Plus 6-20-2014: Global Read Aloud

 

Pernille Ripp, a 5th grade teacher in Wisconsin, started Global Read Aloud in the summer of 2010 to expand the global collaboration of her students.

 

Participating educators choose a book to read aloud to their students during a certain time period during which they try to make as many global connections as possible.

 

 

Individual teachers decide how much time they would like to dedicate to Global Read Aloud and how deeply they would like to be involved. You can connect with just one class or go for as many as possible.

 

Tools such as Twitter, Skype, Edmodo, wikis, email, regular mail, and others have been used to make these global connections.  Last year more than 144,000 students in more than 30 countries on 6 different continents were represented.

 

The official start date for this year's project is October 6th, 2014. The book choices are:

• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo
• The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm
• One For the Murphy's by Lyndy Mullaly Hunt
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

 

 Watch What is the Global Read Aloud?

 

You can sign up to participate in Global Read Aloud here.

 

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Featured 5-28-2014: One Hen

One Hen provides educators with flexible curriculum resources designed to help students develop financial responsibility, personal initiative, global awareness, and giving back.

The motivation for One Hen comes from the children’s book, One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference. A young Ghanaian boy named Kojo who uses a small loan to buy one hen, which in turn lays eggs and hatches more hens, until he eventually becomes the largest chicken farmer in the country.

 

One Hen challenges kids in grades K-8 through a series of interactive lesson plans, an engaging storybook, and a website of games and activities. Teams of students face the challenges of running their own real-world small businesses. With the profits they earn, they repay their loans and make a donation to a non-profit organization of their choice, helping to meet a local or global need.

 

 

In the process, the young entrepreneurs learn necessary skills in business math, personal financial literacy, and social entrepreneurship.

 

One Hen is a non-profit organization whose mission is to "empower all kids to become social entrepreneurs who make a difference for themselves and the world.”

 

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Featured 3-24-2014: Subtext

Classroom groups can exchange ideas right in the pages of digital texts using Subtext, a free iPad app, opening up opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.

 

Subtext was built to support classroom reading, with practical features such as getting everyone on the same page in class to insight into how your students read.

 

With Google Books and Feedbooks built in, you can search for any book or digital document, or import your own ePub formatted documents. You can also share and discuss web pages with a class in the same way as books.

 

A set of annotation tools helps to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills. Students can highlight key passages or tag a set of commonly-used literary concepts.

 

 

Set up a closed class groups in Subtext to keep your students focused and secure as they read. They will only see notes from you and their classmates.

 

Subtext can help you follow how students and classroom groups progress, including reading speed, word look-ups, highlights, notes, and quiz results.

 

See Subtext in Action

 

Subtext is aligned with the Common Core Standards. When students read with Subtext, they are encouraged to analyze what they read, articulate what they think, and make connections between texts and the real world.

 

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Extra 3-21-2014: NYPL Children's Books

 

A group of librarians from The New York Public Library read more than a thousand titles this year, shared countless stories with the children who visit their branches, and compiled Children's Books 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2013.

 

This list includes the titles NYPL’s librarians thought to be the very best children's books for toddlers through sixth graders. 

 

 

Many of the stories focus on classic, timeless themes, stories that reveal feats of bravery, quests for justice and redemption, friendships lost and found. In these books, "heroes and heroines find ways to slay dragons, right wrongs, and prevail against all odds. They offer reassurance and inspiration in a world that can sometimes seem strange and dangerous."

 

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Extra: 1-2-2014 Sally Ride Science

Sally Ride Science provides tools for college and career readiness designed to fuel students' passion for STEM fields and careers.

 

Sally Ride Science strives to bring science to life for students ages 10-13, supporting and sustaining students' natural interests in science and technology. Books and eBooks on Cool Careers in Science and Key Concepts in Science vitalize science and show kids that science is creative, collaborative, fascinating, and fun.

 

The Sally Ride Online Academy offers professional development, helping educators incorporate engaging career-focused approaches into their existing instruction.

 

 Watch a video about he basics and benefits of the Sally Ride Online Academy

 

The Sally Ride EarthKAM is a NASA-backed program enabling students and teachers to learn about Earth from the unique perspective of space. 

 

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Featured: 12-2-2013 Google Play for Education

Discover, purchase, and share educational apps, books, and videos easily with Google Play for Education, a new online destination just for schools.

Browse content by grade, subject, keyword, or standard (including Common Core). Google Play for Education includes student tools in the categories study & reference, STEM tools, creation, and productivity & organization.

 

Teachers can find tools that support the cycle of planning, delivery, and assessment of instruction in the classroom, as well as tools that support classroom management, including behavior management, and communication with and between teachers, students, and parents.

 

A series of videos provide a closer look at how to use Google Play for Education.

 

 

Google Play for Education offers both free and paid content. Purchases can be made using purchase orders with no credit card required. Apps can be distributed quickly via the cloud.

 

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Featured: 9-24-2013 Zinn Education Project

The Zinn Education Project is a website that promotes and supports the use of the book A People’s History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people’s history in middle and high school classrooms.

The goal of the Zinn Education Project is to provide students with an understanding of United States history that is perhaps more accurate, complex, and engaging than that which is found in traditional textbooks and curricula.

Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States emphasizes the role that the choices and actions of working people, women, ethnic minorities, and organized social movements had in shaping history.

The website offers more than 100 free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level. The teaching activities are comprised of reflections on teaching about a people’s history, lessons, and critical reviews of literature. All of the suggested lessons have been used and developed in classrooms. The site also highlights the many available resources on people’s history.

 Watch Lauren Cooper speak on the Zinn Education Project

The Zinn Education Project is coordinated by two non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

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Featured: 9-12-2013 Net Texts

Net Texts helps schools replace or supplement traditional textbooks with customized multimedia courses delivered to students' iPads, Android tablets, and laptops.

Teachers can use NetTexts' Content Management Website to select existing courses or to create new ones by mixing and matching items from the NetTexts library with their own educational material. Courses can include videos, slideshows, e-books, PDFs, text, audiobooks, and Web links.

Students then use the NetTexts iPad, Android, or web app to download and view these courses. Students will feel more engaged and have more ownership of their learning, whether reading the latest assigned e-book or watching a 'flipped classroom' video.

Net Texts consulting services help your school get the most out of Net Texts. Teachers will be trained how to use the content management site and mobile apps, how to find Open Educational Resources, and how to create high quality content.

Net Texts can build customized OER courses based on teachers' recommendations, syllabi, and state standards. A school or district can replace textbooks with a multimedia curriculum based on OER, saving money on textbooks for years to come, as Net Texts courses can be updated with new material at any time.

 Watch Introducing Net Texts: The Digital Backpack for Your iPad

Net Texts courses contain teacher-created material as well as Creative Commons-licensed and other open education resources from the Web.

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Featured: 7-16-2013 The American Novel

The American Novel offers a comprehensive exploration of 200 years of the American novel, with detailed information on more than 50 American novels and authors, as well as the literary movements they inspired.

The Literary Timeline lets you scroll through 200 years of the American novel.

Six Novel Ideas uses six themes such as Melting Pot and Violence to explore the American novel throughout its history.

Test your literary know-how in the Elements of the Novel section of the site. The Lit Quiz will test your knowledge of the major works and authors of the American novel. In the flash quiz show, To Tell the Truth, decipher literary symbols or guess story characters. Use the Context and Hypertext feature to learn more about the historical, social, personal, and literary influences of important American authors.

The American Novel is a companion website to the PBS American Masters TV series Novel Reflections On The American Dream. The series explores the characters, plots, and themes of seven novels written since 1900, that deal with wealth, poverty, and the nature of success and failure in America. Passages from each book are dramatized through still photography that is inventively animated coupled with original and archival footage.

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Featured: 4-16-2013 Widbook [Writing]

 

Widbook is an intelligent platform where authors and readers have the opportunity to share their best digital content with people worldwide.

On Widbook, you can begin a book from scratch or upload your already completed or in-progress content in order to publish it. The Editor Tool enables users to visualize their work and use features such as keywords, bookmarks, highlights, real time chat, and more.

Invite people to make comments and add suggestions to your work. Widbook is a creative way to share content and spread ideas. Give some suggestions to another author or add a comment to a book.

 Watch the video: Widbook - Write, read and share!

Using Widbook, friends can share and post their favorite books, stories, and comments on their social network. Find books, save the favorites onto your bookshelf, and follow the authors.

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

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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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.

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

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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Featured: 2/28/2013 Kno Advance [eBooks]

Kno Advance is an interactive learning platform for publishers. Advance makes it possible to transform a print title into an eBook instantly, literally at no cost to the publisher or author.



The goal of Kno is to make learning more engaging for students. The Advance platform was created to provide publishers with easy-to-use, powerful tools to make their content and assessments interactive.



The components of Kno Advance:

• Kno Ingest - Bring titles to market within days, content will be available on the Web, iPad, Android, Windows 7 and Windows 8 devices.
• Book Enhancer - Easily add interactive elements like, video, audio, websites, calculators or simulations to the book.
• Kno Assessment - Author questions and assessments or import questions from their current systems. Kno supports multiple types of questions.

Watch the video: Advance; an interactive learning platform for publishers

Kno is a reader for digital textbooks first mentioned here last August. With numerous features to facilitate reading, studying, notetaking, and organization, Kno can do everything a physical textbook can do and more.

More than 80 publishers have contributed to Kno's digital library of over 200,000 titles. It is the largest collection of digital titles on the market.

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Borrowing Ebooks with Overdrive

Increasingly, local libraries are adding online digital catalogs of books available for borrowing. Many libraries are choosing OverDrive Digital Downloads to deliver and manage the lending process. Currently, OverDrive is tied into 18,000 libraries with millions of readers.



The first thing you need to do is become a member of a library participating in the Overdrive digital lending program. Then you will need a library card number and a 4-digit pin code to identify you as a borrower and regulate the number of ebooks you can have checked out.

OverDrive supplies ebooks to libraries in two popular formats, PDF ebooks and industry standard EPUB ebooks. Depending on your library, most of the titles available on OverDrive can be read with all major desktop and mobile platforms, including Windows and Mac computers, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry smartphones using an OverDrive e-reader client, and ebook readers including Sony Reader and Kindle.



You will select a book to borrow by browsing the online library with your browser. You can place holds on books that are not available, have a wish list, and look for books they currently have available. To look for books that are available, click on ‘Advanced’ next to the search bar. This will pull up a new menu that will give you a number of options such as ISBN, Author, Title and others. Check the box on the bottom that says ‘Only Show Titles Available.’ If you place a hold on a book, you will be notified by email when it is available. Each library is limited to a predetermined number of copies that they can lend out.

If you are using an OverDrive e-reader client, you will download the file directly to your e-reader. If you are using an Amazon Kindle e-reader or app, you will have to log on and register your library account with Amazon, and check the book out directly to your Amazon account. As soon as you check out the ebook it will be available on any of your devices. Reading an ebook that you borrowed from the library is the same Kindle experience as with any other book, including syncing across all of your devices.

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I would also like to mention Overdrive for K-12 Schools.

Your school library can give your students access to digital books and more 24/7 with School Download Library. Students can check out titles online, and read or listen offline on PC or Mac, smartphones, MP3 players, and ebook readers including Sony Reader and Kindle (US only). You can build this digital collection based on grade level or school curriculum with digital titles available in virtually every subject.

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Extra: 2/9/2013 iPads in the Classroom Guide [Free eBook]

If you're using iPads in the classroom, or are are still evaluating the idea, it might be worth taking a look at Annalisa Kelly’s iPads in the Classroom Guide (2013 Edition).

iPads in the Classroom Guide (2013 Edition) is a beginner’s reference for teachers at all levels who are using iPads and/or other iOS devices in their lessons.

The book covers a range of subjects from case studies to lesson ideas to how to select the most appropriate and cost-effective apps. The logistics of implementation and device management is also covered in the guide.



This may be one of the best resources regarding iPads and education available. Available free in the iBookstore.

This book can be viewed on an iPad with iBooks 2 or later, iOS 5 or later.

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Featured: 11/28/2012 Calameo [Self-publishing]

Calaméo instantly creates interactive web publications from your PDF files.

Publish, search for, and share all your documents online with Calaméo. Organize your publications into subscriptions. Your colleagues and students can add comments to and start discussions on each publication.

The Calaméo publishing method offers a wide variety of options and is simple to use. From a PDF file, create an interactive electronic document that is accessible from a computer and can simulate the feeling of reading a paper document: page turning, mark the pages, zoom in. Your documents can have as many pages as you like.

Watch Creating Online Publications with Calameo

A basic Calaméo account is free. Upgrading to a Premium account allows access to more features.

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