Teaching and Tech Tinkerings of a Special Educator: free

Showing posts with label free. Show all posts

Sunday, February 7, 2010

DonorsChoose- Worth the Wait

How did I get a multi-function color printer and cartridges for our classroom?

In mid-January, I began to give up hope that the project I submitted to DonorsChoose in September would be funded. But just before it's deadline, I received an e-mail that my project was fully funded. We will be publishing our thank you notes (thanks to our donors) on our new printer.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Google Earth: A Whole New World

Despite our initial frustrations with Google Earth crashing our system, the Google Earth program packed a positive punch with our students that will leave a lasting impression on how they view the world.

We are currently investigating how maps connect us to people and places as an International Baccalaureate unit of study. As a techie, I of course wanted to bring in Google Earth because it looks cool and it has a wow factor. It certainly would motivate my students. For this reason alone, I decided to use the program.

But my students taught me that the costs of using the program (having it crash several times, having my laptop crash, and eventually having to get a new laptop) did not overshadow the benefits. Here are the Google Earth features and a sample of the corresponding concepts and skills they learned:

• Day/night feature: The Earth’s rotation causes day and night and that when it is daytime where we live, it is nighttime in some other parts of the world.
• Zoom feature: A map provides a birds-eye view of a place through the zoom feature.
• Fly-to and street view features: We can connect with people through maps by flying to student neighborhoods and neighborhoods of people in Tokyo, Japan
• Weather feature: The weather is different in different locations. Our weather in Alexandria is similar to the weather in Tokyo because we are at a similar latitude, yet different because we are at a different longitude.

My students have never mastered this content with the depth of understanding and level of interest before than they did through using Google Earth.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Go Global with ePals

The ePals site safely connects classrooms around the globe via teacher-moderated e-mail and blogs. Students have opportunities to work collaboratively on projects with students from classrooms in other locations. There are several safety features embedded into the program, but teachers should remind their students not to provide last names, school names, or locations.

Within five minutes, I found a project appropriate for our first and second graders for their internationally-minded maps unit. They will host a stuffed bear that will travel around the world. We will mark its journey on Google Earth.

Summary of key features:

teacher-moderated e-mail and blogs

collaborative projects

pen pals around the world

provides home-school communication

Friday, July 31, 2009

Relax, Play, and Create with E-Sand Art

A great break activity. Create your own sand art. A mouse click causes the sand to fall and Ctrl C lets you select another color. ***** When you start, the screen will appear blank. This is your blank canvas. Click and hold...sand will begin to pour on the page.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Teach Vocabulary Relationships through Wordle

This image, and others like it, can be created at http://www.wordle.net/. Simply type in words you wish your students to link to a theme and click "go." It's that simple.

Need a phrase to appear? To have the words "papyrus paper" appear together, connect them with ~. For example, enter the text below:

papyrus~paper

Want to make a word appear larger for emphasis (perhaps the theme of your unit?) Just type the word multiple times. It will only appear once, but larger than your other text.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Grab Your Students' Attention-Fast and Easy to Use

What can you do for free? Simply upload your own photos or download creative commons licensed photos from sites such as Flickr, add a soundtrack, and Animoto will automatically create an amazing show that lasts up to 30 seconds. Are you an educator? Sign up for an educator account and create full-length presentations for free.

Click on the heading above for a better version of the video below.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Portaportal

Here's a great site for keeping all of your links together on the web. Students can access the websites they use in class from links on your portaportal site.

The link above is a sample.