I Wonder!

If you have small children in your family, you know that they can ask endless questions about everything. "What's the wrong side of the bed?" "Are Bald Eagles really bald?' "Why?" "Where does chewing gum come from?"

Somehow, they lose the enthusiasm of the whys and I wonders as they progress through school. To encourage wonder and learning through discovery, creativity, and imagination, head on over to Wonderopolis! Here you will find a Wonder for each day, but you can search by categories for past "wonders" as well. Click on the "wonders" tab, and then scroll and look on the lower right hand corner for the list of categories. I bet you will find some things there that you have wondered about too!

100th Day of School

Here in our district, the second nine weeks have ended and we are just around the corner to the 100th day of school. Just in case you are ready to change up your 100th day activities, check out these ideas courtesy of pinners at Pinterest. Click the icons to view. Enjoy!

WatchKnowLearn Site

I love free! As educators, I know you do too. With the economy as it is and school budgets getting smaller, what's a teacher to do other than use as many free resources as we can. Right?

I am sure that you have been using YouTube and loving that GCS has unblocked that site. I hope you are using Discovery Education since that is still being provided for you from the district. But sometimes, those sites don't have the video you need for the particular content you are teaching. I just learned about a free site, yes free, that provides thousands of video content with many especially for elementary students! The site is called WatchKnowLearn. According to their website, they have indexed over 20,000 educational videos in 3,000 categories. You can search their database by category (subject areas) and you can drill down in those categories as well.

A feature that I found useful is being able to search by student age level as well. You simply use the slider to narrow down the age category. The screen shot shows that I narrowed my search to 8-12 year olds.


Finally, another feature for this site that is truly worth checking out is the ability to create your own online classroom. Creating your online classroom allows you to save videos into your categories for your students to access easily. You even get your own sub-domain which becomes the URL address for your online classroom. You can create student accounts and even add attachments to those videos.

I love the possibilities for this site. Check it out and let me know what you think!

YouTube

As you know, GCS has unblocked YouTube for teacher log ins. No longer do you have to search for the video from home, download it, and bring it to school to use with your content. The one concern you may have is all the content that shows up when you are in YouTube. Now there is an easy way to clean up that interface.

Hopefully, since you have been trained to use our Google domain, you are also using Google Chrome as your browser. I just love Chrome and I love all the extensions provided for free. Clea.nr Videos for YouTube removes the clutter (comments, related videos, and ads) that you usually see when you view videos in YouTube. The extension is actually available for other browsers as well.

So when I search for "animal adaptations" my search looks like this:

Once I choose a video to view, check out how "clean" it looks.

Multimedia Presentations

Brain Rules

I have always had a fascination about how the brain works especially when it comes to learning. I recently finished an excellent, easy to read book about how the brain sciences can be used to influence how we teach children and the way we work. I highly recommend Brain Rules by John Medina.

There is lots of great information in the book, but I would like to share rules for multimedia presentations in light of student learning especially since we are using SMART Boards in our classrooms. If you read the book, you will find this information on page 210.

1. Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
2. Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
3. Students learn better when words and pictures are presented near to each other.
4. Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
5. Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

These rules go hand in hand with the lesson design principles we have been talking about during our SMART Board training. Think about all those times we said to be careful of how much text you are putting on a page, just put the key points. And our emphasis on using relevant images that are clear and easy for the students to see. Finally, remember the points we made about using animation purposefully. All those design elements will help your students learn.

Live Life Like a Turtle?

I read a blog post recently on creativity by Trisha Riche and she mention a quote by Ruth Peale. "Live life every day like a turtle. To get anywhere, a turtle has to stick its neck and take a risk. So take risks every day. It's the only way to truly live and make a difference in the world."


So I thought what a perfect quote to reflect as 2011 fades into history and 2012 brings new possibilities to stick out our necks. As I reflect over the past year, I think about when I took risks. I think as educators we take risks each and every day as we strive to find ways to engage our students in our content. As an Instructional Technology Facilitator, we take risks as we try to provide examples and feedback to teachers integrating technology into the classroom. 


As 2012 dawns, some risks that I will be endeavoring in will be revamping TRICKS to meet Common Core Standards and Balanced Literacy, helping with a repository for our district SMART Lessons, and working on Pinnacle Staff Development for the summer. 


Changes are afoot. But sometimes, change is the way to make a difference in the world...

Live life every day like a turtle." To get anywhere, a turtle has to stick its neck out and take a risk. So take risks every day. It's the only way to truly live and make a difference in the world.