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How to fix line spacing issues in Google sites using HTML. Easy-peasy. Really!

This PBL Mania post will explore some of those collaborative Web 2.0 tools that can enhance the PBL experience. Allowing students to network while immersed in PBL is so important. This could include communication and collaboration student to student, student to teacher, and student to expert. Below you will find a small collection of tools that might just help make collaboration even more amazing through the use of the online environment. Whenever using any online tool make sure students are practicing good digital citizenship and responsibility. Also be sure you are aware of your school's AUP and each site's user policy. Now let's take a look at some of these tools.

"Turf Mutt is a nice free resource from Discovery Education. Turf Mutt features ten free environmental science lesson plans for K-5 teachers. The lesson plans have clearly defined objectives and detailed directions for carrying out each lesson plan. The majority of the lesson plans span several days. The lesson plans use a combination of hands-on activities, see Discovering Dirt, and reading/ research activities. Although not directly connected to the lesson plans, Turf Mutt has some videos to help students learn about topics in Environmental Science."  Richard Byrne

To help you start off 2011 with some good resources to try in your classrooms, I'm posting a list of eleven good resources to try, today's list features language arts resources. In creating this list I branched out a bit to include ESL/ ELL resources.

A wonderful site to use when teaching media literacy. It helps students to explore the world of advertising, and how 'stuff' is marketed for ages 8-12. 

Some good Web 2.0 tools and sites to help develop 21st century skills 

Andrew Davis' discussion on the best ways in which to master Prezi. Note the word 'master', not learn!  If you haven't used Prezi yet for a lesson or workshop, I would encourage you to take a serious look at it.  

A site to help you make random teams for activities. Simply copy and paste in your names, and the generator does the rest!

Tennessee Librarian, Mary Ann Cole passed on a site called lifehacker.com - a daily weblog on software and personal productivity that recommends downloads, web sites and shortcuts that help you work smarter and save time.  As with all sites, preview and choose what works best for your situation.  It will take a good chunk of your personal time too!

What it is: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics is a website and YouTube channel dedicated to teaching kids phonics through videos.  The site has a great tag line, "Where learning to read becomes reading to learn." The videos are divided up by categories which include: Introduction to PhonicsGeraldine the Giraffe VideosAlphabet Letters and SoundsMore Alphabet Letters and SoundsConsonant DigraphsLong Vowel SoundsConsonant BlendsAlternative SoundsAlternative Spellings200 High Frequency WordsGrammarChristopher Thorne hosts all of the phonics videos with occasional guest appearances from his friend Geraldine the Giraffe (who has her own book!).  The videos are engaging, help students listen for phoneme segmentation, and give them encouragement to replicate the phoneme sounds themselves.  This library of phonics videos is wonderfully comprehensive! How to integrate Mr. Thorne Does Phonics into the classroom: Mr. Thorne Does Phonics is a fantastic introduction to phonics, phonemes, and decoding words. Students can practice word recognition, pronunciation, and phonics rules with fun videos that can be played, paused, and rewound.  The Mr. Thorne Does Phonics site would be a wonderful site to have available for students on classroom computers as a reading center. Students can visit the reading center and pull up the video of the exact phonics skill that they need to practice.  Mr. Thorne Does Phonics would also be a wonderful way to introduce your whole class to a new phonics skill by playing the videos for them using a projector-connected computer or interactive whiteboard. If you have access to a built-in webcam or portable video camera, encourage students to create their own Mr. Thorne inspired phonics videos.  These can be shared with other students in the class, parents, and younger grade levels.  The videos also make a great record of progress throughout the school year. Tips: You can also find Mr. Thorne's phonics videos on YouTube. Can't access YouTube at school?

Edheads helps students learn through educational games and activities designed to meet state and national standards (US). EdTechIdeas: Students can learn about simple and compound machines, how to predict the weather,  perform virtual knee surgery, and even create a stem cell line.

designed to help students practice recognizing scams and dangers online. That game is appropriate for elementary school students. 

You can look at all kinds of interesting places in Google Earth and Maps if you search correctly and long enough. But if you're searching for something small and you don't know the coordinates, you might get very frustrated. Maplandia offers an categories to help you zero in on what you need. 

How to integrate Cyberkidz into the classroom: Cyberkidz is a fun place for students to work on the knowledge level of Bloom's Taxonomy. The music game is the only creative game that I would truly place in the "create" category of Bloom's Taxonomy because it gives students free rein to explore music and create a recording. The majority of the games are designed to help students build skills and remember key concepts that are a necessary foundation for other learning. These are a nice alternative to worksheet skill practice. Students will enjoy the game quality of these practice activities. Each activity can be advanced through relatively quickly making them perfect as a center on classroom computers. Students can visit the game as a math, literacy, geography or science "practice" center before advancing to put those newly honed skills to work in a higher order thinking center. These practice activities could also be completed as a class using an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer. Split students into teams and rotate them up to the whiteboard for a class practice session.

Moon Zoo actually lets your students take part in science.  They are contributing to actual lunar research in real and meaningful ways while learning about the moon.  Moon Zoo would be a great activity to complete as a whole class in the elementary classroom.  Tell your students that they are going to be astronauts and complete a "launch" to the moon.  If you have time, students can create official astronaut badges to wear for the big launch.  Using a projector-connected computer or an interactive whiteboard, launch one of the shuttles here.  When you "land" on the moon, let students explore the surface together by hunting for craters in Moon Zoo.  Help students mark craters, look for boulders and map the lunar surface.  Each student should have a chance to make a discovery.  While students wait for their turn, they can track the crater/boulder count on a table to create a graph.  Categories can be small, medium, and large craters found and number of boulders.iLearn Technology

MART Notebook search engine is designed to help you find resources designed for teaching with SMARTBoards.

Remember playing telephone as a kid? You and your friends would sit around in a circle, the first kid would start it out by whispering a sentence or two into the next kid's ear. The sentence would move around the circle until it arrived at the last person and, inevitably, the end result would be completely different (and often pretty funny) from what was initially said. Now, with the help of Google Translate, a new site called Translation Telephone lets you simulate this experience online. You type in a phrase and click go and then watch as your sentence gets translated from language to language, until it finally gets translated back into English iLearn Technology

A great graphic about the tsunami in Japan..

A fake website that helps to teach students about thinking critically about websites.....