BV Middle School LMS

Advocay for school librarians

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

This would be good to share with 6th gr when we do our LIke Try Why project next year

To use the service, you first must create an account. Users will then upload their slides and arrange them to build a story. These slides will need to be images. For each slide users need to type some text to explain what is in the slide. From there, in 20+ different languages and 70+ different voices, the service will convert the text into a voice over speech. The images and audio are turned into a video and automatically published to YouTube, or can downloaded for personal use.

What it is: Inklewriter is a great digital tool that lets students (and teachers if you are so inclined) write and publish interactive stories. Inklewriter lets students create choose-your-own-adventure type stories, story lines can come with choices and then be linked back together. Inklewriter makes this process easier by keeping track of which story paths have been finished and which still need work. There is no set-up required, no programming language to learn and no diagrams. Inklewriter is free to use and easy to share with the world when it is published. When a story is finished, it can even be converted to Kindle format!

How to integrate Inklewriter into the classroom: Inklewriter is a great digital tool for creative writing. Students can explore multiple plot lines and what-if scenarios in their fictional writing. I also like the idea of using Inklewriter to ask kids to explore the "what-ifs" in history. What if we lost/won this war/battle? What if the other guy (or girl) had been elected president? What if the Berlin wall hadn't come down? These types of stories are fantastic opportunities for students to explore their curiosities and, in the process, learn more about the event they are exploring. After all, you have to know something about how an event actually went in order to write alternate endings. Inklewriter would be a fun way for students to come up with alternate endings to a novel they are reading. Our students wrote a variety of endings for The Giver. Each student wrote a different ending that picked up from the last chapter of the book. Inklewriter would have been a great tool to use for all of these endings to be available in one place. Students could copy/paste the last paragraph of the actual book and then offer their alternative endings as options. In science, students could use Inklewriter as a tool to record their hypothesis. Students can write out the objective and steps in their experiment and make a new "alternate ending" for their various hypothesis. In math, students could create story problems where they lead others down the path to discover the correct answer.

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

Popcorn Maker is an online video mashup tool that makes it easy to integrate several different forms of online media into a video. A clip from YouTube can be enhanced with article clips, images, text, audio, maps, other live feeds and social media content. Add some "bling" to any video clip…interactive is better! Videos can be mashed without logging in. Creating a user profile let's you save and share the finished project.

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.

Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories, presentations, reports, or tutorials you and your students make to share, read, and print. Storybird is a fun, collaborative website that can be integrated in all content areas and at all grade levels. For Resources see: http://clifmims.com/site/resources-from-storybird-hands-on-workshop-at-msmeca13/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+clifsnotes+%28Clif%27s+Notes%29

Revised Bloom's Taxonomy adapted from "A Taxonomy for Learning,Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" by Anderson and Krathwohl samples of how to construct learning targets

Life Feast written by Ana Marie Menezes is an excellent blog for teachers interested in using technology in elementary and middle school ELL/EFL lessons. Check out this post about using VOKI with EFL students for a sense of what you'll get by following Life Feast.