Catch of the Day - wickED - 21 Dec 09

Today's catch, wickED, comes from New Zealand


wickED is a quality-assured online environment for 7–12 year olds. It has been developed to complement The New Zealand Ministry of Education’s study support centers initiative.

wickED Home Page

Kids can explore lots of wickEDly cool things on this site! Quizzes, crosswords, interactives and games in English and te reo Māori, a gallery of student artworks, profiles of inspirational New Zealanders, an information station, and activities and games based around topics.

wickED provides engaging curriculum-based learning activities intended to support facilitated or independent use by students in English and te reo Māori, many of which have been developed with a focus on literacy, numeracy and ESOL.

wickED provides interactives in English and te reo Māori, online activities such as crosswords and quizzes, an online storybook, story creation tools, a student gallery, regular student-centered projects and mini-projects.

Topics Page

Topics include activities from several curriculum areas involving a range of thinking and learning skills. Students are provided with links to quality websites to explore the suggested activities or to engage in research.

Information Station Page

The Information Station provides a safe way for students to search the web. It offers:

• a list of quality-assured maths and language websites
• suggested search engines
• an online dictionary and thesaurus, maps, atlases, online newspapers, encyclopedias
• links to New Zealand libraries
• search hints
• webhunts

Kokona Māori provides a pathway to the Māori and te reo Māori resources on WickED.

The Student Gallery features work sent in to wickED’s virtual characters Ed, Wicki and Tipani by students who have completed topic activities.

wickED TV Page

wickED TV provides a forum to showcase students’ video work. It includes information about the video-making and editing process.

wickED is managed by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Catch of the Day - LitCharts - 18 Dec 09

LitCharts™, an online literature guide, is today's tasty catch

LitCharts is the newest series of literature guides on the web, claiming to be a faster, downloadable alternative to SparkNotes®.

Beowulf Guide Home Page

LitCharts introduces a number of innovations that make their guides effective and easy-to-use.

• Summary and Analysis sections are side-by-side to facilitate a close reading of the facts, patterns, and details of the text.
• The Theme Bar is a visual tool that shows you when and where each theme is active in the course of the work.
• The ThemeTracker provides a quick review of the entire book on a single page, perfect for last minute studying.

A Summary and Analysis Page for Heart of Darkness

LitCharts are just as detailed and helpful as conventional lit guides. However, LitCharts are much shorter than conventional lit guides, 10 or fewer printed pages.

LitChart's newest offering is a collection of guides for the iPhone/iPod Touch including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, Heart of Darkness, Beowulf and many more classics.

iPhone/iPod Touch Guide for To Kill a Mockingbird

Every LitChart and every feature on LitCharts is free online. Every LitChart is also available in its entirety as an easy-to-read, printer friendly PDF that is absolutely free.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

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Catch of the Day - Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page - 17 Dec 09

Today's deliciously fresh catch is the Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page

The Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page is a collection of thousands of lesson plans from preschool through high school, many developed by the site's users.

Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page Home

The Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page was developed to serve all kinds of educators.

• K-12 teachers can obtain lesson plans that are ready to use in their classrooms.
• College students can find model lesson plans and ideas on which to base their own lessons.
• Home schoolers can locate lesson plans for use at home with their own children.
• Parents can get ideas for educational activities to use with their kids.

The Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page has over 4,000 free lesson plans. You can find lesson plans by selecting a subject, recent additions, or seasonal lessons, or search for specific topics.

Teacher Discussion Page

You can participate in discussions with other educators in the Teacher Discussion Forums or check out the Science Projects and Math Worksheets sections. You may choose to sign up for their newsletter.

Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page Quick Tour


Since Hotchalk® Lesson Plans Page launched in October of 1996, lesson plans on the site have been developed by Kyle Yamnitz, students and faculty at The University of Missouri, and more recently by the users of this website.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

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Catch of the Day - Science Pirates - 16 Dec 09

Science Pirates: The Curse of Brownbeard is today's nautically-flavored catch


Science Pirates: The Curse of Brownbeard is a 3D educational computer game that communicates food safety knowledge in an environment of scientific exploration. It's a free download for Mac and PC.

The USDA awarded New Mexico State University a grant to develop interactive games that help middle-schoolers learn about food safety procedures, such as hand washing, cooking food to the proper temperature, keeping raw meat and cooked food separate, and washing surfaces.

Science Pirates Home Page

The original goal of Pirate Science shifted from one of understanding food safety issues through science processes, to one of understanding science processes to better change food safety behavior. The educational focus is more centered on scientific understanding and processes, with the end result being a game that leads students through science processes, while giving gamers a culminating activity of experiment design to lead them to better understanding of hand washing.

Learners will ...

• observe hand washing behavior on the Isle of Misfortune
• predict possible solutions
• understand hypothesis formation, and how it differs from research questions
• engage in testing one variable at a time in experiments
• participate in a new approach to independent and dependent variable identification
• draft a hypothesis
• design an experiment
• draw conclusions
• publish findings
• make recommendations for hand washing behavior

Science Learning Through Game Play: Science Pirates


Science Pirates is ideal for middle school students and takes approximately two hours to play.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Catch of the Day - Discover Life - 15 Dec 09

Discover Life, an encyclopedia of life on earth, is today's fresh haul.

Discover Life is a portal to information about all the world's living things. By simply clicking on a photograph you can examine the taxonomy, natural history, distribution, abundance, and ecology of insects, spiders, plants, fungi, birds, mammals and many more. This information can be very useful in education and enjoyable to kids.

Discover Life Home Page

The National Biological Information Infrastructure, with a team of contributors, now offer information on over a quarter-million species through Discover Life, hoping to catalog a million species by 2012.

The All Living Things Encyclopedia

The Global Mapper web tool has an easy interface that enables you to compare distributional information on a large selection of satellite images, maps, and aerial photographs.

IDnature Guides Home Page

Another goal of Discover Life is to develop an efficient label and database network that uses secure, globally unique identifiers because no standard method of labeling mounted specimens, microscope slides, DNA samples, photographs, virtual images, sound recordings, etc. exists, keeping track of individual items is inefficient and often impossible. Only a small fraction of the estimated 3 billion museum and herbaria specimens are labeled with specimen-level identifiers.

Discover Life encourages students to use the photographs in class projects. However, all rights are reserved by the photographers, artists, and authors.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

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