Academic Musings & Tech for Learning

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:

• Managed, protected environment with easy password protection
• Easily add Multimedia features including videos, photos and more
• FREE ..  and includes 40 student accounts for teachers. You  can buy more, too, in packs of 10 for $10, and you can upgrade to a Pro account for $39.95/year
• NO Advertising!

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.

Weebly – For Educators

Weebly – Free Website and Blog for Everyone

Children in the class used laptops to visit a site to hear animal sounds at kiddyhouse.com – http://www.kiddyhouse.com/Farm/ . This site was simple to access, and easy for a young audience to use. Another site with an animal farm is www.kbears.com/farm/ . The Kbears website has several other interactive worlds for primary grades (2-4) and a library of 100 animals. The kindergarten class had fun clicking and listening to the sounds of farm animals. Then we all went to \label the parts of a horse at the BBC schools web site. Flash interactives for Ourselves includes labelling parts of a horse, a fish and a human. The students were thrilled to drag and drop the labels on the right parts. Check it out here . Click on the “Ourselves” icon to continue to the label activity.

BTW… the BBC Schools website is a fabulous resource for students of all ages. Lots of kindergarten students read Eric Carle books. For ideas to use in the classroom, check out the website – many teachers have submitted great ideas at http://www.eric-carle.com/catexchange.html.

Free application to capture and record stuff on your desktop – absolutely fabulous for quick how-to’s and sharing .. Jing at http://www.jingproject.com/ . There an intro and video on how to use Jing at http://blog.jingproject.com/2007/07/how_do_i_use_this_thing_called.html. There are MAC and PC versions. TechSmith makes Camtasia, and Snagit. Jing is akin to Camtasia “light” and may be a great solution in lieu of the more pricey Camtasia or Captivate.

I made this quick tutorial using Jing to show how to edit the slide master in my Jeopardy game.

It very simply captures screenshots and sends them to your flickr account .. or gives you a link to share it or embed it .. but much more than that, you can record a voice narrated tutorial as well and annotate the screenshot. Check it out.

Last week I had the pleasure and honor to conduct a guest math lesson at the Arturo Schomberg Bronx facility of Satellite Academy High School. [You can also read more about the Satellite Academies here. Shawn Welcome is the Principal.] The lesson I created is called “Dining Out” and this idea can work well particularly well with older students in a consumer math, personal finance, and/or basic algebra review class. The primary activity involves ordering dinner from a menu and getting as close to $50, without going over, including sales tax & gratuities.

Some envision a curriculum around the topic of EveryDay Math. With my personal experience and background in finance (I worked on Wall Street for a number of years, as a Mortgage Office after that and for a financial planning firm), I really know a lot about this and it is one of those things I really like teaching. Too often our students graduate high school knowing nothing about credit cards, bank accounts or budgeting. There are all kinds of financial decisions we make – from picking a cell phone plan to furnishing an apartment – and a class like this can give students a real jump on dealing successfully with these situations.

At The Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem, NY I taught a similar class, and I really enjoyed the students and their engagement with the subject matter. There were equations, too, of course, but it all fit into Math in Every Day life. The school has a computer lab & mobile laptop carts that can be used, too. Students can learn to use a spreadsheet program, research investments, and tap into an online Mathematical Skills plan to practice and create their portfolios. Dan Stein, college professor and consultant, has developed a spreadsheet that students can use to track their progress and link directly to AAAMath.com for topic reviews and practice.

I published the lesson on the web using google pages and used a calculator widget from Lab Pixies. Widgets are great… and this one cames in handy! Lab Pixies has something new call “moodgets”…. I’m sure you’ll be seeing this one on myspace … and it could be great to use with little kids when learning about expressions and feelings..

For more teaching ideas, lesson plans and articles, see my Portfolio page at LynneMBailey.com.

On Thursday, October 25, 2007 there will be another blog workshop on designing and implementing a blog. You can register for the workshop here. Consider joining Webgrrls while you’re at it. Webgrrls is a great resource for anyone interested in tech-related issues and meeting interesting people with very diverse backgrounds in many fields. There are monthly meetings and lots of opportunities for networking.

Blogging can be a bit confusing for the uninitiated. I wrote a paper, A Look at Blogging in December, 2006 about blogging with ideas for using it in the classroom. You can download it here (it’s a PDF file for Adobe Acrobat) and check it out. Using blogs for students to post and comment can be very beneficial for learning, and teachers and administrators find them to be a great communications tool.

For more teaching ideas, lesson plans and articles, see my Portfolio page at LynneMBailey.com.

Jeopardy Game Template !