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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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!

http://www.glitteryourway.com/

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. 

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!

History Pin

What is it: History Pin is a site that was created through the partnership of We Are What We Do and Google. History Pin allows you to use a map, add photos and write a story about that photo. What's unique about this site is that you can narrow a search down and view other posted images and stories taken during a particular time period. But that's not all. Because you can look at posted photos, that were taken during an earlier time period,  you can layer them over current Google Street Views and see all the changes that may have occurred over time. Take a look at the History Pin intro video.

How to integrate it into the classroom: This is GREAT for your history or geography classes. I'm a huge visual learner and so are many students. Occasionally I have teachers ask me for an electronic copy of a map or a web page with an "interactive" map that students can label. My answer is always, "Download Google Earth" or "Have you tried Google Maps?" Now I can add a little more to those requests. How powerful would it be if you had students locate a city that your class may be discussing in your history class and then have another student post a pic their Grandparents took when they visited that city. Then you could layer the old photo with Street View!

A big "Thank You!" To Li-Bear-y Corner for sharing this great find!

Document Scanner Android App

What is it: Document Scanner is an app in the Android Market that allows you to "scan" a document, using your phone's camera, and convert it to a pdf. so that you can then email to everyone.  A new feature is that you can now upload the document to Google Docs for storing. 

What makes this app stand out is that you can scan any number of pages and merge them into one document. You also have the ability to add scans to an existing pdf. and reorder the pages. The build in camera allows you to talk higher quality images. 

How to integrate it into the classroom: There are an infinite number of possibilities for this app.  Whether it's on a personal or educational level. Teachers can scan student projects to place in a student portfolio or to post on their blog.  Students can scan notes from the teacher to reference information at a later time. And it can all be in one document instead of several images. 

I like to use it after meetings. I tend to take notes on post-its, napkins or whatever my pen will write on.  This allows me to organize those notes to refer to later.

Flipchart Wiki Status

I have had a lot of requests for flipcharts over the past few weeks and I promise I will get those up on my Flipchart Wiki soon. I just started a new position in St. Louis and I'm trying to get settled in. Some of the Flipcharts I previewed at the Promethean ActivEducator Conference in Fort Worth can be found on Promethean Planet. Here's a link to my "Blank Refrigerator Magnets" Enjoy.

http://www.prometheanplanet.com/en-us/Resources/Item/53841/blank-fridge-magnets/

Testing Blogger Droid App

I recently downloaded the Blogger Droid app for my HTC EVO. I'm hoping to blog a little more and provide more information as I come across it. So if you're reading this and can see my test pic... it worked.

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Bookr

What is it: A colleague of mine, ITS Happening, shared this with me today.  It's called Bookr.  It's a site that allows you to create photobooks from images found on Flickr.  You type in the tags of images that you are looking for and it searches for you.  You select the images that you want to use and then type in some text.  Very easy to use. Here's my example I made in about 2 minutes. I was thinking about summer already.  The only downside is that you are unable to save it so that you can edit it later.

How to integrate it into the classroom: There are many useful ways to integrate Bookr into the classroom. Here are a few suggestions.  Please feel free to suggest more.

• Retell an event in history in your own words and using images that make it a little more interesting
• Student can share an event that happened in their life that was important to them
• Students can develop their descriptive writing 
• Teachers can create a book of problems or scenarios with images to guide the learning
• Practice inferencing in a story
• Students can create a science journal over a concept just learned
• Once a narrative has been written, students can then add images to go along with it