Category: Content Area Focus
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ThinkBright
This morning I was reminded again about a HUGE resource available to teacheres around the country for free – PBS. The national PBS websites have many resources available, and our very own WNED here in WNY has its own website that acts as a portal (entry page) to these resources. The WNED site, called ThinkBright,…
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QuestGarden !
I was just in Bernie Dodge’s session on “Obstacles to Faster Webquest Creation.” If you have ever done a webquest, you know that they are great, but take time to create and manage. Bernie unveiled a new webqeust generating (and hosting) tool called QuestGarden that will be available Sept. 1st. It takes many of the…
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Wiki – mania
Wikis are websites that anyone can edit. It is another unique product of the online revolution. One of the neatest projects that has come out of this is Wikipedia – an online, community-created and edited encyclopedia. In concept it is just like traditional encylopedias. The primary difference is that the authors are anyone who chooses…
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Connected
For my Additional Professional Hours for this year, I have been participating in an online professional development community titled Tappedin (www.tappedin.org). It is an online campus that has virtual buildings for colleges, teachers and students. In a typical event, there is a live chat among participants on a given topic (ELA, Science, Blogs, Library of…
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Powerful Projects
Video editing on the computer has brought an awesome new level to learning. Some ESL students just finished projects in which their teacher filmed them acting out skits to practice/reinforce common sayings in English. The finished products not only demonstrate the content, but have so much more in that they are finished pieces with audio/video,…
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Read a good poem lately?
If you have not (and I’m the first to admit I have not read poetry in a while…), you should! Check out the following links for some great poetry. Or…maybe better…turn off the computer, go to the library, and get a good book of poetry 🙂 Poetry 180 – A Poem a Day for America’s…
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Supporting ELA with Technology
We had a fun time tonight with our ELA inservice, Supporting ELA with Technology. We spent some time at ReadWriteThink, a great site for lessons and online activities for ELA. Next we went on to Brainpop to check out the movies there for ELA. We finished the night with a discussion about blogs. After visiting…
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The Writing Project
I was just in a cool online forum where I learned about the Writing Project, a national program that focuses on helping teachers improve their own (and their students) writing though summer professional development. WNY has its own chapter of the Writing Project, based at Canisius College. An english teacher from the district, Margie Herberger,…
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Brainpop
We have a computer lab license for brainpop.com, an awesome website for short animated videos on just about any topic in the curriculum. If you are looking for material to introduce, reinforce, or review a topic, Brainpop may be just what you need. Check it out at: www.brainpop.com See someone in the computer lab for…
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oneword
Ideas are awesome. Thinking out of the box is key to having a unique voice. Oneword.com provides just that – one word – and you have 60 seconds to write the first thing that comes to mind about the word. Very cool. Very fast. Very fun. Go for it – what do you have to…