Tech for Teachers
October 1-15, 2012
Google a Day
Question:
If you travel over the International Bridge from the Michigan city to the same-named Ontario twin city, on what street will you find yourself once across the border?
My sister-in-law is a 6th grade teacher and she offers these questions as extra credit. The students are give the question to look up over night. They then bring the answer in the next morning. If you are lucky enough to have computers in your classroom or a 1 to 1 initiative then you can have the students look this up in the morning while you're waiting for everyone to arrive in class.
It's a fun way to get your students searching and learning and opens a door to talk about primary sources and help guide your students in that direction.
Check it out for yourself and play the game at http://agoogleaday.com/#game=started
By the way, I answered the above question in 34 seconds. See how fast you can do it.
Star Fall
A free public service to teach children to read with phonics. Their systematic phonics approach, in conjunction with phonemic awareness practice, is perfect for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL). http://www.starfall.com/
PTable Dynamic Periodic Table
Ptable shines when used as a true application, more interactive and dynamic than any standalone software. It allows for all of the following plus more: Multiple write-up sources • Realtime data view • Instantly swap data • Visualize trends • State of matter slider • Data subsets • Orbitals • Isotopes • Compound mixing • Compound searching • Formula searching. http://www.ptable.com/
Elements
If you think you've seen the periodic table, think again. The Elements: A Visual Exploration lets you experience the beauty and fascination of the building blocks of our universe in a way you've never seen before. You start off at a living periodic table where every element is shown with a smoothly rotating sample. To read about tin, tap the tin soldier. To read about gold, tap the gold nugget. Immediately you see the sample filling nearly the entire screen, photographed to razor sharpness and rotating around a complete circle in front of your eyes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elements-visual-exploration/id364147847?mt=8 -- iPad app $13.99
Screencasting Made Simple
Screencast-O-Matic
Screencasting in Education:
- Teachers can use Screencast-O-Matic to create short computer-based tutorials or to demonstrate how to do something. You can use it to capture PowerPoint lectures for delivery later or for a flipped classroom approach. It's also really great for capturing math tutorials.
- Students can use Screencast-O-Matic to record digital stories. Imagine recording a child at the smartboard drawing and talking about the process or scanning their work and letting them go through and tell you all about in their voice. Try having the students teach students by letting them create the tutorials or demonstrations for class.
The uses are only limited by your imagination.
Check it out at http://screencast-o-matic.com/
Mendi Benigni
College of Charleston
JC Long 319
Email: benignim@cofc.edu
Website: blogs.cofc.edu/tlt
Phone: 843.953.5569
Twitter: @benignim