Group items tagged

Active Textbook is an interesting service that you can use to turn your PDFs into multimedia documents. The basic idea behind the service is that you can upload PDFs and add pictures, links, and videos that are displayed when students read your PDF through the Active Textbook viewer. While reading your PDF through Active Textbook students can highlight, draw, and add comments to the document. Active Textbook could provide a good way to create your own short multimedia texts for students. The most compelling feature is the option for students to highlight and take notes on the document while they're reading it through Active Textbook. Active Textbook also adds a dictionary tool to your document which could be handy for some students. Active Textbook is free to use for up to 500 pages of material.

a wealth of projects to make and each activity is clearly laid out with step by step reproducible pdf instructions, a concept map exploring needed materials, cultural connections, concepts/phenomenons, big ideals, and real-life examples. Also includes variations on the activity and science websites.

What it is: Physics Central is a fantastic website full of…you guessed it, physics! There are fantastic sections for students to explore science, activity books, experiments and activities. Students can learn more about physics in action (physics as found in the world around us), meet physicists, and learn about physics research. Physics Central will ignite a students curiosity in: sound, electricity and magnetism, force and motion, light and optics, material science, quantum mechanics, space and the universe, and thermodynamics and heat. My favorite find on Physics Central so far (I'm sure there will be many more favorites the longer I explore) is the Nikola Tesla and the Electric Fair section. Here, students will find a downloadable kit that includes a manual, comic book, and four related activities.

Science

Kahoot is a new service for delivering online quizzes and surveys to your students. The premise of Kahoot is similar to that of Socrative and Infuse Learning. On Kahoot you create a quiz or survey that your students respond to through any device that has a web browser (iPad, Android device, Chromebook). Your Kahoot questions can include pictures and videos. As the teacher you can control the pace of the Kahoot quiz or survey by imposing a time limit for each question. As students answer questions they are awarded points for correct answers and the timeliness of their answers. A scoreboard is displayed on the teacher's screen. Students do not need to have a Kahoot account in order to participate in your activities. To participate they simply have to visit Kahoot.it then enter the PIN code that you give to them to join the activity. Using Kahoot, like Socrative and Infuse Learning, could be a good and fun way to conduct review sessions in your classroom. Using Kahoot could also be a good way to gather informal feedback.

All About Explorers is a site that Russel Tarr tipped me off to this morning. The site, developed by Gerald Aungst and Lauren Zucker, was designed to help students develop their skills in identifying valid information found on the Internet. On All About Explorers students find fake biographies of famous explorers. The biographies do contain information that is in part based on facts, the content is intentionally written to be inaccurate. Applications for Education Teachers who want to use All About Explorers to teach their students to be discerning consumers of information should take a look at the All About Explorers lessons and treasure hunts. The treasure hunts are short activities in which students compare information from multiple sources on the web. The lesson plans are a series of five activities designed to introduce students to web research strategies discerning the quality of information found online. My only criticism of the lesson plans is that lesson four perpetuates the myth that .org domains are generally non-profit organizations and that they somehow have more credibility than .com or .net domains. (A quick glance at martinlutherking.org or dhmo.org will dispel those myths).

"The primary goal is to inspire youth to explore their own interests through a series of online activities and related incentive badges. Many of these badges are integrated with content from online education conferences, which highlight a variety of different topics. Smithsonian Quests & BadgesThe second goal is to enhance students' cognitive capabilities by incorporating knowledge and skill-building into the quests. The online conferences and quests are interdisciplinary in nature, offering students the opportunity to choose what they care about most. All quests engage students in exploring a topic of interest either as part of a formal standards-aligned school curriculum or as a student-driven after school activity. An important secondary audience is you, the educator, whose support is vital in connecting with students. To this end, you also will be offered badges that will document their participation in Smithsonian online conferences, online professional development sessions, and the completion of class projects. All quests will be reviewed and badges awarded by a team of Smithsonian experts."

Edheads is an online educational resource that provides free science and math games and activities that promote critical thinking. Choose from Simple Machines, Virtual Knee Surgery or Stem Cell Heart Repair, among others. All activities meet state and national standards.

The noun project has as its aim the creation of a global visual language through symbols and icons. This could be used for all kinds of vocabulary activities in Communication Arts, Foreign languages, ESOL, etc. Not only can teachers and students use the icons for things like flashcards or presentations, they can create new one and upload.

Can*TEEN Career Exploration is an innovative resource to inspire girls to envision themselves in STEM careers through gaming and online activities.

"Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive."

We have devised an interactive curriculum aimed to support teachers of secondary students (approximately ages 13-17). The curriculum helps educate students on topics like: YouTube's policies How to report content on YouTube How to protect their privacy online How to be responsible YouTube community members How to be responsible digital citizens We hope that students and educators gain useful skills and a holistic understanding about responsible digital citizenship, not only on YouTube, but in all online activity.

PAT time activity 6th grade Fridays

Living in the US challenge -- could be a great geography activity in 7th grade next year!

. Silk is a free service for creating webpages organized around a theme or topic. Silk is intended to be a place where you can share collections of materials as well as write text directly into your webpages. Your Silk dashboard provides a place to organize your materials into collections and sub-collections. Your collections can include documents, videos, images, charts and graphs, and links to other sites. Take a look at a sample Silk site here. You can create multiple sites within your free Silk account. Your Silk sites can be public or private. Creating collections on your Silk site can become a collaborative activity by inviting others to be editors or administrators on a site.

Put yourself on the map: Easily make shareable, animated trips with photos, music, links and stories. At its most basic level, Tripline is a way for you to tell a story by putting places on a map. That's a very human activity that has been happening for thousands of years. It's also a way for you to easily answer those questions we hear so often: Where are you guys going? When are you leaving? How was the trip? What did you do? - the kind of questions that photos don't answer. And just like in the movies, the Tripline player gives you an animated line moving across the map with a soundtrack. That's appropriate, because our journeys are our own epic tales of discovery and adventure.

The Blobz Guide to Electric Circuits is a neat series of interactive animations designed to help students of elementary and middle school age learn how electric circuits work. There are five sections to the series. Each sections builds upon the lessons of the previous section. The series starts with the basics of what makes a circuit complete and concludes with diagramming and building circuits. Each section in the series has a few short lessons and is followed by an animated interactive activity to which students can apply what they have just learned.

8th grade science

Use thinglink to create maps that students can remix to respond to questions for a review. Edu version of thinglink allows you to create student accounts and a thinglink channel for easy distribution. You can also share directly to edmodo.

VideoNotes is a neat new tool for taking notes while watching videos. VideoNotes allows you to load any YouTube video on the left side of your screen and on the right side of the screen VideoNotes gives you a notepad to type on. VideoNotes integrates with your Google Drive account. By integrating with Google Drive VideoNotes allows you to share your notes and collaborate on your notes just as you can do with a Google Document.

If only we could actually use YouTube for learning activities!

Teach about the United States Constitution with featured activities. Find primary sources to illustrate representative government, federalism, branches of government, the Bill of Rights, amendments, and more. DocsTeach - An online teaching tool from the National Archives.