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The mission of The Why Files is to explore the science, math and technology behind the news of the day, and to present those topics in a clear, accessible and accurate manner.The Why Files produces a new story each week, alternating longer features with shorter shorties. The website also posts a series of interactive science animations and the ever-popular "Cool Science Images," a series of Teacher Activity Pages linked to the national science teaching standards, The Weather Guys, and Curiosities. I think this is a cool resource!

VR in the classroom

Starfall.com opened in September of 2002 as a free public service to teach children to read with phonics. Our systematic phonics approach, in conjunction with phonemic awareness practice, is perfect for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL).

This is a great site for children ages 2-8. It teaches pre-reading as well as reading skills up to 2nd grade. Includes games, animated stories, songs, and writing activities. I use it daily!

Starfall is a free website that teaches children how to read through phonics. It has practice games on phonemic awaresness. The program is great for grades K-2, second language learners and special education.

Wiffiti is a free interactive messaging site that you can use with students. It is one of the sites recommended to use with lessons using cell phones. The student can summarize their reading assignments and text them to the site. Using a projector you can show the summaries to the class.

Mobile learning: Provide an update on the development of mobile phone technologies with the potential for supporting and/or delivering some elements of teaching and learning. Report briefly on the work and key findings of the m-learning research and development project.

An intriguing beta release which allows you to log the Creative Commons-licensed images you've obtained from Flickr. While Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable, some have grown concerned that a copyright holder might change the CC status of images displayed on Flickr and fear that the burden of proof would then fall to themselves as the "user" of the image(s). This tool would seem to address that problem.

This lesson plan from Interface Magazine suggests ways to incorporate Twitter in your class. They seem so easy and practical but I never would have thought of some of these methods, and I was even an early Twitter adopter. Make sure to watch the video under "The Twitter Experiment"! I found this in the "Featured Resources" section of The Gateway to Educational Materials, accessed via the publisher's companion site to our textbook.

This article is by Dr. Hoffman, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the ALIMA program at UCF. It provides guidelines for creating digital learning materials for those with accessibility issues, such as learning disabilities, or vision and motor impairments. The fact that I had no idea that's what the article was about (I was thinking about general accessibility for everyone) is an indication that this is a topic that deserves more attention, awareness, and application in practice. The article will be freely available as a PDF from this webpage when on campus or logged into the UCF proxy server.

Focuses on the use of iMovie, computer software for classroom storytelling activities in the United States. Difficulty of children in visualizing the setting of a story; Development of the Place Project for students; Interest of children in digital story telling.

Making A Difference: Using Emerging Technologies and Teaching Strategies to Restructure an Undergraduate Technology Course for Pre-service Teachers To prepare educators for the twenty-first century, colleges of education must be leaders of change by providing pre-service teachers with a technology-enriched curriculum. Many pre-service teachers continue to enter institutions of higher learning lacking positive attitudes, proper skills, and knowledge of the use of computers. The purpose of this study was to evaluate both quantitatively and qualitatively the effectiveness of a completely redesigned introduction to technology course for pre-service teachers. The intent of this article is to share information, provide guidance for faculty considering upgrading or beginning an introduction to technology course for pre-service teachers, and to

The website for my middle school's media center has a few excellent links.  We have links to eLibrary access, World Book Online, The Library of Congress, Teaching Books for Students, EBSCOhost, ThomsonGale database, Tumblebooks, the Lexile Framework for Reading, the ERIC online library, and the Florida Information Resource Network.

This site provides many applications for pictures or video such as edit, download, add, and design. The site also offers lessons for students to acquire skills. This is useful when the student is using the site to design and add three-dimensional effects of the classroom that help students visualize the environment and their effects through the image to develop the sensory side of the student. The student can also download images on the site and engage with other students, teachers, and parents.

by Dr. Glenda Gunter, Taryn Hess. When combining the increasing use of online educational environments, the push to use serious video games and the lack of research on the effectiveness of online learning environments and video games, there is a clear need for further investigation into the use of serious video games in an online format (2013)

These are the resources that are recommended by the Department of Education for Science classes. While the links all lead to valuable resources, the interesting part is the technology that they recommend each classroom to have!

The introduction of the uses of digital storytelling in Education.

The Goals of this Website The primary goal of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website is to serve as a useful resource for educators and students who are interested in how digital storytelling can be integrated into a variety of educational activities.

The Goals of this Website The primary goal of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website is to serve as a useful resource for educators and students who are interested in how digital storytelling can be integrated into a variety of educational activities.

This article is written by Dr. Campbell, it talks about the importance of integrating Technology into the classroom. She talks about how students love social media and using their phone. Therefore, it is important for a teacher to continuously utilize these tools to further interest and engage the students in the classroom. She also talks about various tools the teachers can use in the classroom to further interest the students in the curriculum. Such tools may include Prezi, Voicethread, Tagxedo, and Museum Box.

There is a great deal of enthusiasm for the use of games in formal educational contexts; however, there is a notable and problematic lack of studies that make use of replicable study designs to empirically link games to learning (Young, et al., 2012). This paper documents the iterative design and development of an educationally focused game, Compareware in Flash and for the iPad. We also report on a corresponding pilot study of 146 Grades 1 and 2 students playing the game, a paper and pencil related activity and completing a pre- and post-test. The paper outlines preliminary findings from the play testing, which included high levels of student engagement, an approaching statistical improvement from pre- to post-test, and a discussion of the improvements that needed to be made to the game following the pilot study.

This site provides links to multiple sites that have interactive assignments and games for all different grade and skill level.

Math Machine Archive: Math Games The Math Machine brings you a great collection of math games that you can share with your students. Here in The Math Machine you will find links to more than 50 online games that will help you teach and reinforce important math skills. Search the list below for games you might use with your whole class in your schools computer lab, or you might schedule students to use these games on computers in your classroom computer center. These games make great reward time activities too.