on challenges and how to face them. Users can leave comments on these lessons, and vote on which ones were most helpful.

You can view comments, quotes, stories, speeches, songs, lectures, and even videos without setting up an account, but you do need to login to post your own lesson and vote for others' lessons. Educopark is a neat way to have students reflect on a variety of topics and could be quite useful for discussion starters and writing prompts.

April 26, 2010

Ah, Spring-- the season that inspires writing! April is National Poetry Month, and lots of websites are available to help students read and create poems. Have writer's block? There's a site for that, too!

Getting students interested in writing poems can be a difficult task. The Shape Poem generator provides a nice selection of templates that may pique students' interest in writing poetry.

Shape Poems is a simple poem generation template hosted by Read Write Think. Shape Poems provides a template for writing poems in the shape of an object, about that object. Shape templates can be selected from one of four themes including sports, school, nature, and celebrations. Students then select a shape and identify words that they associate with their chosen shape. When completed, students can hear their poems read to them and/or print their poems.

April 19, 2010

Go Green for Earth Day-- April 22-- with sites that make it easy to incorporate conservation topics within any curriculum area.

Teaching ecology and environmental conservation principles from the classroom can be a tough job. It’s a subject that really requires that hands-on, in-the-field type of involvement to really engage the student and provide tangible educational concepts for reflection. Conservation Maven can help with this.

Every day Conservation Maven posts educational and research items about all things conservation. You can keep track of ongoing conservation studies being done in the field. These provide a valuable in-the-field look into the science and practices of conservation principles in real-world situations. The site has multimedia resources as well, which can provide some visual appeal to your lessons.

April 12, 2010

Sunday, April 11, 2010 was Holocaust Remembrance Day-- 

The United States Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust and created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a permanent living memorial to the victims. In commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, the Museum has designated "Stories of Freedom: What You Do Matters" as the theme for the 2010 Days of Remembrance, April 11 – April 18. Here, students can read survival stories, learn about events relating to World War II, and even discover ways to stand up and speak out when they hear an inappropriate, hateful remark.

April 5, 2010

Think documentaries are boring? Think baseball has no place in the classroom? Think again!

PBS has an awesome series of documentary films and lesson plans with activities all about "the great American pastime." By studying the history of baseball, students gain an understanding for the struggles and triumphs of our country throughout the past 150 years of American history.

The activities on this site were designed to allow teachers to draw on the many lessons of the game in a variety of disciplines including social studies, mathematics, history and language arts/literature and make the fun and excitement of baseball part of a dynamic learning experience.

March 29, 2010

Earth Day is coming up, and Mr. Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers blog has some neat ideas to encourage teachers to "Go Paperless" for Earth Day.

1. Get your students using Google Docs to write their essays. Students can share essays with you and you can grade them without printing.

2. Try using the Drop.io upload widget to collect your students' work online. -OR- create a custom form in SchoolCenter to make a "digital drop box."
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/02/use-dropio-upload-widget-to-collect.html

March 22, 2010

It's Spring! According to the calendar anyway! Even if we can't see the signs of Spring yet, we can hear them.

Wild Music is a fun and educational website on which students can learn about sounds commonly heard in nature. On Wild Music students can listen to the sounds of nature and explore what creates those sounds. Some of the activities students will find include a game of animal audio memory in which students hear sounds and have to match them to each other. Students can find activities such as The Mosquito in which they compare their hearing to the hearing of various animals.

March 8, 2010

March is Women’s History Month in the United States.

The New York Times has created an interactive of “reader submitted photographs from around the world that illustrate the importance of educating girls and empowering women.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/26/magazine/20090826-a-womens-world-reader-photos.html#/20898

Women’s History Month Across the Curriculum comes from the New York Times Learning Network, and when they say, "Across the Curriculum," they are not kidding! Lesson Plan Categories include not only American History, Civics, and Current Events, but also Fine Arts, Economics, Mathematics, Journalism, Health, Science, Technology, and many more.

March 1, 2010

But wait, there's more... An expanded Website of Week...

Another resource for Dr. Seuss' birthday, March 2:
PBS has a nice website that looks at the Political side of Dr. Seuss and his books. Great lessons and activities for older students.
 
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/politicaldrseuss/

AND... Did you know March 4 is National Grammar Day?

Language is something to be celebrated, and March 4 is the perfect day to do it. It's not only a date, it's an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/nationalgrammarday

Happy Celebrating!