Thursday, January 31, 2008

National Gallery of Art: Kids!

Take your kids through a tour of this site and discover all of the fun activities available for them. you can visit this site by clicking here.



Many uses for short videos

Just wanted to share that my students and I have had some great learning experiences this week using the short videos from www.simpletruths.com. A few examples . . . We watched "Great Quotes from Great Leaders" and then did a classifying activity with Inspiration (analysis level thinking is part of the Language! curriculum). It was an easy way to incorporate both technology and social studies into my Language! curriculum! I'm also going to have my students go back to the video on their own and reread the quotes for an independent reading activity, as independent reading is also part of the Language! curriculum. So many possibilities. Today I'm going to show "Outside the Box" and have the students, in partner or small groups, orally retell the story.
Guess what? Retelling is also part of the Language! program. Has anyone else used these videos? I'd like to hear your ideas.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Nettrekker: To Use or Not To Use, that is the Question

Let us know if you are using Nettrekker, the educational search engine that our district subscribes to. Take a VERY QUICK poll for us so that you can communicate whether you want to continue to use Nettrekker or not.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Use Google Earth as Your Virtual Telescope

If you have been using Google Earth to simply span the globe...think about spanning the sky. Google Earth has a feature that lets you switch to viewing the sky from earth, turning your window into a virtual telescope. Google Earth has also incorporated some fantastic layers. I really enjoyed the "Life of a Star" layer. This shows you actual stages of a star's life and explains that particular stage. It is really cool.

What a great way for students to learn about stars. Just open Google Earth and click on the "Switch between sky and earth" button.
This will give you a view of the sky above the location you were viewing in Google Earth and it will give you a different set of layers. I double-clicked on the "Life of a Star" layer to get my lesson started.
This is just one of the thousands of uses for Google Earth. You can use Google Earth for history, math, science and more. For more new features in Google Earth, check out the latest edition of their online newsletter, Sightseer.