Study Island and Promethean Integration

What is it: Study Island is an educational state standards based program. Teachers are able to create learning experiences for your students that target specific state standards.

How to integrate it into the classroom: Study Island has now created a way to integrate your classroom response devices such as ActiVotes and ActivExpressions into their program. What makes this different from using the Promethean software is that you do not need to run ActivStudio or ActivInspire to conduct classroom voting. Everything is done through Study Island! Similar features available with Promethean's Learner Response System are also available on Study Island.  You start and stop the voting as well as view class results!

Google Public Data Explorer

What is it: Google Public Data Explorer is a Google Labs project, so that means their testing it out, that is available to anyone. With the Google Public Data Explorer you have access to large data sets of public information such as Unemployment, Population, and Retail Sales. What great is that you can view them in a as various interactive graphs or charts that you customize. For example, I want to see a line graph that compares the unemployment rate of Texas, California and Florida.

How to integrate it into the classroom: Students and teachers can create incredible visualizations, of the data sets, that can be explored and discussed with one another.  At the elementary level, students can begin to explore the parts of an effective graph.  At the secondary level, students can synthesize the information into vivid discussions.
Once you've used the Google Public Data Explorer to create an awesome visualization of a set of data, you can link or embed them into your blog or web page.  Embeds and links are updated automatically! Real time data.  That's powerful! Some visualizations can be animated to show change over time.  Imagine the types of projects that students can create.

Keep Your Gmail Safe

I actually ran acroos this on Twitter last night. Thanks for the retweet, Greg. I didn't even know about this setting on Gmail.  Thanks Chris Pirillo for posting this on your blog.

"When you are logged in to your Gmail account, go up to the top of the page and click on Settings. The fifth header down on the page is Browser connection. Next to this, click the little button that says to Always use https. This will ensure that no matter where you are at, you are logging in to your email securely."

Post Student Work Easily With Embed It In

What is it:  embedit.in is a resource that anyone can use to embed their documents into blogs or websites. There is no account set up and it's simple and free.

• You choose the document that you would like to embed and embedit.in will ask you to sign in with one of your existing third party services (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.)  
• embedit.in can provide you embeddable code for the document itself, a thumbnail for viewing or just get a link for access to your document. 
• There are also privacy settings. You decide if you want viewers to be able to download, save and print your document.
• You're even given the option of adding annotations! 

Once you choose your options, embedit.in will provide you the embeddable widget code to place into your blog or site. It's pretty simple.

How to integrate into the classroom: This is an extremely useful resource for educators to use when creating their classroom blogs or websites. embedit.in is great way for classroom teachers to recognize their students' hard work and achievements. Students themselves can use embedit.in to post their class projects or homework assignments on their personal blogs for teachers to view or for the purpose of collaboration. 

Spell With Flickr

What is it: Here's a simple site called Spell With Flickr.  This site allows you spell words using images taken from the photo sharing site, Flickr. Just type in any word and the site will search Flickr for you.  If you don't like an image that it pulls up for a particular letter, just click the letter and a new image pops up! You can save each individual letter and add it to a document or project. What's also great is that Spell With Flickr will also provide you with the HTML code to embed the image into your blog or website.

How to integrate into the classroom: Here are some great classroom uses.

• Have students practice spelling words
• Students can produce creative titles for projects
• Letter recognition activities
• Teachers can create titles for bulletin boards or word walls
• Elementary students can create unique alphabet books

Enjoy!

BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF

The Wildlife Conservation Society and the New York Zoos and Aquarium have developed an interesting and educational interactive website. The site is called BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF. This fun interactive site allows students to name and build "creatures" with various adaptations. Once their creature is "born" it is given an scientific name along with a description of its various adaptations. What's great about this activity is that teachers can use this site for various educational purposes.

• Students can create characters for their writing assignments to help build vocabulary and develop descriptive writing.
  
• Language Arts Teachers can use it as a story starter or discussion topic for an upcoming writing unit.
• Geography teachers can use it to introduce various regions of the world.
  
• Science teachers can ask questions about an organisms adaptations. "Why do you think the "pea-dog-bush-fro-iger-fly-crocodile" has large eyes and webbed feet?"

As you build your wild self, sounds are played to correspond with the various parts. If you choose a peacock crest, you'll hear the sounds that a peacock makes. You are also able to share your creature with your friends. Enjoy!

Sending A Link That's Too Long?

Well, one solution for this is TinyURL! I use this pretty often. As I had mentioned before, I train educators on using interactive technology in the classroom. So, I email out the occasional "how to" tutorials from the web. One issue that I come across is copying and pasting a URL that is 100+ characters long. Here's where TinyURL comes in. This site can take an annoyingly long web link and shrink it. You can even create a semi-customized URL. Here's one example. Enjoy!

http://www.screencast.com/users/manuelherrera/folders/Jing/media/ccc1a004-363a-41da-b8ae-8a5be6a57a6d

to

http://tinyurl.com/ykvmkyu

ABCya and other Word Cloud Generator Sites

ABCya Word Clouds is a site that allows you to create word clouds from any text that you copy and paste or just type into the site. This is similar to http://www.blogger.com/www.wordle.net except that ABCya allows you to save the image it creates as a jpeg. You can do the same with Wordle but there are a few extra steps involved. ABCya is customizable so that you can choose your colors or the style you want. Give it a try. Here's a word cloud created from my blog posts.

http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm

Here is a list of other word cloud generator sites:

• http://tagul.com/
• http://tagcrowd.com/
• http://worditout.com/
• http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/
• http://wordsift.com/

Big thank you to The Whiteboard Blog for the list of word cloud generators.