EDge21: January 2010

Saturday, January 30, 2010

I Need My Teachers To Learn 3.0

A video well worth three minutes of your time.

I Need My Teachers To Learn was written and performed by Kevin Honeycutt and produced by Charlie Mahoney (who also played percussion, bass, and piano). This has gone through many iterations. This is 3.0.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Catch of the Day - ZuiTube - 29 Jan 10

ZuiTube, videos for kids, is our plum catch today

ZuiTube was created for kids, so they can enjoy themselves without mom and dad needing to worry. ZuiTube gives kids access to fun, exciting, entertaining, and educational videos in a safe place.

ZuiTube Home Page

ZuiTube provides a number of features to make browsing easy for kids. For example, the presentation of content is graphical for kids who are just learning to read, and whenever a child is watching a video, ZuiTube suggests other content .

Channels Page

As kids learn how to navigate the web and find information on their own, learning to search is essential. ZuiTube Search is tailored to the needs of kids, providing suggestions and spelling correction, search results with content relevant to kids, and a graphical presentation that is easy for kids to understand.

Video Search Results

In ZuiTube, kids can rate videos with twenty-five unique emotion tags to express their opinion. These tags help kids find new videos by tagged emotions. Kids can browse videos by cute, awesome, weird and much more.

Tags Page

ZuiTube is brought to you by KidZui, an Internet browser for kids with over 2 million games, websites and videos.

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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Catch of the Day - Web-Based High School Chemistry Simulations - 28 Jan 10

Today's catch is Web-Based High School Chemistry Simulations, a resource of the Center for Science Education at EDC

Web-Based High School Chemistry Simulations provides teachers with links to chemistry simulations, organized by the McREL standard and in some cases, national science education standard, to which they correspond.

Catalog of Simulations

Web-Based High School Chemistry Simulations catalogs sites that provide high school students the chance to manipulate variables in a simulated chemistry activity and see the results of their activity. This opportunity encourages students to form hypotheses, test conclusions, and find patterns in the relationships among variables.

Simulations Aligned to McREL Standards

This directory is organized according to which science standard a given web site addresses. A standards-oriented teacher may want inquiry-driven simulations that align to a particular standard. The list of sample chemistry simulations aligns to the McREL standards for 9–12 physical science and to the 9–12 national science education standards.

This material found at Web-Based High School Chemistry Simulations is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation.

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Catch of the Day - Math Snacks - 27 Jan 10

Today's tasty catch is Math Snacks, a middle school site.

Math Snacks are short animations and games designed to help learners understand math. Each snack presents a mathematical concept appropriate to grades 6-8 (ages 11-13).

Math Snacks Home Page

Math Snacks are ideal for classroom use or for students to use on their own, they can even be placed on mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPod Touch for extended use. Accompanying print materials can help learners apply conceptual understanding to problem solving.

Example Teacher's Guide

Math Snacks for the iPhone/iPod Touch

Math Snacks were developed by New Mexico State University's Media Productions and tested in the Learning Game Lab.

Math Snacks Video - Bad Date

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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Catch of the Day - National Geographic Xpeditions - 26 Jan 10

National Geographic's Xpeditions is the fresh catch today

National Geographic has a long history of bringing the world into our living rooms using images, text, and television. Xpeditions is for teachers, students, and families studying geography on the Web.

Xpeditions Home Page

Some of what you'll find at Xpeditions ...

Teacher-tested lesson plans sorted by standard and grade level
Fun interactive activities for the classroom or home
Hundreds of printer-friendly maps

Xpedition Hall is a virtual museum where every click brings geography to life.

Expedition Hall

Xpeditions is home to thousands of ideas, tools, and interactive adventures that bring the U.S. national geography standards to life.

From the Lesson Plans Section

Through games, lesson plans, maps, and more, Xpeditions helps integrate the U.S. geography standards into learning—both at home and in the classroom.

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Catch of the Day - eHistory - 25 Jan 10

eHistory, a history resource site, is today's abundant catch

eHistory is a site managed by the Department of History at The Ohio State University teeming with history resources.

A Multimedia History blends images, audio, video and graphics with text, unlike a traditional encyclopedia entry or journal article, which is largely text-based.

From the Multimedia History Section

The eHistory Primary Sources and Documents section will be gathering documents, images, and other primary source material to help with teaching, learning, and the investigation of history. The collection will be searchable and will include results from other sections with primary sources like the Oral Histories and Maps and Images.

An Oral History from the Primary Sources Section

Origins is a free monthly publication in which an academic expert will analyze a current issue in a broader, deeper context. Origins will also include images, maps, graphs, and other material to supplement the essay.

Book Reviews are written by members of the Ohio State University History Department. Each month a thoughtful review of a recent book will be presented. The books featured here are of both scholarly significance and of appeal to a wide audience.

eHistory has thousands of images and hundreds of maps available on the site, many of them primary sources, which are fully searchable. More content will be added on an ongoing basis to better serve students, teachers and other history enthusiasts.

Maps and Image Section

The eHistory site may be used for personal and educational use where no profit is involved, unless the content in question is copyrighted by someone other than eHistory.

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Friday, January 22, 2010

Catch of the Day - Yodio - 22 Jan 10

Yodio, a rich-media tool, is today's tasty catch

Yodio is a place for anyone to create and share their own personal broadcast messages. Use Yodio to add narration to photos or presentations, then share these narrated photo stories with others.

Yodio Home Page

Upload photos to Yodio, call from your phone to record the narrative, then share via email, link, or embed your Yodio story in web sites, blogs, etc.

Yodio Editor

Yodio has created a new form of rich media where you can synchronize voice commentaries with digital photos to create easily shared, voice-narrated, photo presentations. Yodio combines sight and sound into a unique form of broadcasting.

Sample Yodio I Made

Using Yodio, you can call on a phone to record or upload an existing recording. Upload one or more photos to your Yodio account. In your account you can create your own rich-media broadcast by simply dragging-and-dropping the audio tracks and the photos. Then publish it with helpful information and tags, and share it via e-mail, links, embedded player, etc.

Yodio Sharing

Yodio offers an integrated, one-stop digital publishing service where anyone can go to record, produce, and share audio recordings and personal broadcasts.

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

A Classroom Idea for Using an iPod Touch

Yesterday, as I observed a sixth grade teacher, I had one of those simple ideas that sometimes flash into your consciousness from out of the proverbial blue.

The teacher posed a question to his class that called for a short one or two word response. He told his class to write the answer on paper and he circulated through the class looking at their answers.

I had my iPhone in my hand taking observation notes. Suddenly, I thought, "If each kid had an iPod Touch and the Marquee app, they could all enter their answers, hold up the Touch, and the teacher could quickly scan everyone's responses."

For those of you unfamiliar with Marquee, it lets you write your own message, choose the font, the background and text colors, the speed and style by which the message will scroll or flash on your iPod Touch screen. Then hold the screen up towards the person you want to see the message, and let them read it from across the room.

This isn't going to change the course of education in the 21st century, but it makes an efficient and simple use of new technology.

Catch of the Day - Digital Literacy Toolkit - 21 Jan 10

The Digital Literacy: Skills for the 21st Century Toolkit is the catch of this day

The Digital Literacy: Skills for the 21st Century Toolkit has developed from the premise that multimedia authoring must be taught as a skill in the same way that traditional writing is taught. Even though most teachers and students have become familiar with the technical skills required to use images in multimedia productions, they lack the critical idiom to determine whether an image or sound is appropriately used.

Digital Literacy: Skills for the 21st Century Home Page

The Digital Literacy: Skills for the 21st Century web site has been developed to address the lack of comprehensive, established approach to guide the teaching, learning, and assessment of specific digital literacy skills.

Create a Soundscape Activity Page

The Digital Literacy: Skills for the 21st Century Toolkit is a set of resources that teachers can access and use without the need for any special training. The site not only presents each activity with explanatory text but also provides a rationale and a clarification for the overall process of instruction in digital literacy.

Two-Minute Tour of the Digital Literacy Toolkit

The goal of The Digital Literacy: Skills for the 21st Century site is to help schools and districts implement a new approach to teaching digital literacy.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Catch of the Day - Kid-cast.com - 20 Jan 10

Kid-Cast.com, a new podcasting service, is today's very fresh catch

Kid-cast.com is a website for kids to publish their own podcasts so that other kids can listen to them. Kid-cast.com provides kid-safe podcasts for young minds to hear.

Kid-cast.com Home Page

Kid-cast.com wants parents and teachers to know it's a safe place for their kids to spend time creating their podcasts and to have them posted. They take many precautions to make this a safe place for kids' material to be posted and heard.

Podcast Page

Each podcast is reviewed before posting to try to determine it's age-group appropriateness. One of the things Kid-cast.com uses to help you determine if a podcast is right for your students or child is the implementation of their own podcast rating system that's similar to the ESRB ratings found on video gaming systems. By using this Podcast Rating System it's easier to identify who can safely listen to a particular podcast ...

E - Everyone
E10+ - Everyone 10 and Over
T - Teens (age 13 minimum)
T16+ - Teens 16 and Over

Kid-Cast.com is dedicated to helping kids get their message out to the world. Contributions are by kids themselves, allowing kids to listen to their peers on subjects they care about. Visit the Kid-cast.com blog.

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Catch of the Day - Drop.io Voice - 19 Jan 10

Today's catch is drop.io Voice, a voice recording tool

Drop.io Voice lets students and teachers create simple online podcasts directly from any phone.

First, you will need to create a drop at the drop.io home page.

Each drop has a phone number and custom extension (just like each has an email address). Dial the number, wait for the prompt, enter the extension and start talking. Whatever you say, drop.io Voice will convert to an MP3 and put on your drop in a matter of just a short time. Then it can be listened to on the drop, or sent out via email, RSS, MMS, or basically anything else you want.

Click here to listen to a short recording I made using drop.io Voice.

Try it yourself. Call 646-495-9241 x 45069 and record a message.

The amount of talk time is limited by the size of the drop. The size of a free drop is 100 Mb which is about 400 minutes of talk. You can determine security levels when you create the drop.

Drop.io Voice numbers are in the 646 (NYC) area code, so depending on your phone plan, calling drop.io Voice may cost money. If that's an issue, you can call using Skype, Google Voice or a similar service.

Using drop.io Voice, a drop can be the world’s simplest podcast system, a private class audio-blog, a way to record a speech or lecture for future review, use, sharing, and more.

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Monday, January 18, 2010

Catch of the Day - EasyWriter - 18 Jan 10

The EasyWriter web site is today's delicacy

The EasyWriter web site offers coverage of key topics from the EasyWriter, 3e handbook (Andrea A. Lunsford), including doing research, documenting sources, recognizing common writing errors, and working online.

EasyWriter Home Page

The EasyWriter Resources section includes material on the 20 most common errors, documenting sources, working online, exercise central, MLA exercises, and more.

Page from the Working Online Section

In the Re: Writing Resources category, you'll find tutorials on avoiding plagiarism, designing for the web, evaluating online sources, designing documents, and conducting research, as well as a number of other resources.

Two-Minute Tour of EasyWriter

Most of the EasyWriter content is available without the need to register with the site. However, certain content such as Exercise Central is accessible only to registered users.

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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Teaching Email and Text Etiquette

Are you teaching students appropriate email and text etiquette? Traditionally, students were taught the proper form for letter writing of various sorts, but how many people regularly write letters anymore? Much of modern written communication is done by email and text.

Are we teaching good form for today's methods of communication? Do you, as a teacher, know what good email manners are?

Teaching Email and Text Etiquette - A LiveBinders collection of resources

Teaching Email and Text Etiquette