The Rearview Mirror 3/30/2013

For those of you who may have missed an EDge21 featured post or who didn't have the opportunity to look at some of them during this past week, here's a second chance.

Monday

Electric Slide is a free iOS app that lets you wirelessly present your PowerPoint slides, documents, and videos with just your iPhone or iPad.

Tuesday

GoNoodle delivers refreshing brain-break games designed to be played in five minutes or less to your classroom projector or interactive whiteboard.

Wednesday

Online eLearning course authoring with easygenerator allows designing flexible courses that meet learners' needs by facilitating the development process.

Thursday

Big Deal Media is a robust collection of free publications and services such as newsletters, ebooks, print projects, website content, and social media.

Featured: 3/28/2013 Big Deal Media [Resources]

Big Deal Media is a robust collection of free publications and services such as newsletters, ebooks, print projects, website content, and social media.

K-12 professionals can find the information and tools they need at Big Deal Media. Since 1995, it has consistently delivered lists of resources and funding opportunities. Created by experienced educational publishing professionals and practicing K-12 educators, Big Deal Media publications provide timely, relevant resources in the rapidly transforming educational environment.

At Big Deal Media find:

• Sources of grants and other attainable funding for projects and programs.

• Resources for 21st century themes and skills.

• Professional learning opportunities.

• Standards-aligned lessons and assessments.

• Free and inexpensive finds.

Big Deal Media eBooks are electronic publications that offer resources for educators, while serving specific audiences, including K-12 technology professionals and educators of English language learners.

The mission of Big Deal Media is “to save every educator time and money while identifying top-quality resources for schools and classrooms.”

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EDge21 will be taking a Spring Break next week. The daily featured post will return on Monday, April 8.

Featured: 3/27/2013 Easygenerator [eCourse Authoring]

Online eLearning course authoring with easygenerator allows designing flexible courses that meet learners' needs by facilitating the development process.

Workflow assignments, course development version control, content reuse, and the ability to reformat eLearning for mobile delivery are some of the features of easygenerator's SaaS eLearning authoring tool.

eLearning authoring with easygenerator starts with a design process that includes:

1. Determination of the learning objectives.

2. Planning how to assess learner comprehension.

3. Identifying content needed so the learner can meet objectives.

Easygenerator supports collaboration between instructional designers, developers, and subject matter experts through its workflow and role assignment system. Because of its approach in using learning objectives, easygenerator can help you create better, more effective eLearning courses.

Watch a video demo of easygenerator

Elearning authoring with easygenerator is available through a free option or a subscription option. The free authoring software has all the functionality you need to create adaptive eLearning courses, that you can publish on the web, in any LMS, and on mobile devices.

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Featured: 3/26/2013 GoNoodle [Health]

GoNoodle delivers refreshing brain-break games designed to be played in five minutes or less to your classroom projector or interactive whiteboard.

GoNoodle games are designed to energize and stimulate students in a variety of situations. Kids look forward to GoNoodle brain-breaks because they incorporate the game playing experiences they know and love.

The mix of interactive games and physical activity can help students get more exercise in their day. Practicing just four GoNoodle games a day gives students as much as 20 minutes of physical activity.

Watch a video: Welcome to GoNoodle

GoNoodle is a product of HealthTeacher, an interactive leader in youth health that creates games, apps, and othereducational resources.

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Featured: 3/25/2013 Electric Slide [Presenting]

Electric Slide is a free iOS app that lets you wirelessly present your PowerPoint slides, documents, and videos with just your iPhone or iPad.

Show your PowerPoint files and other documents on any web browser, TV, or projector and control it using your device. Since viewers just need your simple Electric Slide URL to follow along, no complicated setup.

How Electric Slide works:

1. Upload files either from your device or via the web

2. Present to the meeting room TV or remote viewers - just provide your simple URL

3. You can also plug directly into a TV or use AirPlay

Even without a live Internet connection, you can present to a TV, projector, Apple TV, or another iOS device.

Electric Slide preserves your PowerPoint transitions, builds, animations, fonts, and formatting, both on your iPhone or iPad as well as any web browser. Many other formats, including Word, PDF, and videos are also supported.

A free Electric Slide account includes:

• 50 Mb storage

• Up to 5 simultaneous live viewers

• Videos up to 60 seconds in length

• Meeting length limited to 90 minutes

• Doesn't expire

Watch a video introduction to Electric Slide

Oddly, Electric Slide does not currently support Keynote presentations. However, I am told this feature is in development. Electric Slide is free from the iTunes App Store.

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Things I Like: Coffitivity

Research shows that ambient noise, an important environmental variable, can affect creativity. Empirical results demonstrate a moderate versus low level of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks. A high level of noise hurts creativity. A moderate level of noise increases processing difficulty, inducing a higher construal level and thus promoting abstract processing, which subsequently leads to higher creativity.

I've always suspected that this was personally the case for me. I spend a lot of time working in cafes and I feel more focused and productive in that environment. On occasions when I might be working in the quiet of my home, I sometimes seem easily distracted and not able to get deeply into whatever task is at hand.

Therefore, I was delighted to stumble upon this website. Coffitivity delivers the vibe of a coffee shop right to your desktop, so that when your workspace just isn't quite working, you can find that cafe ambience anywhere.

Coffitivity generates the mix of calm and commotion of an environment like a coffee house that has been proven to be just what you might need to get the creative juices flowing.

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The Rearview Mirror 3/23/2013

For those of you who may have missed an EDge21 featured post or who didn't have the opportunity to look at some of them during this past week, here's a second chance.

Monday

Nota is a collaborative platform where anyone can add videos, links, images, comments, and other content directly to the pages of an ebook.

Tuesday

GetEdFunding is a free grant finding resource to help public and private preK–12 schools, districts, educators, higher education institutions, and nonprofit organizations that work with them, locate and secure the funding they need.

Wednesday

Scrible is a free web tool to mark up web pages in your browser, manage them, and collaborate on online. It wasfirst mentioned on EDge21in 2011. TheStudent Edition of Scrible is a free upgrade for students.

Thursday

Ticket To Reading Rewards is a reading incentive program sponsored by the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation intended to encourage middle school students to read books outside the classroom.

Featured: 3/21/2013 Ticket to Reading Rewards [Reading]

Ticket To Reading Rewards is a reading incentive program sponsored by the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation intended to encourage middle school students to read books outside the classroom.

Ticket To Reading Rewards has three primary components:

• Reading Component-Students are encouraged to read to earn rewards for participating and for reading books.
• Ticket/Campus Visit Component-The NABC Foundation provides free tickets to local college games or practices to all students who enter the program. The goal this year is to distribute 50,000 tickets to participants.
• Coaching/Mentoring Component-The NABC Foundation often runs a Coach the Coaches clinic for middle school basketball coaches in each school district. The focus is not only on basketball techniques, but also on motivating coaches to encourage their players to reach a high level of reward in the program and to provide leadership within the school to promote reading.

Rewards earned by participants in Ticket To Reading Rewards have included subscriptions to Sports Illustrated for Kids, miniature basketball hoops, medals, trophies, basketballs autographed by NCAA coaches, books, and gift certificates.  The top reader in each school receives special recognition, and schools compete against each other for a coveted award.

Watch a video about Ticket To Reading Rewards

The Ticket To Reading Rewards program was founded in 2002 by the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation. Students have read an estimated 4 million books, earned nearly 1 million rewards, and attended 125,000 local men's and women's NCAA basketball games at no cost to schools or students.

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Featured: 3/20/2013 Scrible-Student Edition [Annotation]

Scrible is a free web tool to mark up web pages in your browser, manage them, and collaborate on online. It was first mentioned on EDge21in 2011.



You use Scrible by adding the bookmarklet to your browser, then using the tools to annotate web pages with highlighting, notes, and more. You can then share, organize, and search these annotated pages  from your online libraries.

The Student Edition of Scrible is a free upgrade for students (with a .edu email address) that adds these features:

• Citations and Bibliographies-Capture citations in a snap and create bibliographies with a single click.
• Summaries and Reports-Compile your annotations from multiple articles into a simple summary or robust report.
• More Space-Use 250 MB of space to save your articles. Invite others to earn even more storage.
• Shareable Libraries-Collaborate with others by inviting them to group, topic, or project specific libraries.

The Student Edition of Scrible includes the ability to maintain multiple, separate libraries and makes them easier to share. You can now keep topics of interest separated, with each library keeping  saved pages and tags specific to a topic.



The Student Edition of Scrible also provides the ability to share entire libraries instead of only individual pages. A teacher can now collect material on a topic, and share the entire library with students through one action instead of sharing multiple links.

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Things I Like: Google Books Downloader

Earlier today, I discovered a handy little app, Google Book Downloader.

Google Books Downloader is a very barebones tool. Enter the URL or ID of a Google Book and it will create and download a PDF of that book, including books that have full or limited previews. Google Book Downloader can only download the portion you can read on Google Books.

Download a book to Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive, or another cloud storage service and your book will be available on any device capable of viewing a PDF.

You can download Google Books Downloaderfree from CNET's Download.com.

Note: Google Book Downloader is not connected in any way with with Google.

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Featured: 3/19/2013 GetEdFunding [Funding]

GetEdFunding is a free grant finding resource to help public and private preK–12 schools, districts, educators, higher education institutions, and nonprofit organizations that work with them, locate and secure the funding they need.



The mission of the GetEdFunding website is to help close the equity gap in educating students from all backgrounds and circumstances by helping educators and institutions acquire the funds they need to supplement tight budgets.

GetEdFunding has currently collected more than 1,000 grants and opportunities from federal, state, regional, and community sources. GetEdFunding is monitored, updated, and expanded daily.

You can search GetEdFunding by six criteria, including 41 areas of focus, 8 content areas, and themes and skills that support your curriculum. Once you are registered, you can save the grants of greatest interest, then return to read about them at any time.




GetEdFunding is sponsored by CDW-G and created by educational professionals for educational professionals. It’s meant to be an easy-to-use, relevant, and reliable database that will be used again and again. Former and active preK through 12 teachers, higher level educators, and experienced educational publishing writers have been involved in every stage of development of this database.

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Featured: 3/18/2013 Nota Reader [eBooks]

Nota is a collaborative platform where anyone can add videos, links, images, comments, and other content directly to the pages of an ebook.



The purpose of Nota is to advance any text beyond traditional print standards as well as current reader technologies, to allow an ebook to be more than just a digitized version of the original print book.

Latin for “note”, nota can be videos, or problem sets, or links to relevant web pages connected directly to an ebook page. Since anyone can add nota along with comments around them, the knowledge base can continue to evolve around the ideas on that page.



Furthermore, Nota is providing learners at the high school, college, and post-collegiate levels with their free STEM Fundamentals Catalog of textbooks to support all students. The catalog covers a variety of STEM subjects and grade levels, complete with rich video, web content, and problem sets.

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The Rearview Mirror 3/16/2013

For those of you who may have missed an EDge21 featured post or who didn't have the opportunity to look at some of them during this past week, here's a second chance.


Monday

NaturalReader is a free iOS text-to-speech app that converts entered text, PDF files, MSWord documents, e-books websites and more into spoken words.

Tuesday

Money as You Grow provides 20 essential, age-appropriate financial lessons and corresponding activities that kids need to know as they grow.

Wednesday

Math Champ, a popular classroom game for the iPhone and iPad, is now available for free. This innovative quiz game for iPhone and iPad is designed for grades 4 to 7 (aged 9 to 12).

Thursday

TheMarch Madness website provides classroom lessons, resources, and tools that have been developed around the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Save Google Reader

Hi!

I just signed the petition "Google: Keep Google Reader Running" on Change.org.

It's important. Will you sign it too? Here's the link:

http://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running

Thanks!

Featured: 3/14/2013 March Madness Math [Topical]

The March Madness website provides classroom lessons, resources, and tools that have been developed around the NCAA men's basketball tournament.



The March Madness website offers many ways to use the NCAA basketball tournament to inspire learning in your classroom.

Some of the March Madness activities:

• In Figure the Winner students practice calculating percentage, average, mean, median, and mode.
• Exploring Binary uses the NCAA brackets to explore binary trees in sports and math.
• A March Madness webquest.
• Who’s Number 1? is an activity in which students investigate the mathematics of ranking.
• Check out the cities and schools that are part of the tournament using Google Earth.

March Madness Reading engages students in drawing conclusions from large amounts of information, using evidence to support opinions, and reading tables, graphs and charts.

The March Madness website also provides links to a number of related resources as well as several downloadable PDF files.

Note: As far as I can see, this site has no official connection with the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

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Featured: 3/13/2013 Math Champ [Math]

Math Champ, a popular classroom game for the iPhone and iPad, is now available for free. This innovative quiz game for iPhone and iPad is designed for grades 4 to 7 (aged 9 to 12).



With the Math Champ app, each player competes to become the class "Math Champ". Any student with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch can compete head to head in a real time quiz delivered by a teacher’s iPad (the Math Champ host).

Teachers can also access valuable student metrics in the class list area, and the host will keep a record of results for all players for every quiz they complete.

Before play starts, the teacher can easily select the appropriate grade and the difficulty level and the Math Champ host app will do the rest of the work - a unique quiz is generated on the fly from from thousands of available questions based on Common Core standards. As students play, the leaderboard can be streamed to an interactive whiteboard or Apple TV to display the current top ranking players.

Watch a video: How to use Math Champ in your classroom

The user interface is designed to work on both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch and features a work area that is completely intuitive. Math Champ is designed to use Bluetooth or wi-fi networks. Bluetooth can be a valuable fall back for classrooms that don’t have reliable wi-fi connections. Up to 15 students can play using Bluetooth and 20 to 25 can play using wi-fi.

Math Champ is a product of InKids. The host and client apps are both available free from the iTunes App Store: Host | Client

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