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6-12, Education, Science, Teaching Tools, Websites

Follow Your Curiosity

Terri Eichholz

With the recent touchdown of the Mars rover, Curiosity, the beginning of the school year would be a great time to ignite your students’ curiosity about space exploration.  On the Follow Your Curiosity site, NASA has provided 5 lesson plans with student and teacher guides for grades 6-8.  I think that you could modify them for a bit lower or higher grades on either end, though.  The site includes video clips and many hands-on activities, including a simulation activity of a Mars rover and the creation of a 3-D Mars community.  Visit Follow Your Curiosity for a great selection of Rover Resources!

Art, Books, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Student Products, Websites

International Dot Day

Terri Eichholz

Mark your calendar for September 15th, which is International Dot Day!  Sponsored by FableVision Learning in coordination with Peter Reynolds, author of The Dot, this is a day on which educators pledge to encourage their students’ creativity.  You can sign up formally to participate in International Dot Day, or you can choose your own way to celebrate this day of imagination.  The website offers ideas for ways in which to make this a memorable day for your students as well as videos from some of last year’s participants.  You can also go to this link for some ideas from Peter Reynolds on how to incorporate his wonderful book into your classroom.

Thanks to Cari Young, librarian at Fox Run Elementary in N.E.I.S.D., and author of The Centered School Library, for this great tip!

6-12, Careers, Education, Independent Study, Research, Science, Websites

Curiosity.com

Terri Eichholz

Curiosity.com is a website from the Discovery Channel.  It is visually appealing, and has many topics that you might be, well, curious about.  For example, you can see the 30 strangest landmarks in America or view an image gallery of geniuses.

Curiosity.com is not “vetted” for educational purposes, but there is a link to Curiosity in the Classroom, which is.  Curiosity in the Classroom offers resources for parents, students, and teachers including lesson plans and downloadable activities.  It also gives information on careers and fun quizzes for students to take.  This portion of the site is aimed at students in 6th-12th grades.

If you have secondary students who are working on independent projects, but cannot seem to narrow down a topic, Curiosity.com might be the place to send them.

3-12, Education, Music, Teaching Tools, Websites

Choruzz

Terri Eichholz

I have not used Choruzz in my classroom yet, but I can see the possibilities.  This site allows you to create your own playlist of songs.  There is no sign-in or registration required.  Once you create a list, and “publish” it, you are given an embed code and a unique URL, so that anyone you would like to share it with can access it.  You can check out a practice playlist I created at this link.

Last school year, one of my more successful lessons included a center where students could listen to a playlist on my iPod, and choose the song that they would pick as a theme for the novel we had just read.  They really enjoyed it, and there was much discussion within each group about the pros and cons of the songs.  Their written explanations were very thorough.  I could see using Choruzz for this activity, so that more students could access the playlist – or even do the activity at home.

My cautions would be that the videos for the songs are included, and that there are some ads that run at the bottom.  I have not seen anything inappropriate in my short experimentation with this, but will be exploring it further before I offer it as an option for my students.  Another possible obstacle would be that district filters might block the site.

Choruzz has a lot of potential for classroom use.  If this particular site cannot be used educationally, I would love to see a similar one that could be used in a classroom setting.

3-12, Apps, Art, Creative Thinking, Education, Games, Student Products

App Design and Icons

Terri Eichholz
image credit: http://baart.weebly.com

I love this blog post from Suzanne Tiedemann on Brunswick Acres Art.  She tells about a lesson for 5th graders in which they pretended to be app developers, and went through a simulation of the design and creation process.  The students drew their own “icons” for the apps, and created descriptions that would appear in the app store.  This idea could be used in all kinds of creative ways in the classroom.  Wouldn’t it be fun to have the students design their own app ideas for apps that would tell about them as a Beginning of the Year activity?  Or, how about design an app that a character in a book would find useful?  What about an app that reflects an understanding of a science lesson or that would have changed a moment in history?  The great thing about this is that you do not need to actually know how to design apps – as it can all be in your imagination.  But, just in case you have an aspiring app designer in your classroom, you can always show him or her the TED talk video of 6th grade app developer Thomas Suarez that Tiedemann helpfully includes in her blog post.

Apps, Education, ESL, K-12, Language Arts, Teaching Tools, Universal Design for Learning, Websites, Writing

Talk Typer

Terri Eichholz

Talk Typer is a website that works best in the Google Chrome Browser.  Without installing any software, you can choose from several languages, then speak into your microphone, and Talk Typer will print the text of your speech.  You can then look at what it produces, make any corrections you would like, and then move it into the bottom portion of the page.  In this second level, you can e-mail it, tweet it, or even translate it seamlessly into another language.

This free tool could be so useful for ELL classrooms, foreign language classrooms, and even regular classrooms where students might use this as an aid or an extension.  For teachers who are looking to incorporate Universal Design for Learning into their classrooms, I think this resource is essential.

(Here is a link for speech to text options in OSX and Windows 7)