Heads in the Cloud

Intended to show how poverty is an obstacle to education, Ayiti is a simulation game set in Haiti. They player makes choices for a family of 5 regarding their work, schooling, and health. Of course, this process is more difficult than it should be - with disasters, disease, and lack of education plaguing every season. Upper elementary students would probably have the best experience with this game, but middle schoolers and up will probably be impressed because this life really isn't easy.

Interactive exhibit about the ratification of the Constitution. Set up as a series of interactive timelines. Lesson plans available.

How to cite a web page, an online image, a database, e-mail or blogs PurdueOWL clearly and succinctly guides you and your students through referencing all your tech resources accurately.

Easy websites for your classroom or your students!

The interactive map is the best content on the site. Being president for a day is a fun activity - using facts from throughout Presidential history. Teachers may like the activities suggested for more learning activities in the classroom. Writing style is best suited for the 4th to 6th grades.

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. They're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

Fun way to engage your audience. Requires texting, so school policies will dictate whether you can use this with students in the classroom. You could also try using it outside of the classroom. Live poll results can be featured within your PowerPoint, which is very engaging. Adults also enjoy this so using it at parent nights can be a clever way to show your teachers/admin understand technology while making sure they are keeping their focus on you and not checking their Facebook pages on their phones. Faculty might also like to see the possibilities of this tool. It is free within certain parameters. I have the paid version only because I needed it for a particularly large group - if you choose this option, be aware that the next year's charge is automatically placed on your cc after one year.

Great site to make pictures with words. Students can run passages or speeches through Wordle to come find the main points. This could extend from entering in a sonnet to inputing a student's own diet record. Design elements make this fun to play with. Could be used with technology lesson to review the role of tag clouds on the internet or look at visual representations of information (eg. surveys).

Use stock photos, video, and music or upload your own. Your images are coordinated with music to make a video that is great to insert in everything from websites to presentations. I used one as preview for a play to show all the behind-the-scenes work the students did. Free videos up to 30 seconds - or pay to have full length videos. Students can use Animoto to create their own videos- great for music class - but can be an interesting tool for anything from vocabulary to science. The one below is actually a mock-up I made showing waht a vocabulary exercise might look like.

Communicate with professionals or other classrooms - see each other in real time. The new education side of Skype (http://education.skype.com/) includes a directory for teachers to connect. Excellent possibilities for second language learning.

Look for upcoming video-conferences with scientists

A variety of resources for science - space, plate tectonics, global energy budget, winds and currents, climate, biogeochemical cycles, the atmosphere. Animations, pictures, and resource links.

Fun, free photo-editing with refined results

This tool is so great because everything is so well integrated. Students can upload their own pictures and draw. Their thoughts can by typed and recorded. Everything in one place! Great range of color in the palette. Everything is easy enough for young elementary students to be successful independently. For younger students this could easily be used for fiction or nonfiction writing. The audio aspect allows them to explore more or different things than they may be able to in their writing. Kids love the fact that they made a movie. Easily shared with parents and others. Way to make kids want to become digital storytellers!

Create a presentation that lives in the cloud - accessible anywhere you can hop on the internet. Insert text and photos. Zoom in and out. Play with the path you take through your presentation. The nonlinear presentation style may remind some of sitting in the midst of piles of papers preparing to type a paper. Students in middle school will use this to its best advantage, given some time to be creative. Of course teachers can use this one for their presentations, too. .prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }Thoughts on using Prezi as a teaching tool on Prezi

Watch the video to see many ways that people use Scratch. Students can really build their own animations and games using this code. Great for using the design cycle in technology!

Choose an artist and create a story with that art. The pictures can inspire you. It is like a visual story starter. Students would have to lay out the pictures in the order they want and supply the test to accompany them. There are special teacher/class accounts to help educators get around the issue of student emails. I feel like this would work best for the Upper Elementary crowd - 4th to 6th - because some of the picture options are a little dark. I also think that the leaps that might be needed to make one page connect to another well would require some more sophisticated thought. Very appropriate for a poetry/rhyming type unit - on the writing end. What I like best about this site is that it shifts the way you look at writing - it presents new possibilities.