Content Literacy

The Common Core State Standards focus on core conceptual understandings and procedures starting in the early grades, thus enabling teachers to take the time needed to teach core concepts and procedures well-and to give students the opportunity to master them.

Math videos to help explain skills/concepts. Tends to be very skill based, but offers multiple takes on the same skill so if a students doesn't get it from one person the next might be a better fit, short videos makes it plausible that a student might use, GREAT integration of vocabulary. Well worth incorporating into classroom practice to help students understand how to use formulas or manipulate equations. Also they are GREAT models if you want kids to create their own.

Videos from Snag Video that have been identified as educational in nature. 

There are extensive libraries of some great shows on Hulu, including NOVA, and several news shows.

From Free Technology for Teachers, "FORA.tv is similar to Big Think in that it presents videos relevant to topics in the news and in the public conscious today. The videos feature well known personalities and experts talking about the important issues of the day. You will also videos of debates, press conferences, and public meetings."

Free Technology for Teachers is an award winning blog. Here is his post on alternatives to youtube. I like most in fact bookmarked almost all of them. Great resrouce and if you don't subscribe to this blog you should

ast week I blogged about my Bloomin' Peacock, a new Bloom's Taxonomy visual I made to share with teachers in a training.  Over the years, I have created a number of Bloom's Taxonomy pictures to hang in my classroom for students to refer to.  My Bloomin' Peacock was such a hit with you all, I thought I would start sharing the others I've made.   Today I revived one that I created for my classroom and added the digital version (again the digital tools displayed relate directly to the Treasures reading curriculum).  This is my Um-bloom-ra Bloom's Taxonomy:

...benefits of using trade books is increasing student engagement. High quality trade books are written as to spark interest and create a desire to read. Many contain colorful, interesting illustrations, photographs, and diagrams, all of which draw students into the text and improve comprehension.

Google taking advantage of its own video network to share ways of using its own products.

Blog about Chris Geeen's iPod touch project at his school. Has some very interesting ideas about how students can create quick products from research on the iPod touch. Worth looking at if you have access to mobile learning tools not just iPod, although some of the apps are specific to the iPod.

What started as a desire to know what technology access my students had turned into a great opportunity to get to know them, and what they thought about grades, learning, and their interests. Here's a copy of the survey that I gave my students this year on the first day. Some of the responses to the questions were interesting enough to put in wordle form

Connecting Students through Video

Magnoto is a little like glogster. It's a nice little project tool. It is in beta and may not be stable enough for mass use, but it is pretty user friendly and can allow 5 people to work together on the same project. Each person can have their own page or can work together to create one page. 

or the uninitiated Wordle is essentially a word cloud generator that creates word clouds from text you either manually enter or draw from websites, news feeds or utilise tags from a del.icio.us account to create a visually appealing word cloud which you can customise and stylize to suit your needs. The beauty of Wordle is that there is no signup or login and the whole process can be completed in as little as a minute depending on how complex you wish to get.   Here is a Wordle I generated from my website at www.edgalaxy.com

Exactly what it says it is... a Free Video Converter to convert mp4 to a more usable format. It will also convert multiple files to multiple formats at the same time. 

Over 50.000 teachers and students all over the world are using SymbalooEDU as a PLE tool. Check out the following videos to see how SymbalooEDU is being used in education as personal learning environment.

"NASA Images provides photos and video related to space exploration, aeronautics, and astronomy. Topics include the universe, solar system, earth, and astronauts. A space flight interactive timeline shows images and video from the 1959 launch of Explorer 1, the first spacecraft successfully launched by the U.S., to the Mars Rovers and International Space Station. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)"

The title says it all. Great list of apps. 

Great site from the National Archive. Easy to use and wonderful site for having students access primary source materials. 

Adobe is launching a new tool and looking for some classrooms to pilot. I don't think it will stay free for long, but it looks like an easy and very dynamic setting.