Perfect Present for the Teacher in Your Life
From Threadless Finally, proof the dog did eat your homework. Threadless is also a great site for puns and other hooks for a variety of subjects if you’re willing to look- and who wouldn’t have fun looking? Studying communism? Geometry?
Swivel- YouTube for Data (well as close as data’s likely to get anyway)
This is a perfect tool for teachers. Upload your own data sets and correlate away. You can now analyze your data and the data uploaded by other site members (currently all data is public). Once you’ve got things set up, Swivel then creates the html to allow you to easily embed different flavors of the graph in your blog or web site (that’s one of their’s above- and it allows a lot of customization). It makes data look good and it’s really easy to embed in blogs or webpages. The possible uses in History, English, Science and Math are pretty obvious. But it’d also be a great way to communicate with parents at a school or district level. Testing data will be public anyway so you might as well make it look good and the ability to compare different data sets visually and to share them is simply amazing. Between this site and DabbleDB I see it becoming a lot easier for teachers to really integrate powerful data analyzation and manipulation into the day to day operation of their classrooms. via TechCrunch
Using Bollywood Clips to Illustrate Conflict
I used BombayTV last year to get students to illustrate the major and minor conflicts in Richard III. It could be applied to any story you are working with–whether literature or history. Actually, I imagine you could use this for math and science with a little creativity. The student’s loved it.
MobZombies (I swear it’s educational)
MobZombies The twist is that a player’s physical position controls the position of their zombie-world avatar, forcing the player to actually move around the real world to succeed in the game.The virtual zombie-world is a simple environment — the game’s complexity comes from players having to negotiate real-world objects in order to avoid the zombies and stay alive. The scoring system is simple: the longer you can stay alive, the higher your score. Of course, the longer you stick around, the more zombies you’ll encounter. I couldn’t resist this one- What a great game for PE not to mention fighting the obesity epidemic! It’s ideas like this that need to be applied to education. Simple, interactive and fun. Now picture being able to solve math problems by running to different numbers or by making physical diagrams or even adding a physical/competition dimension to miserable multiple choice questions. -Only the first 8 people to sprint to the virtual head of John Smith move on to the next level. Am I crazy or does this sound like a lot of fun? via Boingboing
Google Earth File on the Colonies
I am still feeling my way around using Google Earth in the classroom. I want to make it more than a 3d worksheet. I think the key is making the students responsible for creating the files but I think in order to do that they need examples and exposure the program and how to use it on a more basic level. That is what this file is supposed to provide. This KMZ file covers SOLs USI 5 (for you non-Virginians that’s the early colonies in North America and some of their climate/economy/settlement rationales/religion). Download the file here. In the end I’d like to see students using it as an interactive hyper-linked notebook. If the teacher gave them a KMZ file at the start of the year and it was divided into folders based on SOLs then that’d get the organization started and the students could be responsible for adding the place marks, additional information and links out to relevant websites. I would like an internal search feature that scanned the info window text (which should be easy for Google) and I think it’d be a complete package for certain content.
Behavior Modificaton Plan (with style!)
Looking for a way to refocus your students without having to stop class to speak to them? Want to maintain your street cred as a hip “techno teacher”? Well, check out the Warning Label Generator. You choose the label style, icon, and message, and the generator spits out a jpg. Save it, copy it, laminate it, drop it like it’s hot on the desk of that student who doesn’t seem to get the concept of an internal monologue.
“Hop the Pond” for a great illustration
I happened upon this BBC site while tutoring a student last year, and I used it this year in my classes with great success. It’s an interactive activity that shows the student how adjectives and adverbs beef up a simple sentence and change the image the sentence places in our heads. My students loved it, and they really started to understand how descriptive details are often well placed adjectives and adverbs.
Community Script-Writing
The Jet Set Show recently posted a project entitled “Brandon’s Pitch”. Brandon has developed a basic set of characters and some conflicts between them, and he would like the general public to suggest possible story lines. He will take the suggestions into consideration when writing the script. This might be interesting to follow as well as a possible model for collaboration in a number of your classes. Link to Wiki
The Planets get Pages!
So far two science classes have now used iWeb to create social software pages for the planets. It went very well. The kids did a great job and really showed both creativity and a good grasp of the subject. There are some great quotes in there. One of my favorites was “I guess my life started out after that huge bang . . .” I also liked that Saturn’s secret shame was jewelry. I’d recommend checking them out- Jupiter Mars Venus Earth Mercury Uranus Pluto Neptune Saturn
Assembly Line Education
Six and a half hours a day. Nine months a year. Thirteen years. March, children, march. Take your diploma and drive thru. This is, as Jim Grant puts it, the American Lock-Step, Time-Bound, Grade School Structure. Do you have any idea where this model for education comes from in our history? The Kingdom of Prussia in the 18th Century. The king was having trouble with Lutheran aristocrats and decided to implement a compulsory education system that would indoctrinate his people to ensure the king’s place in Prussia. Horace Mann, Massachusetts representative and education reformer, was looking for a common system of schooling and turned his eye to Prussia. This lock-step method of educating was revolutionary at the time. It followed the mighty and holy Henry Ford in its assembly-line structure. The still very present agrarian society was respected within the structure. The majority of schools in America were still private institutions and unorganized before Mann put the lock-step system into place in the 1840s. Mann also organized teacher conferences and delivered lectures and addresses advocating reformation of the education system. Horace Mann was an educational revolutionary and should be respected for his attempt to provide consistent education to all learners in his state. We no longer live in an agrarian or industrial society. Our commodity is information these days. We […]