Just for Fun
Lost Tapes : Creaturefy Yourself, Lost Tapes Game : Animal Planet.
From Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, this flash app lets you upload a photo and transform yourself into a ghoulish creature using eyes, hair, noses, teeth and more from the Vampire, Lizardman, Werewolf, Owlman and Bigfoot creature.
This is me, part Lizardmand and Owlman.
iEARN – International Education & Resource Network – is one network that actively works to provide frameworks for global communication.
Melinda Galbraith at NECC 2009
I met Melinda Galbraith at 2009 NECC presenting information about iEARN and their global initiatives for student interaction and professional development. There are wonderful opportunities for international collaboration and building multicultural understandings through various disciplines. They have several active projects.This is from their most recent email update.
The Tech & Learning blog has a great post -Why Wordle-By Steven W. Anderson – with an excellent slide presentation and commentary on how one can use Wordle in the classroom. Wordle is about words, giving the user a visual representation and can be used in many ways in the classroom, and in all disciplines. The more often a word is used in the text, the larger it appears.
It’s also an easy-to-use Java applet. Go to wordle.net to try it out. Click on the CREATE link and you’ll find a page where you can type in, or paste in, any text. You can also type in the URL (web address) of another page or a del.icio.us user name to see their tags as a Wordle. In this example I used the text from the Why Wordle blog post. Two important tips were mentioned in the presentation on the blog post. First, you can delete individual words in the Wordle by right clicking on a word and click on ‘delete xxx’ from the little menu. [PC Users]. Secondly, use ~ to connect two or more words together to be used as one term. If you want to enlarge the size of a particular word, just type in several more times. The more often a word is used, the larger it is.
Saving your Wordle can be a bit tricky. You can save it to the Wordle gallery by clicking the button on the page, and link to the URL – that’s the easiest thing to do. You can also print it right from your computer. If you have a PDF creater installed on your computer you can save it as a PDF using the Print Function.
Or, you can do a screen capture to save it to your computer. The FAQ’s refer users to this site , which is pretty good, for more information about how to do that. Basically, you press the PRT SC [Print Screen] key on your computer. In my case I also have to use the FN [Function] key as that button is shared with the Insert key. The image is saved into short-term memory, and you have to paste it into another picture editing software application and save it from there. Your image is lost, replaced by a new image when you use the Print Screen key again, or turn off your computer.
At The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, a different writer or poet’s birthday is celebrated every day, along with other interesting literature facts. It’s sponsored by PublicRadio.org and you can also subscribe to the podcast.
This can be a great way to inspire, or perhaps provide a lesson’s opening discussion or motivation.
Weebly is a free online web page creation and publishing site. I’ve been working on a Weebly site, Tek4Ed, site to replace my GooglePages site and have found it to be very user-friendly, complete with drag and drop editing. They now have a special service just for educators. Features include:
Weebly provides over 70 templates with the added flexibility to completely customize your own, and it’s all hosted for free by Weebly. You can also use your own domain name at no extra charge.
You can create blogs at Weebly, too. However, I couldn’t find a way to import or export posts, which means I’ll keep using other blogging engines that do, such as this one which using WordPress.
By the way, tomorrow “Using Weebly to Design Classroom Websites” with special guest Dan Veltri will be the Classroom 2.0 webinar session. Details are at http://live.classroom20.com. If you miss it, check out the archives at http://live.classroom20.com. Click on the “Archive and Resources” page to view the past recordings.
A join
t project of Discovery Education & WM Waste Management, Think Green has a very comprehensive set of resources for K-8 classrooms, and some for 9-12 as well, online. Included are lesson plans, hands-on activities, videos, interactive activities and some great classroom display materials. All of these are free, and no registration is required.
The interactive activity, Energy Consumption has links to worksheets, explains BTU’s and students calculate and compare costs of using different fuels and insulation to heat and cool a home in San Francisco, Dallas and Minnesota. There are many activities linked to this interactive.
Future Power includes a virtual lab. Links to videos and articles are embedded in the activity. Students compare the costs and CO2 emissions of natural gas and coal mixtures. Unfortunately the lab doesn’t include other fuel options, but perhaps students can investigate those as well. It is still a very useful activity and challenges students to plan, experiment and report their findings.
How to Light Up a Room is another virtual lab that studies the effect of different window coverings on temperature. Students can run the experiments, compare and chart data.
Power Up is a fairly simple interactive activity where students complete a pie chart that identifies how much electrical energy is provided by different fuel sources in the US. Written information is provided for each source (grades 5 +). Mineral Resources – Recycling Aluminum is a one-session interactive good for lower grades.
Overall this is an exceptional collection of resources that can used to enrich learning in science and other disciplines.
Sept 14, 2009: The Washington Post Blog: The Answer Sheet – Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk.
Learning styles gets a lot of attention in current teacher education. Daniel Willingham, guest blogger. cognitive scientiest and author of Why Students Don’t Like School, “It doesn’t work–not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.” He goes on to state that, “Suggesting that teachers cater to learning styles—when teachers must already do some differentiation based on what students know—makes a teacher’s job much more difficult with no benefit to students.”
But the bottom line seems to be that categorizing students within the framework of auditory, visual and kinesthetic is meaningless. I would comment, however, that varying delivery methods can make for a more engaging classes. Learning often involves repeated exposure and actual use of information; doing that in different ways is certainly more interesting than doing it the same way all the time.
400 years ago, under the Dutch flag, Henry Hudson sailed into the river, known to the Lenape Indians as the Muhheakantuck, the River that Flows Two Ways.
From Ian Chadwick’s website about Henry Hudson [http://www.ianchadwick.com/hudson/hudson_03.htm], this an excerpt of September 1609’s voyage:
- 11: Hudson sailed through the Narrows and anchored in New York Bay. The first night he anchored off the northern tip of Manhattan.
- 12: A flotilla of 28 canoes, filled with men, women and children approached, but, Juet wrote, “we saw the intent of their treachery and would not allow any of them to come aboard.” However, the crew bought food from them. Hudson noted the natives used copper in their pipes and inferred there was a natural source nearby.
- 13: The crew traded for oysters with the Native Americans; the ship was near today’s Yonkers.
There are many quadricentennial celebrations and exhibits underway to mark this event. Some great gateways to explore stories and information about this are the Henry Hudson 400 web site home, with an interactive map filled with archival historical maps and links for more data, and Explore NY 400, a very comprehensive site dedicated to celebrating New York’s 400th year.
What did the native Lenape Indians eat? Check out Garden Lab’s Lenape Edible Estate, which was created for the Hudson Guild and is located at 441 West 26th Street at 10th Avenue, New York, NY. This Monday, September 14th, there is a free, family Harvest Opening event from 6:00 – 8:30 PM featuring harvest activities, interpretive garden tours, native foods cooking demonstrations with field-to-fork food education program Growing Chefs, and other food demonstrations with Hot Bread Kitchen. On the website you’ll find pictures of the plants, the garden layout and lists of all the plants in the garden.
One of the more remarkable projects is The Manahatta Project. After 10 years of diligent, hard work the team, headed by Dr. Eric Sanderson, unveiled a website that details what Manhattan was like in 1609.
I had the good fortune to learn about his project at Teaching the Hudson Valley’s summer institute in July of 2008. It is truly a remarkable piece of well researched science and technology. The effort began with a very detailed British Army Survey Map from 1692. Using a sophisticated matrix of species and environmental conditions, scientists developed a ‘Muir Web’ of the likely flora and fauna for every inch of 1609 Manhattan. They estimate that there were 55 distinct ecological community type. To get started,you’ll need to type in an address. Blocks are highlighted and clicking on one brings up another window with detailed information about the probable wildlife, plants, Lenape usage and landscape together with a photograph depicted that type of environment. You can easily mouse-over the map and do the same for every are of Manhattan.
There are some excellent teacher resources here as well including activities and lesson plans. One of these teaches the water cycle in an interesting, place-based way and compares the life of a water droplet in 1609 to present day. This is much more fun and realistic than the idealized charts we are used to. Another idea from here is to create a web using yarn going from one participant to another that connects specific plants, animals or environmental features. It becomes very apparent, very quickly, that everything is connected. To review and download the Manahatta Curriculum visit their website.
Here’s another great resource from Lenva Shearing, Getting Tricky with Wikis. You will find code and directions for altering the appearance of wiki pages – and the code could also be useful for using in other place.
You’ll also find out how to add students, password individual pages, wrap text around images, put comment boxes on the page and more.
Here are a few great resource aggregations of Web 2.0 tools
On Wikispaces there is WebTools4u2use put together by school library media specialists with ideas for how to use some of these. CoolToolsForSchools was created by Lenva Shearing of NZ’s Bucklands Beach Intermediate School and includes a description of each of these tools – and she’s used them all. Both sites are easy to navigate and fun to explore.
For a wider spectrum of Web 2.0 tools visit http://www.go2web20.net/ which has a really comprehensive listing of web apps divided into 20 categories including travel, twitter, business, blogging, fun and e-learning.
