Tag: History

Animoto for Education

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Animoto for Education4895 views


What it is: There are some really neat online tools that I find that live in my Google Notebook for a long time (I have upward of 800 links for educational websites yet to post to iLearn Technology…and growing daily!) Some get pushed aside for my newest cool find, and some move to the bottom of the list because, while they may have educational value, they are not intended JUST for education and may have some questionable user created content that I wouldn’t want my students to stumble on. Animoto was one of these sites for me. It is an amazing and COOL tool but wasn’t necessarily geared just toward education. I got a fun email today that Animoto now has an education only site! Animoto for education is a site where students can create compelling and impressive digital content quickly and easily. It is the perfect addition to your classroom’s digital storytelling kit. It is very intuative and easy to use, in no time students have digital videos that they created! This is also an amazing place for you, the teacher, to create a video that will bring your lessons to life. You can post or embed videos on your class site or even, are you ready for this?, download for in class presentations. Animoto for Education makes it simple to mix audio and visual for a dynamic, unique presentation in no time. It is so easy to use that students could create a complete animoto presentation in one computer class.

How to integrate Animoto for Education into the classroom: Animoto for education is a great place for you to teach from. Make any lesson come to life with audio and visual, use at the beginning of the day as a ‘teaser’ for what your students can look forward to learning each day or use to teach complex concepts in history, math, science, or character education. Students will respond to new media in the classroom. Allow your students to display knowledge of a concept using Animoto. Use Animoto for Education for a beginning of the year get to know you activity. Students can each create an Animoto showcasing who they are through pictures and music. Animoto presentations are quicker to create than traditional PowerPoint type presentations making them ideal for digital storytelling in the classroom setting. Because Animoto is completely web-based, students can create videos from school and continue working on them at home. The ability to download videos is outstanding…students could save their work for offline viewing too!

Tips: Children under 13 can’t sign up for their own account. To use Animoto for Education with your students you can register your students with dummy accounts using dummy email addresses. Animoto is private to your school. This means that other people can’t come accross student videos or contact students through the site.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Animoto for Education in your classroom.

Capzles

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Capzles2610 views


What it is: Capzles is another interactive timeline maker. I really love all the little extras that Capzles has! With Capzles teachers and students can add photos, videos, audio, and text to their timeline. Themes, colors, backgrounds, and background music can be added to the timeline making it unique and personalized. Capzles also provides options when sharing your Capzle, it can be private with a specific list of who can view the Capzle or made public for the world to see.

How to integrate Capzles into the classroom: Obviously Capzles is a great way for students to create timelines about any subject. The web 2.0 collaborative aspect of Capzles makes it very appealing to students. I think Capzles could also be very valuable in the primary classroom. Students probably won’t be creating their own timelines in Capzles at this age, parent helpers paired with students to create simple timelines would be appropriate. Becasue Capzles has the capability of adding audio, photos, and text, it would be the perfect place to record students reading throughout the year. As you assess student reading through reading records, record the students using a program such as Gabcast, Gcast, Audacity, or Garageband. Take a digital picture of the student reading. Througout the year, you can make a Capzle for each student. This is an excellent motivator for students, especially your struggling readers. Students can see their growth throughout the year in pictures, and hear their reading progress made throughout the year. You can share the Capzle with parents (they will go crazy for this keepsake!) and with the students future teacher. How much would you love getting a timeline of your students from the previous year? You would have a jump start on their struggles and strengths in reading as you quickly flip through their timelines. Cool huh?!

Tips: When assigning students to create a timeline, direct them to concentrate on the “meat” of the timeline first. Then they can go back and design their timeline with themes, colors, and backgrounds. If you don’t specify they will spend all of their time tweaking the look and run out of time to add the content.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Capzles in your classroom.

Library of Congress on Flickr

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What it is: The Library of Congress has a photostream on Flickr. If you aren’t familiar with Flickr, it is an online storage/community for photos. Anyone can obtain a Flickr account and now it appears that The Library of Congress has joined the Flickr community and will be sharing some of their most popular images.

How to integrate the Library of Congress on Flickr into the classroom: You can’t get more convient that Flickr for images, and now that the Library of Congress has a photostream, you can get quality historical images to share with your class. These are really incredible photographs that will bring history to life for your students. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and after seeing this photostream, I believe it! As an added bonus, many of the photographs have no copyright restrictions which means that it is a great place for your students to find images for projects that they are working on. The uncopyrighted photos are also wonderful for you to use in your classrooms in presentations, and as printouts for bulletin boards.

Tips: Here are some fun facts about the Library of Congress: They serve as the national library for the United States, they are based in Washington DC, they have more than 134 million items preserved on 530 miles of bookshelves, they are the world’s largest library, they hold books, photos, maps, databases, movies, sound recordings, sheet music, manuscripts, etc., they have been collecting photos since the mid 1800’s.

Leave a comment and share how you are using the Library of Congress photostream on Flickr in your classroom.

Kids in the House

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What it is: Kids in the House is a great website for kids to learn about Congress, how laws are made, about the Clerk, and the history of the House of Representatives. This interactive site includes great links, definitions, explanations, and games. It also features a section called “Tools for Learning” where teachers can find educational resources and a lesson plan library.

How to integrate Kids in the House to the classroom: Take a break from the text book for this one. Kids in the House will help your students understand how Congress works, how laws are made, and the ins and outs of the House of Representatives. This is a good one to use before our election in November. Kids in the House uses kid-friendly language and cartoons that will really help your kids understand what can be a difficult subject to get a handle on. Use the site over several days as a sort of webquest. The Time Traveler section will teach them about the history of the House of Representatives, then take a virtual field trip of the Capitol Complex, the House Chamber, and the National Statuary Hall Collection, finish up the mini unit with games that reinforce what students have learned on Kids in the House. As a side note, this is way better than the way I learned (or didn’t) about the House of Representatives! This site could be used by the whole class in a lab setting or set up as a learning center in the one or two computer classroom.

Tips: The glossary on Kids in the House is a great one, as students are exploring the site, the glossary changes based on the key terms of the page. Students can look up words as they are working.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Kids in the House in your classroom.

Dipity

Kelly Tenkely5 Comments on Dipity3412 views


What it is: Dipity is a site that makes it simple for your students to create and share interactive timelines about any subject or topic. It allows students to embed You Tube videos, Twitter, RSS feeds, Blogger, flickr, Picasa, Last FM, and more right into their timelines. Dipity makes timelines relevant and fun for students and best of all, students are creating timelines in “their language” of Digital Native. You have to check this one out…look at a sample timeline to see how truly superior these timelines are to the traditional paper/pencil timeline! Okay seriously, have you ever seen something so cool?!

How to integrate Dipity into the classroom: Dipity is the perfect tool for creating a timeline for any subject in your classroom. Students can bring history to life by embedding relevant You Tube video into their timelines. Create a timeline of your day by combining Dipity with your classroom tweets from Twitter. Timelines can be created by students individually or as a class and posted on a class website as a study resource. Dipity makes your classroom interactive and engaging for students. This is where real learning takes place! To introduce Dipity to your students, invite them to create a timeline of their day or their lives using Dipity (if they have a family Flickr account they can embed pictures right into their timeline).

Tips: Students can look at the content they add to Dipity in four different views: Timeline, List View, Flipboook, and Map View (this only works if the timeline has been tagged with locations.)

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

Time Tube

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Time Tube2524 views

What it is: Time Tube is an awesome website for our You Tube addicted students. It is essentially a cross between a time line and You Tube. Students can type in a historical (or any) event and Time Tube will create a time line of related videos (the time line is based on when the video was added not on historical relevance). You have to see it to truly appreciate the cool factor of this tool. Your technology native students will “get” this site right away.

How to integrate Time Tube into the classroom: Use Time Tube in your classroom to introduce students to time lines, history subjects, current events, etc. Your students will appreciate the break from the traditional textbook time lines and learn more in the process. Before using Time Tube with your classroom, preview the topic to verify its school appropriateness (actually you should always do that!) This would also be a good place to teach students to question the reliability of the resources they are using and to check their “facts”.

Tips: Time Tube is related to a site called Dipity which I will be reviewing tomorrow…very neat!

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

Read the Words

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Read the Words2355 views


What it is: Read the Words is a free website that offers an audio player that will read anything you want. The Reader on the audio player can be listened to online, downloaded to a mp3 player, broadcasted as a podcast, or posted on a website or blog. The first step to creating your reader is selecting what you want read, this can be uploaded from a PDF, MS Word, HTML file, or input manually, cut and pasted, through RSS or URL. Step 2 is selecting a reader for your purposes, there are 14 readers to choose from. The readers speak English, Spanish, and French. Each reader has unique voices and some have accents. You can control the reader’s speed and pitch. Best of all it takes approximately one minute to generate an hour long recording.

How to integrate Read the Words into the classroom: Read the Words would be an excellent way to guide a webquest for students, create a reader to steer students through each activity in the webquest. If you have mp3 players available for checkout, create a reader for guided reading. These can be used in class during silent reading time or checked out for home use so that the student learning day can be extended. The readers would be excellent for history or science reading where vocabulary can be challenging. Read the Words is perfect for your auditory learners and because you can have text that is already in your lesson read, the differentiation for these students is short and sweet. Read the Words would also be great for English language learners or for English speakers learning Spanish or French.

Tips:
Take some time initially to listen to each of the readers. Choose the one that is easiest for your students to understand and best fits your purposes.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Read the Words in your classroom.

Novel Games-Flash

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Novel Games-Flash2631 views

What it is: Novel Games provides free Flash games that can be embedded on any website. There is a long list of games that you can embed from World capitals game, typing games, to Sudoku and other great math games. Search the list of games, you are sure to find many that fit your needs. Because you can embed the games on your website, students can easily access the games from school and home.

How to integrate Novel Games into your curriculum: There is such a variety of high quality, FUN, educational games that integrating them into your curriculum will be varied as well. An example of how I am using the Novel Games in my classroom can be found at www.typing.weebly.com. My students are learning how to keyboard. Because I don’t want to spend my year teaching only keyboarding I offered my students a challenge. Practice typing at home and come participate in a Typing Olympics (where only touch typing is allowed) and you won’t have to spend your computer time learning to touch type. I am at a private school so the best prize that can be offered is a break dress code day. The fastest touch typer’s in each class will get to break dress code on a day when no one else does. Students can practice typing using these practice games I have provided. The games are perfect as part of the Typing Olympics because they give a final score…easy to tell who the winners are! Most of the games are perfect for practicing a skill and will inevitability get kids doing homework voluntarily because they are so much fun to play.

Tips: Don’t have your own website to embed the flash games? Create a free one today using a site like www.weebly.com. To embed a player simply highlight and copy the code from Novel games and paste in an HTML editor in a site like Weebly. Make sure that your students have the latest Flash player installed or the games won’t work properly.

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

CurrClick

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on CurrClick2696 views

What it is: CurrClick is a website that contains thousands of instantly downloadable education resources from some amazing publishers. CurrClick provides educators with access to full previews, a place to create wish lists, instant delivery, great customer service, prices that are about 30% below retail and very best of all…a new FREE book each week with no strings attached. I really did just say a FREE new book every week! Does it get any better than that?! I am so excited about this find, so worth exploring!

How to integrate CurrClick into your curriculum: The free books each week will help to keep your classroom library fresh and current for your students. But CurrClick also has really great curriculum resources like the Connect the Thoughts Spelling program (one of the freebies). It also has great audio books that can be loaded onto your class iPod reading buddies (if you are so lucky!) or just downloaded to iTunes for a computer reading/listening center. I downloaded the free Little is Big audio book about a fish who teaches students character education values. The book is so cute! CurrClick makes it simple to find what you are looking for by subject, age, publisher, or price.

Tips: To find all of the free titles available sort by price and then click on the Free option. Create a wish list at the beginning of the year and send to parents…they can fulfill you wish list whenever they are looking for a gift to give you.

Another huge thank you to my friend Jill from www.theapple.com for telling me about CurrClick!

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

Picturing America

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Picturing America2945 views

What it is: Picturing America takes hold of the notion that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and applies it to teaching American history. The National Endowment for the Humanities is providing American art masterpieces into classrooms and libraries. The idea behind Picturing America is that bringing our nation’s artistic heritage into the classroom gives students unique insights into the character, ideals, and aspirations of our country. The Picturing America program is completely free for schools and libraries and provides them with 40 high-quality masterpieces, a teacher resources book, and the program website.

How to integrate Picturing America into your curriculum: What better way to teach your students American history than actually bringing history into the classroom and providing students with real ties to the past? I wish that I had the opportunity to learn history this way! Picturing America is going to bring authentic conversation into your classroom about American history. It would be the perfect use of web 2.0 collaborative tools where students can discuss the history and the art in Picturing America. Picturing America masterpieces would also be easily integrated into the art classroom or in literacy as writing inspiration. The teacher resource book is going to provide you with wonderful tie ins to your current curriculum. This is an amazing program, I encourage you to take part in it!

Tips: Apply for the Picturing America program today.

A big thank you to my friend Jill who shared this site with me!

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