Make it Interactive

Scholastic offers a wealth of activities and resources powered by SMART’s Notebook collaborative learning software to help you improve your students’ writing. For example: Interactive Whiteboard Activities: 5-Minute Proofreading Practice provides daily exercises for practice in proofreading for spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar and more. All it takes is five minutes a day! Each book comes with a CD of Notebook files to use with your SMART Board. Writing Lessons for the Interactive Whiteboard shows teachers, step by step, how to use the interactive whiteboard to engage students in learning excellent writing craft techniques with models of strong writing. The book covers includes tips for both Promethean and SMART Board users, plus a CD with models to use on screen. 50 Graphic Organizers for the Interactive Whiteboard contains 50 classroom-tested reproducible templates of graphic organizers along with easy directions and student samples. Full-color, interactive PDFs of the graphic organizers on CD are useful for modeling. Check out these and other interactive whiteboard products on the Scholastic site.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Websites I found interesting (weekly)

• Jigsaw Planet

   create online playable puzzles from your own photos or copyright free photos

  tags: puzzles jigsaw jigsawplanet web2.0

• In My Backyard (IMBY) - National Renewable Energy Laboratory

  SEREF, the Solar Energy Research and Education Foundation, has built a couple of tools that could be of interest to science teachers. SEREF has an energy estimation tool that allows you to estimate the potential solar and wind energy of any location. To use the estimation tool you have to enter your location using on the map and input the size of the solar panels or wind turbine structure. You can also draw out the dimensions of your solar panels on the map. The potential energy is then calculated based on climate, latitude, and typical weather patterns.

  tags: solar wind green

• Free Technology for Teachers: Estimating Solar Power Using Google Earth

  tags: Google_Earth

• Net Cetera - OnGuard Online

  tags: internet_safety internetsafety

• 2Learn.ca Tools - from the 2Learn.ca Education Society

  tags: venn_diagram

• How Teachers are using Google Earth in the classroom

  tags: Google_Earth

• Delta Air Lines Blog |

  tags: delta rebook

• Google For Educators - Web Search

  tags: google_search search

• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum

  In a move that will make primary-source documents more accessible for students, Caroline Kennedy unveiled the nation’s first online presidential archive on Jan. 13, a $10 million project to digitize the most important papers, photographs, and recordings of President John F. Kennedy’s days in office. Users can browse through the drafts of Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech and see how he tinkered with the words of that most famous line from his inauguration. Or, they can listen to his personal phone calls and read his letters. Archivists digitized more than 200,000 pages, 1,200 recordings, and 300 museum artifacts, as well as reels of film and hundreds of photographs. Library Director Tom Putnam said they started with all of Kennedy’s Oval Office files—everything that went across his desk—along with his personal papers, official White House photos, audio of all his public remarks, video of his famous speeches, and home movies. Private partners—including AT&T, EMC Corp., Raytheon Co., and Iron Mountain Corp.—contributed $6.5 million in equipment and technical services to digitize thousands of records. The library will continue digitizing about 100,000 pages a year, along with thousands of photos and recordings. At that rate, it would still take more than 100 years to digitize all records from the Kennedy administration

  tags: JFK kennedy presidents socialstudies

• Kerpoof Studio

  tags: kerproof digitalstorytelling winter

• http://www.kerpoof.com/edu/plans/Tall_Tales/Tall_Tales.pdf

  tags: talltales kerproof digitalstorytelling

• Using Kerpoof for Digital Storytelling

  tags: kerproof digitalstorytelling

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Promote Reading on a Daily Basis

Scholastic is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a global literacy campaign that underscores the importance of reading as the pathway for young people to succeed in the 21st century. Through its “Read Every Day. Lead a Better Life.” campaign, Scholastic is asking everyone committed to the support of young people—partners, educators, business leaders, publishers, booksellers, librarians, nonprofits, parents, caregivers and students—to work together to expand and support children’s reading throughout the world. The goal of the campaign is to provide information and ideas to parents and teachers for making reading easier, more fun and more accessible to children while promoting the importance and value of reading for success in school and in life.
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Free Ebook on Web Tools for Educators

One of my Discovery friends, Lee Kolbert, posted on her blog the link for a free ebook that she coauthored with Richard Byrnes. Enjoy this resource. It is excellent!

http://www.slideshare.net/kolbert/super-book-of-web-tools-for-educators

Super book of web tools for educators

View more documents from Lee Kolbert.

Google's Tech Support for Parents

Google's Tech Support for Parents (or staff?)

Send them this way for clear explanations of how to do simple things on their computer
http://www.teachparentstech.org/

This would be great for staff, also!

Question the Author

NPR’s Backseat Book Club is a monthly feature inviting children to read a book with NPR and send in questions. At month’s end, some of the questions will be put to the book’s author during NPR’s afternoon radio program, All Things Considered. This month the website presents theTop 5 Books For Backseat Readers (aged 9 and up) recommended in 2011.
Click Here to Visit Website

Hook Inner-City Youth on Reading

Author of young adult books, Alan Sitomer has teamed with Recorded Books to bring his award-winning teaching skills to schools across the country through the BookJam. Sitomer, a three-time Teacher of the Year award winner, shares results from his own inner-city Los Angeles classroom. Each Jam includes 30 copies of three popular young adult novels and a standards-based study guide for each novel with reproducible differentiated learning activities and both formative and summative assessments. In addition, the Composition JamBox is an easy-to-use resource for assigning podcasts, slideshows, short movies and other engaging multimedia projects. Sample the audio and lesson plans from The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez (characterization activity), Monster (setting activity) and The Hoopster (symbolism activity). Also find Sitomer’s 6 Steps for Teaching Imagery in The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez.
Click Here for More Information About BookJam
Click Here to Access Sample Audio and Lesson Plans

Websites I found interesting (weekly)

• Smories - new stories for children, read by children

  tags: reading literacy storytelling digitalstorytelling smories

• Google Squared: A Complete Guide | ICT in my Classroom

  tags: googlesquared

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Raise Awareness of Cyberbullying Behaviors

Slimy, creepy crawlies are the ugly image of cyberbullying in a new interactive Web site aimed at children between eight and 12 years of age. Created by the nonprofit organization SchoolAid, CureTheBullies targets children who may witness bullying behavior or even act as accomplices to bullies through their use of email, social networking or text messaging. An online self-discovery test helps children identify passive bystander behavior in themselves and offers them tools and advice on how to rid themselves of “Bullies Viruses.” Six cyberbullying behaviors have been turned into slimy viruses in the interactive program. If infected, students use a “cure,” such as “Understanding” or “Courage,” to defeat their virus. For instance, a “Gang Green” infection has the symptom of ganging up on someone on Facebook, blogs or forums. Its cure is “Friendship.” Youth infected with “Forwarditis” exhibit symptoms of forwarding emails, pictures or messages that could make someone feel bad. The cure is “Understanding.”
Click Here to Visit Web Site

Find Library Materials About Worldwide Locations

With mapFAST, you can use Google Maps to find texts about places all over the world. Visit mapFAST, type in a location and get a list of texts about that location. By setting a radius parameter, you can specify how close to the actual location you want your texts to be. Thebooklists generated by mapFAST come from Google Books and WorldCat. Through Google Books you may be able to read and print some titles for free.
Click Here to Access Free Tool

Websites I found interesting (weekly)

• Discovery Educator Network - home

  tags: DEN discovery

• Thinklinkr: the best real-time collaborative online outliner

  tags: web2.0 thinklinkr outlining outline collaboration

• Google Fast Flip

  tags: google fastflip aggregator

• Best iPhone Apps: Poddy Training Apps for Early Childhood by ecctech | Appolicious ™ iPad and iPhone App Directory

  tags: ipodtouch ipad

• Learning about the iOS app Stickershop from a 7 year old #edapps « Moving at the Speed of Creativity

  tags: ipodtouch ipad wesfryer stmarys

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.