The Rearview Mirror 6-29-2013

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

Student Cultural Exchange provides immersion-based travel opportunities designed to give American and international student travelers the opportunity to develop deep, lifetime connections with previously unknown people and places.

Tuesday

Voxy is an English language learning system based on research in second language acquisition, mobile technology, and cognitive science.

Wednesday

TryEngineering is a resource for students, teachers, and parents about engineering and engineering careers.

Thursday

The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of bird, animal, and other natural audio and video recordings.

Featured: 6-27-2013 Macaulay Library

The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of bird, animal, and other natural audio and video recordings.

The Macaulay Library's mission is to "collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts."

Teachers can use the accurate depictions of nature from the Macaulay Library to illustrate the natural world and create exciting interactive learning activities.

Lessons for elementary, middle, and high school use rich media including sounds and videos from the Macaulay Library to spark student interest in understanding biological adaptations. Teachers can download individual lessons or units addressing science standards about waves, forces, and motion.

 Watch a sampling of Macaulay Library video

The Macaulay Library provides training, equipment, and resources to help document the diversity of nature with sound and video. Field techniques and the technical knowledge required to record the behavior of birds and other animals in the wild are taught through workshops and informal training sessions.

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Featured: 6-26-2013 TryEngineering

TryEngineering is a resource for students, teachers, and parents about engineering and engineering careers.

It is hoped that TryEngineering will help young people better understand what engineering means, and lead them to consider an engineering career. Here students will find information on the different disciplines within engineering and descriptions of the lifestyles and experiences of engineers.

TryEngineering provides:

• Hands-on experiments and activities.
• Referrals to summer programs and internship opportunities.
• Tools to search for schools that offer engineering programs.
• Tips on course selection, applying to colleges, and financial aid.

Parents and educators will find teaching resources, information about school accreditation, and other information that can be of help in planning and preparing students for a career in engineering.

Teachers can download free standards-aligned lessons for students aged 8–18, aimed at introducing engineering concepts and allowing the application of engineering principles in the classroom.

 Take a video tour of TryEngineering

TryEngineering is a joint effort between IEEE, IBM and the New York Hall of Science.

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Featured: 6-25-2013 Voxy

Voxy is an English language learning system based on research in second language acquisition, mobile technology, and cognitive science.

Voxy delivers authentic content that actual native English speakers use in real-life activities, providing opportunity to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening, with feedback from English-speaking tutors.

Technology-mediated learning offers personalized and individualized instruction to give learners access to content, just-in-time feedback, and progress updates to enhance the learning process.

Adult learners have opportunities to engage with genuine language content, practice using the target language to accomplish real-world tasks, and receive feedback on errors.

Distributed regular practice will help to sharpen the learner's skills and provide frequent opportunities to improve. Whether using a computer, tablet, or smartphone, learning and practice is always accessible.

 Watch a video overview of Voxy

Voxy guides learners through a sequence of lessons, tracking performance and adapting lessons accordingly. Voxy works for beginners to advanced learners.

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Featured: 6-24-2013 Student Cultural Exchange

Student Cultural Exchange provides immersion-based travel opportunities designed to give American and international student travelers the opportunity to develop deep, lifetime connections with previously unknown people and places.

Student Cultural Exchange immersion-based programs are designed to fill a perceived void in the overall education of international students studying in the US. SCE programs strive to provide a structured, fun, and inspiring setting where international students can immerse themselves in American culture and activities.

SCE’s international programs aim to get young people out of their comfort zonesand into new, unfamiliar places. Unique programs stress the importance of developing deeper connections with the people and places the students visit. The goal is to transform travelers to mature global citizens.

Student Cultural Exchange acknowledges that their varied program themes and locations may present different risks and potential hazards. The safety of their travelers is a primary objective from the planning and design to the implementation and completion of programs.

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

Rear view Mirror 6-22-2013

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

Kingsoft Office Free 2013 for Windows provides a no-cost, powerful alternative to the MS Office monolith.

Tuesday

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) provides links to quality educational resources for teaching and learning online, with emphasis on the STEM disciplines.

Wednesday

The Engineering Pathway pledges access to high-quality STEM teaching and learning resources for use by K-12 and university educators and students.

Thursday

The largest online catalog of educational videos aligned to Common Core and other standards is available at OpenEd.

 

Created with Blogsy

Extra: Flowstate Keeps Writers on Task

 

Flowstate, an iOS app, describes itself as the “most brutal writing app”, designed to help writers overcome blocks and distraction.

Flowstate is a writing app "designed to subdue the inner critic, and enable writers to translate their feelings and ideas onto the page without over-analyzation."

The writer chooses how long they want to write, and then enters a full-screen writing session. If they exit early, or stop writing… everything is lost. By blocking all distraction, the writer can fully commit.

This could be a great tool to make sure students stay on task!

Flowstate features iCloud document storage and a choice of six different fonts, sharing, but not much else.

Flowstate costs $1.99(US) from the iTunes App Store, and is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 6.0 or later.

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Featured: 6-20-2013 OpenEd

 

The largest online catalog of educational videos aligned to Common Core and other standards is available at OpenEd.

Choose a standard group such as Math or Language Arts, followed by a category like Congruence or Speaking and Listening. Then select a standard and you will see resources related to it. You can filter by grade (K-12). Optionally, search for resources by keyword instead of by standard.

Registered users can also create courses on OpenEd.

Founded in 2012, Open Education Institute strives to enable teachers to have access to the best educational resources (videos, games, and exercises) for their students, especially resources tied to Common Core standards.

OpenEd is committed to providing this access free to all teachers worldwide. Most of the site's software (including the catalog itself) is open source.

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

Featured: 6-19-2013 The Engineering Pathway

The Engineering Pathway pledges access to high-quality STEM teaching and learning resources for use by K-12 and university educators and students.

The Engineering Pathway's K-12 curriculum uses engineering as a context for the utilization of hands-on science and math in real-world designs and applications that hope to inspire creativity.

Search K-12 engineering lessons and activities and other resources by a variety of criteria such as content area, grade level, and standards. The Engineering Pathway resources also include professional development opportunities and research findings.

Resources for higher education may be located using multiple criteria including discipline, audience, resource type, title, author/creator, special topics, or by selected collection. These resources include support for ABET accreditation, research and scholarship, curricula development, and extracurricular activities for students.

The aspiration of The Engineering Pathway is to "provide resources that help teachers, parents, faculty, and practicing engineers to inspire more of today's students to follow an engineering path as their way to understand and improve the world."

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

Featured: 6-18-2013 National Science Digital Library

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) provides links to quality educational resources for teaching and learning online, with emphasis on the STEM disciplines.

NSDL provides structured, descriptive information about web-based educational resources located on other sites. The providers contribute this metadata to NSDL where it is organized into a searchable resource.

Browse national educational standards, including the Common Core Math Standards and find NSDL resources that are associated with key learning goals. View the distribution of NSDL resources in graphical form and browse by education level, resource type, subject, and audience.

Although some resources are restricted to provider site membership, or may have a cost associated with them, most resources in the library adhere to principles of free Open Educational Resource (OER) access.

Partners in the National Science Digital Library network include STEM education organizations and institutions providing digital resource collections, services, partnering opportunities, and connections to communities over a full range of education levels and disciplines.

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

Featured: 6-17-2013 Kingsoft Office Free

Kingsoft Office Free 2013 for Windows provides a no-cost, powerful alternative to the MS Office monolith.

Smaller and faster than most other office suites, Kingsoft Office Free 2013, includes a built-in PDF converter and automatic spell check, as well as an innovative Paragraph Adjustment tool.

Kingsoft Office Free 2013 includes the usual modules for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations:

• Writer provides word and text processing with drag-and-drop paragraph editing, a section tab, support for .doc and .docx.
• Easily create and edit Spreadsheets, a calculator, graphing, and multiple other tools for complex data analysis, export to both .xls and .xlsx extension files.
• Presentation lets you create dynamic slides for speeches and presentations, with Flash, sound and animation effects, and artistic backgrounds.

 Watch a video introduction to Kingsoft Office

In addition to the traditional interface which resembles older versions of MS Office, Kingsoft Office Free 2013 gives you a choice of a new interface similar to the newer versions of Office. You can easily switch between the two versions according to your preference.

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

Extra: Symbolab

Symbolab is a semantic search engine for math and science that allows users to look for equations, formulas, and expressions using mathematical symbols and scientific notations as well as full text search.

The goal of the site is to provide relevant search results that are the most theoretically and semantically similar to the search criteria. Symbolab does this by applying proprietary machine learning algorithms in order to understand the meaning and context of the search queries.

Symbolab indexes the full text and equations of online encyclopedias, dictionaries, academic publications, lectures, books, and more covering math, physics, and chemistry.

Watch a video introduction to Symbolab

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

The Rearview Mirror 6-15-2013

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

ThingLink helps you create rich, interactive images that come alive with music, video, text, images, and more.

Tuesday

Visit London'sScience Museum online. Find out about the museum's objects, arts projects, and medical collection, play educational games, and discover climate science, and more.

Wednesday

TeachEngineering is a digital library of standards-based* engineering curricula for the use of K-12 teachers to make applied science and mathematics interesting and engaging.

Thursday

UsingFlipgrid, teachers create grids of short, discussion-style questions that students respond to through recorded videos.

Featured: 6-13-2013 Flipgrid

Using Flipgrid, teachers create grids of short, discussion-style questions that students respond to through recorded videos.

Begin by creating grids and adding questions. A Flipgrid account lets you can create up to four grids free. Grids can be classes, sections, groups of students, or any collection of users interested in a common set of questions. A grid can contain an unlimited number of questions, and each question can accommodate an unlimited number of responses. Questions are short, text-based prompts that can include links to websites or documents.

Students respond with video of their own. Students can receive email updates when new questions are added to grids they follow. You can easily email a link to a grid or an individual question. Students respond by snapping a thumbnail photo with their webcam, recording their video response as many times as they need, and submitting their video.

There are several ways students can connect with their personal videos and those of their peers: by likes and direct links, as well as Twitter, Blog, and Facebook integration. Teachers control whether videos can be shared outside of Flipgrid.

 Watch a video demo of Flipgrid

Flipgrid uses a streamlined single-page administration tool for teachers to create, manage, and share grids with students and colleagues.

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

Featured: 6-12-2013 TeachEngineering

TeachEngineering is a digital library of standards-based* engineering curricula for the use of K-12 teachers to make applied science and mathematics interesting and engaging.

The TeachEngineering collection provides educators with free access to a growing resource of multi-week units, lessons, activities, and living labs. The collection continues to grow and evolve with new additions from universities, and input from teachers who use the curricula in their classrooms.

Click on Search Curriculum or Browse Curriculum to find what you want for your classroom from the more than 900 lessons and activities currently available.

In most cases, TeachEngineering activities use ordinary materials that you can find in your classroom, school, home, grocery store or hardware store.

Use of curriculum found in the TeachEngineering collection is free to teachers using it in their classrooms. There is no fee or membership requirement (There is an optional MyTE workspace you may use to keep track of favorite lessons and activities, or to submit reviews). No special kits or materials are needed.

TeachEngineering is a collaborative project between faculty, students, and teachers associated with five universities and the American Society for Engineering Education, with NSF National Science Digital Library funding.

*Every lesson and every activity is aligned to the science and math educational standards of the state in which it was first developed and classroom tested. From that information, TeachEngineering provides rough alignment to other state and national educational standards.

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

Featured: 6-11-2013 Science Museum

Visit London's Science Museum online. Find out about the museum's objects, arts projects, and medical collection, play educational games, and discover climate science, and more.

You can also check out the Science Museum blogs, a tabloid history of science, and the latest contemporary science news. The Talk Science Blog gives great ideas for promoting discussion about science in the classroom.

Science MuseumTeacher Resources include activities, videos, online games and websites, tips, tools, and demos. Browse the resources or search by age, subject, and topic.

The Science Museum was founded in 1857 as part of the South Kensington Museum, and became independent in 1909. Today the Science Museum is world renowned for its historic collections, awe-inspiring galleries, and inspirational exhibitions.

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Extra: eQuizShow

eQuizShow is a free online tool designed for teachers to create and play their own free educational quiz shows using templates.

With eQuizShow, show students questions and answers to review. There have been more than 2200 templates created by and for teachers. No Powerpoint or registration is required.

eQuizShow was created by New York City high school junior Henry Wilson as a winter break project, but turned into a more ambitious endeavor.

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

Featured: 6-10-2013 ThingLink

ThingLink helps you create rich, interactive images that come alive with music, video, text, images, and more.

ThingLink helps tell the stories contained in images. ThingLink interactive images can help students develop 21st century skills, using Images to engage, entertain, and educate.

What teachers and students can do by adding tags to any image:

• Create authentic, valuable, and rich interactive stories around historical events using multimedia found online.
• Annotate graphs and timelines.
• Record an instructional message inside an image.
• Embed interactive images into blogs.
• Curate content inside an image to demonstrate understanding of a topic.

Upload images directly from your hard drive or import from the web, Flickr, or Facebook. An education account lets teachers and students store an unlimited number of images.

 

Nearly all online content is embeddable on ThingLink images. Drop a link into the image editor and you will find that virtually all rich content from around the web is supported.

Users comment on images and follow image channels of other users. ThingLink images are shareable, and embeddable with a click to Edmodo, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and email.

 Watch a ThingLinktutorial

If you're a teacher or student, you can sign up to ThingLinkEducation for free. Thinglink is also available as a free app for iOS devices.

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