Kansas Educators

""Tell Me A Digital Story" is designed to provide teachers with information and resources that will equip them to enhance their students' learning by telling stories digitally."

Here is an idea for the Challenge Based Learning Project.

Preston Girls' Secondary College Reading Wiki to show and share with students and teachers how web 2.0 tools can inspire students to respond to set texts in a more creative way. Making book trailers Filming their own '60 second recap Making animotos Creating toondoos Using Flickr to make a showbag Developing a glog Creating a Google Lit Trip Making a Prezi Creating VoiceThreads and responding in Twitterature style are just some examples of how students can creatively respond to a book. Each link explains how the tools can be embedded into the curriculum and shows examples of how other people have used these sites to develop a book response. Some responses are better than others and it would be good to discuss with students beforehand what made certain examples better than others. For some of the presentations, students may need a Flip camera (such as 60 second recap) however the rest of the presentations could use photos and images from the internet. A lesson on Creative Commons and Wikimedia before students are let loose would help them understand their responsibilities in terms of selecting appropriate images and music to use. Once finished, students could show their presentations to each other and have them critique their work. Permissions allowing, presentations could also be uploaded to the school website or shown on parent information evenings or parent/teacher nights. Challenge: My challenge to you is to ask students to use one of these tools (can be in conjunction with a written response) in their next text response.

Check this TEACHER out and make sure you look at the right column My Other Blogs and look as My Teaching Canvas. Simply Amazing!

Fontself is a great new (beta) site for browsing/creating your own fonts. FS is a very nice site for using "original" fonts by embedding them via a html code.

We mock the school system because we love the idea of quality, free, public education. We want to help point out the problems and hypocrisies in an effort to help promote a solution. We also want to provide comic relief for the millions of teachers, students, administrators, parents, and tax payers who have found themselves locked in a system which has never fully reached it's potential

"Kindergarten Is the Model for Lifelong Learning Let's keep teaching creativity throughout school and adulthood."

This is absolutely amazing: 183 Voices, 243 Tracks, 12 Countries, all done virtually!!

"Video: The Amazing Youtube Choir Social media continues to amaze me. I believe a new online collaborative art form has emerged in which several people contribute to create a masterpiece. This virtual choir conducted by Eric Whitacre and produced by Scott Haines will show you what I mean by a collaborative masterpiece. Read the rest of the story of how this was created here. You may also want to see the collaborative video masterpiece my PLN has helped me create. This video was tweeted by @larryferlazzo."

"Does your school or school district provide a moderated, interactive web platform for video sharing among students as well as teachers? While education-specific video sites like Edublogs.tv, SchoolTube, and TeacherTube can and are being used by learners around the world to share video interactively (as well as YouTube and YouTube EDU) there can be a number of benefits when schools provide "homegrown YouTube" video services. Often school district network administrators are loath to unblock / open access to YouTube. A homegrown video sharing site can be moderated and controlled (an extremely important word in the lexicon of IT directors) in ways a public video sharing website outside the school network cannot. Bandwidth limitations are often cited as the reason video sharing sites in schools are blocked. While software and hardware solutions exist to limit the percentage or total amount of bandwidth allocated to services like video streaming websites, many school networks are not presently configured to implement these types of imposed limits. "The fight to unblock YouTube" even for teacher access and use is an uphill struggle in many schools, but the case for a homegrown video sharing site can be less contentious."

I did this with my kids yesterday as part of our Geography and maths unit that was a real hit and had plenty of learning opportunities to offer.

Collect several YouTube videos on this cube. Can be used for presentations too. YouCube is a little project I've put together over the last two days. It allows you to map YouTube videos onto an interactive 3D cube and then save it to a database so you can show your friends. As you spin around a YouCube, the sounds of the different videos fade in and out. Its fun! Visit the YouCube page and get cracking!

"There's a lot more to learn in college than physics laws and essay writing, but even the best professors don't have enough time to share all their knowledge with you in just one semester. To supplement your learning in class and on campus, and to prepare you for the real world after college, subscribe to these blogs on current events, personal finance, the job search, personal development, and more."

"Lesson Plans for Teachers The Museum has created these Lesson Plans that you may download or print from this web site for your classroom use. Each lesson comes complete with directions, enrichment suggestions, and reproducible handouts. "

"The Math and Science of Junk Mail Project A Problem Based Learning Activity for Environmental Issues "