Thursday, August 26, 2010

Relieve Some Work Stress

I wanted to relieve some work stress, so I decided to make a major purchase for my office. An officially licenced Nerf basketball hoop. It's awesome. Take 2 minutes and snap a pic of your "Nerf basketball hoop" and share it! Happy Friday Eve!
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Friday, August 20, 2010

Sound Bible

Here's a website that allows you access to "free" sound clips to embed into your Interactive Whiteboard lessons. The site is called Sound Bible. Once again, I'll let the YouTube clip do the explaining! Complete with a short tutorial! Enjoy.

Jazz Up Your Interactive Whiteboard Projects

Want to dress up your Interactive Whiteboard Lessons? Here's site that can help you out with that. The site is called Glitter Your Way.  I'll let the YouTube clip do the explaining!  NOTE: It also works with your SMART Software!


YouTube Channel - Radford Education

Being a classroom teacher and a Professional Development coach, one thing that I see among all learners is that they all learn differently. Duh. So I was always creating or searching for supplemental resources for my classroom instruction and professional development. As far as interactive whiteboards go, I can "get down" on a Promethean board! But SMART Boards are a whole other ball game. So I started my search for resources.

When I accepted my current position, my district was excited that I had an extensive knowledge on Promethean products. The district had just purchase 100+ boards to install on their elementary campuses. My job was to help with the install planning and then create a comprehensive professional development plan for our teachers on using IWB. Easy right? What they failed to tell me was that we already had 100+ SMART Boards.
With all of that said... my search for SMART resources had begun!



Ok, so to get to the point of this post, I found the YouTube channel for Radford Education. This channel is great! It had very "short and to the point" instructional tutorials on various instructional technology resources. I found just what I was looking for on an introduction to SMART Boards! They have 9 very nice tutorials. But Radford Education's tutorials didn't just stop at SMART. They also have tutorials on many of the Google products. Here's a list:

Google Forms
Google Earth
Google Mail
Google Sites
Blogger
iPod Touch
Ning
SMART Boards

These are perfect tutorials for teachers who like to watch tutorials instead of reading them off of a .pdf. 

Monday, August 2, 2010

Critical Past

What is it: CriticalPast.com was a stie created by a team of professionals in the archival research field.  The site contains over 57,000 videos and 7 million still images from the past that are arranged nicely by date and location. I will note that the images and video are available for purchase but can be viewed from a searching aspect. I do like that you can search by decade through a visual time line at the bottom of the home page.



How to integrate it into the classroom: Bring you historical figures to life by showing students short clips of those figures at various events. Listen to John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address or The Apollo 11 Moon Landing. One downside is that the videos can not be played in full screen mode. But there are some work arounds. 

Thank you to TableTalk for this great find!