Category: Government

Collaborize Classroom-free for the 2010/2011 school year if you sign up before November 15!

Kelly Tenkely3 Comments on Collaborize Classroom-free for the 2010/2011 school year if you sign up before November 15!4171 views

What it is: Collaborize Classroom is an online learning platform developed for classroom discussion and engagement.  Collaborize lets students and teacher collaborate in online discussions. It can be used for meaningful conversations related to classroom curriculum, to ask and answer questions, to collaborate on projects, to vote on ideas/issues, and more.  Teachers can continue valuable discussions, facilitate online learning groups, encourage the sharing of resources, and provide students with space to engage in collaborative learning.  Collaborize is easy to set up and navigate for both teachers and students.  Questions can be posted easily including multiple choices, yes/no, vote or suggest, and forum.  After the questions have been answered, the results of the discussion can be published on a results page.  Collaborize has great teacher features.  Add attachments to any question including photos, videos, and documents.  Send a message to students using the built-in messaging system.  Participation reports track each student’s activity on the site including number of logins, votes, comments, and replies.  Activity reports can be sent to your email daily for review. Set up a watch list to follow a discussion more closely.  Collaborize has fantastic supporting materials including lesson plans, helpful tutorials, and research articles.  If you sign up for Collaborize before November 15, 2010, the product is being offered at no-cost (read FREE) for the 2010-2011 school year!  In partnership with Democrasoft, The Kids in Need Foundation made this free year possible…take advantage of it before the 15th!

How to integrate Collaborize into your curriculum: Collaboraize is an awesome tool to facilitate discussions in (and out of) the classroom.  The format of Collaborize makes it flexible enough to use in any classroom and in a way that works for you.  Use Collaborize to facilitate discussions and literature circles, plan a science lab or experiment to be conducted in class, practice second languages with online dialog, post current events for students to reflect on, work with classrooms around the world to discuss and debate any topic, pose a math word problem and ask students to discuss the different ways the problem could be approached.  Collaborize is a wonderful tool for student discussion and collaboration, but the teacher tools are what make it such a perfect fit for the classroom setting.  It is easy to sign up, get your free year today!

Tips: Collaborize has really helpful resources for teachers.  Learn about the do’s and don’ts of student forums, the art of asking questions, lesson and activity ideas, rethinking your role in the classroom and much more.  Even if you don’t sign up for Collaborize, I recommend spending some time checking out these free documents, they have great tips that can be applied to a variety of web collaboration tools.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Collaborize in your classroom!


Animation Chefs: Kids learn animation

Kelly Tenkely4 Comments on Animation Chefs: Kids learn animation4233 views


What it is: Animation Chefs is a fun website/blog that teaches kids how to create their own animations using stop motion video techniques.  The Animation Chefs teach how to create animations using a “secret” recipe.  To create animations you need two things: a camera and a computer.  Animation Chefs aim to help young producers of stories and animation learn about the latest and greatest ways to get their content created.  The blog will continually be adding tips, tricks, and tutorials for creating online animated videos.

How to integrate Animation Chefs into your curriculum: Animation Chefs is a great place for students (and teachers) to learn the tricks of stop motion animation.  Students can use this site to learn new techniques and get advice for creating their own videos.  My students loved creating their own videos.  Any time I mentioned a video project, the students would ask daily when we would start with it.  Our students have grown up in the video generation and this is one of the languages they want to learn to speak in.  Visit Animation Chefs as a class to learn about stop motion animation, for inspiration, and to learn new tricks.  If you have students that are particularly intrigued by using video to tell a story, this is a great place for them to learn the tricks of the trade.  Often we as teachers shy away from lessons that we aren’t familiar with.  With Animation Chefs, even if you aren’t familiar with creating stop motion animation, you can provide a fun learning experience for your students.  How can your students use stop motion videos for learning?  Students can tell any story, illustrate their learning, explain a difficult concept, reflect on learning, or create videos for younger students/grade levels.  In my computer classroom, I had students take a picture of themselves every single time they logged into the computers during the school year.  We put all of the pictures in a “me” folder on their desktop, labeling each picture with the date.  The last week of school, we created a stop motion video with all of the pictures by putting them into iMovie and setting the picture clip to 1 second.  Students added music that they created in Garageband and a title page.  The end result: each had videos of their school year where they could watch themselves “grow” up.  This works especially well in second through fifth grade where the changes in a years time are marked.

Tips: Animation Chefs has a Twitter page, if your class is on Twitter, they may be a good tweep to follow as a class.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Animation Chefs in your classroom!

Flixtime: Video slideshow creator

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Flixtime: Video slideshow creator4153 views

What it is: Flixtime is an online tool that lets students create 60 second video slideshows.  Slideshows can contain videos, pictures, text and music. The interface of Flixtime is easy to use; it looks a lot like the timelines used in iMovie and would be a great way to introduce students to the idea of video timelines and a separate sound track.   With Flixtime, students can adjust the screen resolution of their video and choose a speed for their slideshow to play.  As I used Flixtime, I couldn’t get over how much like Animoto it is.  If you need an alternative to Animoto, this is your tool!

How to integrate Flixtime into your curriculum: Flixtime is a great tool for telling a story.  Students can use Flixtime to tell a story about their learning, to illustrate a science experiment, to create a video timeline of a historical event, to illustrate vocabulary, to create an auto-bio poem, or to create a custom public service announcement.  Flixtime is an easy way for students to create something new and demonstrate understanding on any topic.  My students have used video slideshows to create math story problems for a buddy to solve, they turn out great and sure beat the dry story problems from math textbooks!  Flixtime videos can be saved on the student Flixtime account, embedded in a class blog/wiki/website, emailed, and even downloaded!

Tips: Flixtime requires an email account for sign up.  The email account doesn’t need to be verified which means that students can sign up with a temporary email account from tempinbox or mailinator.  If you teach elementary students, create a class Flixtime account where students can create and save videos.  This ensures that you know what is being posted and puts the videos all in one place for easy viewing.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Flixtime in your classroom!

Critical Past

Kelly Tenkely14 Comments on Critical Past6802 views

What it is: Critical Past is a website I learned about today from Tom Boito’s great blog EDge 21 in his Catch of the Day.  The resource is too good not to share again here!  Critical Past is a collection of more than 57,000 historical videos and more than 7 million historical photos.  All of the photos and videos are royalty free, archival stock footage.  Most of the footage comes from U.S. Government Agency sources.  All of the videos and photos can be viewed for free online and shared with others via url, Twitter, or Facebook.  The videos and photos are also available to purchase for download.

How to integrate Critical Past into your curriculum: Critical Past is an incredible collection of historical videos and pictures.  The site is easy to search either by decade and topic or keyword.  The clips and photos on Critical Past will bring historical events alive for your students.  Use photos or videos on Critical Past to help illustrate what students are learning in history.  Ask students to be “eyewitnesses” of history and watch a video before they have context for it.  Students can write or blog about what they think they are witnessing, afterward they can research the event more in-depth and write a follow-up reflection on what was actually happening in the clip.

** Check out this awesome lesson that @pharesr created based on this post. So cool!

Tips: Along the right side bar of Critical Past, you will find “related videos.”  Students can watch a clip and the related videos and reflect on how the clips are related.  Sometimes it is a similar time period, sometimes a related event, other times it is a related location.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Critical Past in your classroom!

Sharendipity

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Sharendipity4102 views

What it is: Sharendipity is an excellent online tool that lets you easily create your own learning and educational game.  You can do this by using one of the Sharendipity ready-made templates, or you can create a game from scratch.  There just isn’t always a quality game for students to practice with when you need one.  I know I have found myself wishing that I could find a game focusing on the exact phonic skill or a game that used the vocabulary that we were working on in class.  Often those tailor-made games just don’t exist.  Sharendipity is the answer, making it simple to create your own custom games.  Games are a fun way for students to practice a new skill and they make a great quick center activity on classroom computers.

How to integrate Sharendipity into your curriculum: Create games that are tailored to your students learning needs.  Sharendipity makes it easy enough to create fun games, you can create one in the time it would take you to make copies of worksheets.   Use one of the ready-made templates for the easiest game creation, or if you are feeling brave, start from scratch and make your own.  You can upload all of your own images to Sharendipity making customization really easy.  Consider using pictures of your class, school, or students as the background of a game.  Your students are sure to love seeing familiar faces or landmarks as part of the game.  These games are great for fact practice and recall in math, vocabulary, spelling, phonics, or geography where quick recall of the basics is key.  Sharendipity will walk you through each step of the game making process and when you are finished, you can share the url or embed the game in a class website.  If your students are a little older, they can make their own Sharendipity games to practice with.  Students can create games for their classmates to play as a way to study.  I have students who were constantly creating games and practice activities for my classroom; they got really good at it!  If you are teaching in a computer lab, Sharendipity is a fun way for students to create “original” content for their wiki, blog, or website.  At my school, we buddy up older grade level students with younger grade level students.  It was fun for the older kids to create special games for their buddies after learning about their buddies favorite things.  For example, one student found out that their buddy loved basketball and created a basketball themed spelling activity for them.

If you collaborate with another class or another school, it would be neat to swap customized games with them.

Tips: If you are braving creating your own game, be sure to check out Sherendipity’s learning center for a great guide on how to use the tools.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Sharendipity in your classroom!

Branches of Power

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Branches of Power3549 views


What it is: Looking for another super awesome learning game for your classroom?  Filament Games does it again with Branches of Power.  In it, students can play all three branches of government, all working cooperatively toward the goal of building new laws.  As President, students will choose issues they think are important and rally people around them.  As Legislator, they will create bills around the values of the constituents.  As Justice, they will uphold the law or take out legislation that is unconstitutional.  The only way to navigate the game successfully is to cooperatively construct laws around the issues of the country.  (Our government probably has something to learn about the cooperatively part.) Students will find issues that the citizens care about.  By using the three branches of government, they can grow the issues into laws which appear as towers.  They win if they build all ten issues into towers before time runs out.  Students get the opportunity to play as all three branches, they have to stay on top of it, if they don’t, the branch may start making decisions on its own!

How to integrate Branches of Power into the classroom: Branches of Power is a fantastic interactive game that puts students right in the thick of the government.  I love that the game doesn’t ask students to choose a branch of government to play, but expects them to learn, and play, all three roles.   There is nothing like experience to teach students about the different roles, struggles, and methodologies of each branch of government.  Branches of Power is an excellent game for the computer lab environment where each student has access to a computer and can play individually.  After play, discuss what worked well and what didn’t.  Were students able to complete all 10 towers?  Who got the furthest and what was the strategy that took them to that point?  If you don’t have access to a computer lab, the game can be navigated as a class using a projector-connected computer or an interactive whiteboard.  Discuss strategy during game play and give each student a chance to take part in the game.  This is an outstanding way to learn about the branches of government, what better way to learn than by doing?

Tips: Below the game play screen, check out the Teacher Tools tab.  There are some great teacher files including a Powerpoint presentation that reinforces game concepts and a teacher’s guide to using the game in class.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Branches of Power in your classroom.