Evaluate – Page 15 – iLearn Technology

Mr. Thorne Does Phonics

January 17, 2011Kelly Tenkely4 Comments13488 views

What it is: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics is a website and YouTube channel dedicated to teaching kids phonics through videos. The site has a great tag line, “Where learning to read becomes reading to learn.” The videos are divided up by categories which include:

Introduction to Phonics
Geraldine the Giraffe Videos
Alphabet Letters and Sounds
More Alphabet Letters and Sounds
Consonant Digraphs
Long Vowel Sounds
Consonant Blends
Alternative Sounds
Alternative Spellings
200 High Frequency Words
Grammar

Christopher Thorne hosts all of the phonics videos with occasional guest appearances from his friend Geraldine the Giraffe (who has her own book!). The videos are engaging, help students listen for phoneme segmentation, and give them encouragement to replicate the phoneme sounds themselves. This library of phonics videos is wonderfully comprehensive!

How to integrate Mr. Thorne Does Phonics into the classroom: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics is a fantastic introduction to phonics, phonemes, and decoding words. Students can practice word recognition, pronunciation, and phonics rules with fun videos that can be played, paused, and rewound. The Mr. Thorne Does Phonics site would be a wonderful site to have available for students on classroom computers as a reading center. Students can visit the reading center and pull up the video of the exact phonics skill that they need to practice. Mr. Thorne Does Phonics would also be a wonderful way to introduce your whole class to a new phonics skill by playing the videos for them using a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard.

If you have access to a built-in webcam or portable video camera, encourage students to create their own Mr. Thorne inspired phonics videos. These can be shared with other students in the class, parents, and younger grade levels. The videos also make a great record of progress throughout the school year.

Tips: You can also find Mr. Thorne’s phonics videos on YouTube. Can’t access YouTube at school? Download the videos for offline viewing using a tool like Kick YouTube or Keepvid.

Fold it: Solve Problems for Science and Change the World

January 14, 2011Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3234 views

What it is: Fold it is a puzzle game based on science that helps change the world. Download the Fold It game and puzzles for free and contribute to the understanding of protein folding and amino acids. By playing this game, students take part in actually contributing to science. The implications of the Fold It game are huge, playing this game helps scientists better understand protein structure prediction and protein design. This means that by playing a little puzzle game, your students are contributing to better understanding of the role proteins play in diseases such as HIV, cancer, and Alzheimers, and even bio fuel technology. Scientists collect data from the game to find out if humans pattern recognition abilities and puzzle solving abilities make them more efficient than computers at pattern folding tasks. If it turns out that humans are more efficient, human strategies can be applied to computers to make the process even faster.

How to integrate Fold It into the classroom: If your students are currently learning about cells, proteins, amino acid, and biological make up, Fold It is an incredible way for them to really understand all of these working parts, while contributing to science. The puzzle and pattern nature of this game should appeal to a wide range of students…who doesn’t enjoy a good exercise in pattern recognition and problem solving? On the about page, your students can read the background “briefing” about the game and the science that they are contributing to by playing the game. There is also a Fold It wiki with great links for more in-depth learning and understanding. Not only will your students be learning important science concepts (I’m talking the building blocks of life here!), they will also be actually contributing to science by playing. How cool is that?! There is a large collection of puzzles with new puzzles being released and completed puzzles expiring. Don’t know anything about biology? No problem, you can play the game without understanding the biology concepts behind it (although for me, knowing the background of what I am looking at makes it that much cooler!). Check out the blog where you can read the results of how the game play has affected real science.

Tips: The idea of building games to impact the real world is incredible to me, the first time I had considered this was when I watched this TED talk by Jane McGonigal. If you haven’t seen it yet it is worth a watch! You can read my original post about this TED talk here.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Fold It in your classroom.

Google Science Fair: Registration open!

January 12, 2011January 12, 2011Kelly Tenkely1 Comment2526 views

What it is: About a month ago I wrote a post about Google Science Fair… great news! Registration is now open 🙂 Google has partnered with NASA, CERN, National Geographic, Scientific American, and LEGO group to create a new global competition. Students ages 13 to 18 can take part in the competition and compete for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences, internships and scholarships. Submissions will be accepted between January 11 and April 4, 2011.

From the Google Science Fair website:

Why Google Science Fair?

Digital — Students are immersed in a digital world and can be thought of as digital natives. Why not have them investigate, evaluate, analyze, synthesize, and publish their results using an electronic medium that is relevant for them? It is a cost–saving and greener alternative.

Global — This program’s reach goes far beyond that of any school site, district, region, or even state. Be among the schools around the world that will be sharing students’ findings with each other.

Collaborative — Google tools are all made to be collaborative whether students (and teachers) are in the same classroom or across the Atlantic. Students have the ability to work together anywhere, anytime to investigate a topic or question of interest.

How to integrate Google Science Fair into your curriculum: Google Science Fair is a fantastic opportunity for your students to connect with others globally and work on some scientific inquiry at the same time. Check out the website for full details about the competition and ways that you can integrate it into your classroom.

Tips: Sign up today to receive the Science Fair kit and get your students entered into the competition!

Tag Galaxy: Visual Word Relationships

January 4, 2011Kelly Tenkely9 Comments5184 views

What it is: Tag Galaxy is a neat little tool that helps students to explore relationships between words and ideas as well as view pictures related to that word. Type in a word to search and immediately you are transferred to a galaxy with the original word at the center and the associated ideas orbiting around it. When you click on the word in the center, a globe populates with pictures from Flickr that are tagged with that word. Click on one of the orbiting words and tags related to that word start to orbit. Tag Galaxy is a very neat way to view information!

How to integrate Tag Galaxy into the classroom: Tag Galaxy is a brilliant way to visually explore word relationships. Students can use it to type in spelling or vocabulary words and discuss the relationship the related tags have to the original word. Students can click on the original idea to get a visual understanding of the word in the form of a picture globe. The connection with Flickr helps students to visualize words, ideas, and concepts by providing a variety of pictures that match the tag. Tag Galaxy would make for a fun story starter. Students can type in a word tag to get them started, view related words, and then click on the globe of pictures to spark creative writing ideas. Tag Galaxy can be set up on classroom computers as a creative writing centers, or used for whole class inspiration with a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard.

Check out science, math, art, or geography vocabulary on Tag Galaxy, the resulting collection of images will help your students attach meaning to those tricky science concepts like my photosynthesis example above.

As a side note, Tag Galaxy also offers a pretty good visual aid for learning about orbit 🙂

Tips: ***Very important*** Whenever you are using tools that pull from other sites to populate, it is important to test out the words prior to using with students. You never know how people will tag an image and the image might not be appropriate for all age groups. When using Tag Galaxy with elementary students, have them suggest words that you test before using with the class. In my classroom, whenever students wanted to do an image search, I had them fill out an “image wish list” first. On the wish list students write down words they would like to search. I would do a quick test of the words and sign off on them. This worked well as there were a lot of similar requests (i.e. animals!) 🙂

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Tag Galaxy in your classroom.

Rock Our World: Using music to collaborate and change the world

January 3, 2011Kelly Tenkely7 Comments3289 views

What it is: Rock Our World has one goal, to give students authentic global collaboration opportunities by connecting them with music. Rock Our World has been doing just that since 2004. Students and teachers collaborate in composing original music, making movies, and meeting each other in live video chats. Using GarageBand (Apple), each country creates a 30 second drum beat. Every Friday, the drum created rotates to another country, where the bass guitar is added. It gets passed from country to country with another instrument added at each stop. When it gets back to the original country, it is an original piece of music that has been created with the help of kids around the world.

While the music is being passed from country to country, students have opportunities to meet and discuss various topics of curriculum in live video chats. Incredible companies have been involved in this project including Apple, Fablevision, Discovery, American Film Institute, Smart Technologies, NASA, Visual Learning Company, Lintor Publishing, Mariner Software, actor Will Smith and more. Pretty impressive!

Applications for Rock Our World will be accepted for pre-kindergarten through university in January. You can sign up for membership by providing your email address to be alerted to the exact date you can begin applying.

How to integrate Rock Our World into the classroom: This is an incredible opportunity for your students to work and collaborate with other students around the world. Not only will your students be learning and interacting with new cultures, they will also be learning more about music. Your students will be a part of creating a unique song by adding their piece to it. At the end, each country will have a song touched by students around the world. How cool is that?!

It would be really neat at the end of the project to create an iMovie of the final song that includes the globe animation zooming into each country as their bit of the song is played and including a slideshow of students from each country.

Tips: Take a look at previous projects by clicking on the “Media” tab.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Rock Our World in your classroom.

Corkboard: Classroom Collaboration

December 30, 2010Kelly Tenkely19 Comments5559 views

What it is: Corkboard is a neat little collaboration tool that I learned about on Twitter yesterday thanks to @Grade1. Corkboard reminds me a lot of Wallwisher (which has been a little unreliable lately). Best of all, it is literally a one step set up process. Just type in the web address: http://corboard.me and it automatically creates a unique url for your corkboard. Click to add a sticky note on the corkboard. Give students or other teachers the unique url so that they can add a sticky note. Easy! Sticky notes can be as big or small as you like. Click and hold down on a sticky note to move it around the corkboard.

How to integrate Corkboard into the classroom: Corkboard provides an easy to use platform for students to brainstorm, collaborate, and share ideas. Students can use Corkboard to brainstorm ideas for writing, research, and collaborating on group projects. Ask students to add their thoughts to any conversation on history, literature, science, phonics, or vocabulary corkboard. Students could practice spelling by typing out their spelling words along with a sentence or synonyms on sticky notes. Students can share a board to discuss a book they are reading together, predictions for a class science experiment, and to share what they are learning in any subject or lecture. You could create a new corkboard each week where you post homework, resources, to-do items, etc. for your students. Students can add sticky notes to the board about what they are learning throughout the week. These Corkboards can be added to a Weblist.me so that there is a record of the whole year.

Tips: Looking for other alternatives to Wallwisher? Check out: Edistorm or Stixy. Each has a little different features!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Corkboard in your classroom.

Organize yourself for 2011 with the Action Method

December 28, 2010Kelly Tenkely5 Comments2539 views

What it is: You know what I love about a new year? The blank slate. The empty calendar begging to be written on. The chance to take a step back and evaluate how you are working. I am an organizer at heart. I love having everything in its place. I love label makers, file folders, planners, calendars, and software that makes my life easier. For Christmas my little brother (always have to have the little in there to remind him of his place in life 🙂 ) gifted me with the book “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky. I am about a third of the way through it and already loving it. What my brother knows about me (I think it runs in our gene pool) is that I am a creative person. I am never at a loss for ideas. They flow constantly. The problem: I think every single idea is genius. I want every single idea to come to fruition because surely no one has every come up with something so brilliant before. Even for an organizational nut like me, this is an impossible task. And if I’m totally honest, my organizational skills leave much to be desired when it comes to putting my ideas in their place. Ideas are wonderful things, they make the world go round…but they are only useful as far as they are enacted. When the flow of ideas is constant, many truly brilliant ideas get pushed aside while another round of ideas rolls in. This post isn’t really about the book. While it is a good book, it isn’t really inspirational. It is life changing in what you do with the principles it reveals. Blesky details his Action Method in the book. I immediately loved this method because it works the way I think. It puts everything in its place and gives you a place to organize actionable items (things you can actually work towards completion right now), reference items (all those bits of notes and websites, and pdfs, and pictures I have EVERYWHERE…seriously my husband says I have a problem), and backburners- those ideas that aren’t really actionable yet but could be some day. This keeps those brilliant ideas at the forefront and getting taken care of while the flow of ideas has a place (backburner) so that nothing is lost. Sweet! My next question was: where can I “do” the action method so that I can and will keep up with it? Problem solved, introducing the Action Method online. You can put all of those principles to use in one beautiful interface. Even better…you can access it on your mobile device too. We all know that is a must in this day and age! The online Action Method has a free version which lets you do just about everything…for some extra shiny bits you can sign up for the pro plan. The mobile version is a free download. (There is even a paper version for those of you who like to go old school…normally I am in this organizational camp but like I said, the website is right up my alley.) What is better than starting off the new year organized and with money in the bank?

Here is the Action Method as described on the website:

ACTION STEPS are tasks that need to be completed. Each Action Step should start with a verb: “Call Y,” “Follow up with X,” “Buy a gift for Z.”

REFERENCES are notes, links, files, sketches – any information related to a project that gives context to your Action Steps.

BACKBURNERS are the brilliant ideas that you want to come back to later, but are not yet actionable.

DISCUSSIONS enable you to manage ongoing conversations across all of your projects with anyone that works with you. All relevant communications (shared documents, solutions to problems, feedback, decisions) are in one place.

EVENTS are the key occasions/meetings/milestones/etc toward which you (and your team) are working. Events can be used to coordinate deadlines for Action Steps, aiding project management.

Pretty cool right?! I really like how the Action Method lets you track discussions and delegate tasks easily. Very handy! Need more convincing? Companies like Apple use the Action Method…you know something is working for them! I don’t know about you, but the thought of having everything organized in one place is giving me some major warm fuzzies right now!

How to integrate the Action Method into your curriculum: The Action Method website and app can be used to organize your school life. I constantly have ideas for new lesson plans, projects, websites, etc. that I want to use with students. These can be easily organized with the Action Method. Create a new Project for each unit or educational focus. Action items can be the individual lessons and resources that you are going to complete for that unit. Add any resources you need in the references section. Saw a cool idea on Twitter that you want to use in your classroom but aren’t sure how it will work just yet? Add it to your backburner so you can go back and review it later. The Action Method could very well be the only planner you need! Create discussions with teammates and colleagues (or Twitter colleagues) directly in the program. Delegate tasks to others on your team or even parent volunteers.

The Action Method could be used to help middle school or high school students better organize their lives and learning. It would be especially useful for students who help chart their own learning plans. The site does require an email address (with confirmation) to sign up.

Tips: You can learn more about the Action Method in the book Making Ideas Happen.

Happy organizing!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using the Action Method in Your classroom.

Google Science Fair

December 15, 2010Kelly Tenkely3 Comments2376 views

What it is: On January 11, 2011 Google will be launching Google Science Fair. Google has partnered with NASA, CERN, National Geographic, Scientific American, and LEGO group to create a new global competition. There isn’t much information about the logistics of the science fair just yet, but right now you can sign up for fun and free resource kits for your classroom or school and a reminder notification when the Google Science Fair registration opens. The kit comes with bookmarks, stickers, posters, and more.

How to integrate Google Science Fair into your curriculum: Even though there aren’t many details about what the Google Science Fair will look like yet, rest assured with the partners involved it is sure to be an incredible learning experience. This is a global competition and should have ample opportunity for your students to connect with and learn from others around the world.

Tips: Sign up today to receive the Science Fair kit and receive a reminder when registration is open.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Google Science Fair your classroom!

Figment: Writing community for students

December 8, 2010December 9, 2010Kelly Tenkely4 Comments6285 views

What it is: Figment is a brand new website and writing community for students 13 years old and older (middle or high school only!). This is a place where students can read student writing, share their own writing, connect with other student writers, and discover new stories and authors. Students will find a community of writers and readers who like to share collaborate, and discuss a variety of topics in the online forum.

How to integrate Figment into your curriculum: Do you have students who can’t get enough creative writing time? Figment is a perfect match. Students who love to write can join a community of other students who enjoy to write. This is a great place for them to share their writing, read other students writing and learn how to give, and accept, critiques and recommendations on their writing. This is a great place for students to analyze and evaluate each other’s writing. Have a class of creative writers? Send all of your students to Figment to share their writing with other students. Your students can learn and practice providing constructive criticism and netiquette in Figment. Working with another class from another school, district, state or country? Send both sets of students on Figment as a platform for sharing and discussing their writing.

*There is no teacher portal for Figment, if your students are using Figment in school, be sure to sign up for an account and monitor your students use of Figment.

Tips: The sign up requires an email address, twitter account, or Facebook account. Make sure your students have one of the three before using Figment in class.

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

Project Global Inform

December 3, 2010Kelly Tenkely11 Comments3542 views

What it is: Project Global Inform is an incredible movement bringing together education and a mission to do something about human rights. Project Global Inform “is an in-school project where students use media to spread awareness about human rights violations. PGI came out of the idea that we too often “teach” our students about genocide and human rights violations, but never “do” anything about it. This project’s main objective is to create awareness about current human rights violations in our schools, communities, and abroad. Through the use of media and technology students have the power to make a difference.” This is education and learning at it’s finest, it is a call to action and an invitation for students to do something important. The project is made up of eight steps. First, students learn about human rights issues through media and literature. Next students form groups based on the humans rights issue they are passionate about. Each group learns about the history of the human rights issue they chose including the current political stance, media, etc. Students come up with an action plan for creating awareness. Students use the action plan as the base for their project where they will choose a media outlet to spread awareness about the issue. At the end of the campaign, students will collect data on the effectiveness of the campaign (based on website hits, video views, “likes” on Facebook, etc.). Each team writes up a report detailing and reflecting on the project, success, and failures. Each student creates a video or slideshow (a kind of documentary) of their project. This is an opportunity for your students to learn about humans rights issues and to get involved in an authentic way that has the potential to directly impact those suffering from human rights issues.

How to integrate Project Global Inform into your curriculum: Project Global Inform is an incredible resource and movement that get students involved in impacting their world in real and meaningful ways. As a result of this project, your students will be more informed about humans rights issues, have a better understanding of social networking and how to virally spread a message, how to use media as a communication tool, how to track web 2.0 data and statistics, collaboration, and reflection. This would make a great project for an ethics class, but could be used as a transdiciplinary project including literature, math, and technology (to name a few). Project Global Inform literally meets every single level of Blooms Taxonomy from knowledge and understanding to creating, apply, analyzing, and evaluating.

While the project appears to be focused on the middle school or high school age group, I think that it could be tailored to the elementary classroom. For example, I had my students use Free Rice as the basis for a similar project. They learned about hunger, created a video slideshow that we uploaded to YouTube and played on Free Rice to earn grains of rice. If using Project Global Inform with younger students, choose a humans rights issue to study as a class. Make sure the information you gather is age appropriate. Students can create posters or pictures for a local coffee shop, create slideshow videos that they upload to YouTube, or hold an information day for the local community. These are they type of projects that will make an impact on your students and the world.

If you decide to take part in Project Global Inform, make sure you let your local news organizations know about it. They love covering stories of children impacting the world and it helps spread the message. Here is our Free Rice story in the local paper. I can’t tell you how this project transformed these two boys featured in the article. They became “celebrities” in the school and were so proud of their hard work. Two average students became two of my top students after this project. Give your students something important and meaningful to do, it makes a huge impact on them.

Tips: Even if you don’t have time for the full project, make sure to take the “Plus Two Pledge”. As your students are learning about human rights violations have them sign the pledge to tell at least two people about what they have learned. I told my two…hopefully more are reading this…who are you going to tell?

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Project Global Inform in your classroom!