It's No Mystery

Good teaching takes time. If a teacher wants to have a lesson go well, he/she has to do homework. If using a prepared lesson plan, the teacher must read through it to determine what pieces of the lesson she wants to emphasize, and what can be left out. She must also prepare materials in advance. To meet the needs of all learners, the teacher might need find a variety of resources, utilize various strategies, or plan several activities. All of this takes time.
It's no mystery. The real puzzle is, "where do they find the time?" My hats off all the teachers out there who have solved the time conundrum.

FFFBI
Fin, Fur, and Feather Bureau of Investigation is brought to you by National Geographic and WBGH. It offers mysteries to solve while teaching kids about world cultures. This humorous site integrates math, science, music and history.

ReadWriteThink
This popular sites has a couple of activities for students. The first one is called Make a Mystery Puzzle. This activity, which can be used for book clubs, has children and teens explore this popular type of writing in more detail by making a puzzle. It also encourages them to invent and write their own mysteries.
The second activity, Mystery Cube, is an interactive that helps students identify the elements of this genre.

Mystery! The Disappearance of Polleyanne Fishenchips
This fun interactive comes from PBS. Students follow the clues and use careful reading and inferences to solve the crime.

Trick or Treat

I love Halloween! Besides Christmas, it is my favorite holiday. When my kids were young, I would always make their costumes. I wasn't going to have them go through the embarrassment of wearing a cheaply made store-bought costume like those I always had to wear as a kid. The best costume I made was for my daughter when she was about 4 years old. It was a jack-o-lantern made from a big orange sweatshirt and some black and green felt. I will always remember how cute she looked in it!
I think I used to get just as excited as my kids about going trick-or-treating. Our Halloween tradition has always been that I cook chili for the first time of the season for supper. Then, back in the day, I would take the kids out in search of the best treats while Dave, my husband, stayed home and passed out candy. Once home, all the candy went into a big bowl for all to share. I loved walking around with the kids and a few neighbors. I miss those days now that my kids are big.

History of Halloween
Check out everything Halloween at http://www.history.com/. This site has the history of the holiday, videos to watch, games to play, information about Halloween around the world, and more. The site also highlights other holidays as well.

Hands-on Halloween Science
Check out Steve Spangler's site for some fun Halloween related science activities.

Countess Blood's Spooky Midis, Wavs and Mp3's
Cool site for students to visit to jazz up a spooky podcast or movie. Audio files in midi, wav, and mp3 format.

I Font to Hold Your Hand

As a teacher, I like creating visuals to aid in teaching. Things like presentations, handouts, posters, worksheets, etc. As a teacher with an elementary background, I sometimes like to "cutesy" them up. That's why I love perusing free font sites. Way back in the day, Comic Sans Serif, Kristen, and Jokerman had it goin' on!!!! If I handed out a worksheet to my class that was printed with Jokerman font, the lesson turned into a fiesta, complete with a Mariachi band. Oh, the good times.

These days, I am no longer creating worksheets, but am still having a love-affair with fonts. There are some great sites out there for those of us with the need to have juvenile fonts for elementary, and those of us with more grownup tastes.



Dafont
Dafont has lots of cool fonts



UrbanFonts
UrbanFonts is another site for perusing a large number of fonts.

FontStruct
FontStruct is a fun little site for those with a creative side. At the site, you can follow the "fontstructions" to build your own font using the "fontstuctor" Keep the font for your own use, or choose to share it with others. There is a gallery of fonts to download or edit too. Fun project for art class, web design class, or anyone! Thanks to edorigami.edublogs.org for sharing this site.

What the Font
What the Font is a service that allows you to upload an image of a specific font, and they search for possible matches for that font. Cool.

Facebook - Connecting Near and Far

My daughter created a profile for me on Facebook last year when she was preparing to leave for a study abroad in Costa Rica. She wanted me to use Facebook so I would have a means to look at all the pictures she posted of her beautiful temporary home. She hooked me up with some of my nieces and nephews so that I would have some friends right away. Immediately, one of the teen aged nieces became suspicious of my reasons for wanting to be her friend. She was afraid that I was going to tell her mom (my sister) things I read on her wall, etc. Little does she know that my sister and I learned a long time ago to not tell on anyone. This goes way back to when we were kids. If we would have started telling our parents on each other, we would still be grounded today.

Soon my list of friends grew from 4 to 7, then 15 and now, as of five minutes ago, 23! Some of my friends work down the hall from me. Some used to be my students, and some my former classmates. My newest friend is my most long-distance friend, Gao Fan, from China. Fan was a visiting teacher in our district for three semesters. Even with all the communication tools we have today, it is not too easy to keep in touch with the time difference. I love that I can now peek into my friend's life from so far away whenever I want to! (Well, except when I am at work. My district blocks Facebook : ( )

Doodle
Doodle is a polling site that is very easy to use. You can quickly create an event-scheduling poll, or an options poll. When you create the poll, a URL is issued so you can notify pollees of the poll. If you sign up for a free account, you can have the poll results sent to your email, and save polls. My favorite part is that there is now an iGoogle widget!
Try my poll now
http://www.doodle.com/9edeudwp66i353td

Oldies...with a Twist!

When I really started getting into technology about 12 years ago, I learned about a program that I thought was the coolest thing going! It was a presentation software that would really help me illustrate important points in my lectures. Yep, I am talking about PowerPoint. Wow, I was in love with creating presentations with bulleted lists, varied transitions, and even that cool typewriter text animation. My students were awed and amazed.
Time passed and I found out that my 5th graders were coming to school knowing more about PowerPoint than I did. Then came the point that students would groan if I showed a .ppt or asked them to create one. I thought that the program had finally run it's course. Seemed a shame, especially since I had a gazillion presentations already created.
I think there is still a chance for PowerPoint. With the integration capabilities with other software like Promethean and eInstruction, just to name a couple, (and don't forget Google Docs!) teachers can dust off those old presentations and breathe new life into them.

Pete's PowerPoint Station
This site has hundreds of presentations organized by subject area for grades 2-8. Many of the presentations can be downloaded, but some are view-only. Why start at square one?

School District PowerPoint Archives
I am sharing two district sites that have a good listing of education PowerPoints. First is NEBO school district in Springville, Utah. Check out their archives here.
(The other site is not responding. I will edit post when the site is working.)

PowerPoint Palooza
Over 200 presentations related to American History, World History, Global Studies and others.

Blog Action Day: Poverty - I Don't Know You

Today I am participating in Blog Action Day 08 - Poverty. I feel at a loss at what to write, though I feel compelled to write. I chose my title because I have never known poverty. I don't know many people who have. Last spring, I had surgery and couldn't eat for a day. I was starving! Starvation - I don't know you.
When my husband and I were first married, I was still in college and we had a baby. We ate lots of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese because we were so poor. Poverty - I don't know you.
When I was 10 years old, my parents were divorced. I lived with my mom and brother and sister in rent-controlled housing and qualified for reduced lunches at my elementary school. Desperation - I don't know you.
I have taught the poor, desperate and hungry. Their lives are not easy, yet they don't give up. They come to school, watch out for their siblings while their parents look for work, handouts or drugs. They find room in their hearts to give their teacher a smile, a hug, a dirty stuffed animal for Christmas.
Poverty - I don't know you, but I want to help. Please go to Blog Action Day 08 and see what you can do too.

Integration

We often refer to "technology integration" as if it is a task in itself. My job title even has the phrase in it. However, the quest shouldn't be to integrate technology into the curriculum, but to use technology to integrate the curriculum.
If schools were to take this approach, it might not seem so daunting to teachers. Maybe it would even free up some time for teachers to learn new technology skills and search for resources if they were integrating subjects. Just how to integrate is the tough part though. In an elementary setting, teachers are concerned about teaching students the basics; as well they should be. In the middle and high school settings, teachers are concerned about teaching the standards for their specific curricular area so that the schools make AYP. When does one have time to integrate, and why should a teacher do another teacher's job for them?
Teaching the whole child should be the job of every teacher. Just like doing crunches alone won't get rid of that spare tire, doing math facts alone won't make an accountant. Letting go of the fear of falling test scores if you take time to teach about careers in your math class is tough for teachers. However, doesn't it make more sense to take a class period to talk about a career in math so that students see the connections between what they are doing today and where it can take them in the future, than to have the counselor come in at any random time to talk about many different careers in a 30 minute lesson? Doesn't seem like rocket science to me. But then hey, I teach P.E. so I don't have to worry about it!

Math Mastery
Math Mastery is an online math curriculum that utilizes videos to teach students in grades 2-8 math skills. The videos are engaging and interactive. The curriculum does have a cost. The cool thing I found at this site is the Daily Brains Library which is free. The library has hundreds of word problems that are categorized by subject area. The problems are relatively short and make for an easy way for math teachers to integrate science, history, geography, health, and language arts into their lessons.

Google Lit Trips
This site utilizes Google Earth to combine literature, geography, and history for a wonderful cross curricular experience for students.

Like an Email Joke, Only Better

I am teaching a graduate class called Collaborative Tools for Enrichment. The class is really about web 2.0 tools. Last night after our first class, one of the participants, and fellow Twitterer pmcanulty, sent me the video below. I followed the link and found it took me to Jeff Utecht's blog, The Thinking Stick. I watched the exceptional video and immediately wanted to post about it. Unfortunately, I didn't right away, but later discovered that two other people had emailed it to me AND I noticed a fellow Twitterer, ddraper, posted it just a little bit ago.
While I was watching the video, I noticed a cool app running that allows viewers' comments to be posted throughout the video. I decided to explore it, and before I could write this post, another fellow Twitterer, AngelaMaiers, posted about the app (see below)!
So, how many of you have gotten the email about "Pumpkins Who Drink Too Much" this week, and how many times? At least the video clip and the app are worthwhile.

Schools We Need
This video clip should be watched by EVERYONE. By Chris Lehmann, it covers 21st Century Skills, school reform, and what is truly best for kids.


Viddler
Turns out the app I was referring to is actually a video hosting service. With Viddler's free service, you can Upload as many videos as you want—you get nearly unlimited space. You can also record videos directly to the site using your webcam, post comments and tags at specific points in the video, and share your videos with RSS and iTunes. Best part: FREE!

Links to Learning

Yesterday I learned many new things in a way I never thought I would. I learned by clicking links. I started out by reading a post in my BeTwittered window that caught my eye. The post was by smhamilton who wrote about looking for sites for a web 2.0 class she is teaching. I am also teaching a web 2.0 class beginning today. smhamilton had two links in her post, so I checked them out. The first one was for http://www.sitemark.com/, where I learned about organizing and sharing my bookmarks(see below), and the second was for http://gettingtrickywithwikis.wikispaces.com/. This wiki, by Levna Shearing, has many ideas for ways to spice up your wiki.
I was intrigued by a link for another post by the author called Cogs for Blogs. I clicked that link and learned, among other things, how to add an "Email Me" link to my blog. Check it out to the right! I also clicked another link and found out how to make cool new videos. Read all about it below.
Thanks to a Twitter friend and a few link-clicks, I have learned some cool new things. Oh, and by the way, thanks to many Twitter friends, I learn stuff this way all the time! Now, click the links below to learn something too!

Sitemark
http://www.sitemark.com/ is a social bookmarking website that allows you to save, organize and share your bookmarks. Cool to me because bookmarks are in a thumbnail format. Great for visual people such as myself.

Viddix
http://www.viddix.com/ is a new video platform that allows users to add all kinds of webcontent to their video timeline. Check out the tour for more information.

Research and the Web

I could write an incredibly long post on using the Internet to do research. I am just too busy to do so today! I have run across a couple of tools that can help students capture specific information on the Web along with the link and organize that information in a neat and concise way.

Google Notebook
Google Notebook is a free service offered by Google that provides a simple way to save and organize clips of information when conducting research online. This personal browser tool permits a user to write notes, and to clip text, images, and links from pages during browsing. These are saved to an online "notebook" with sharing and collaboration features. Notes can be added to each clip for ease of organization. If you have the Google toolbar version 5, it allows for a mini window to place your notes in.


Clipmarks
Clipmarks is similar to Google Notebook in that you can save specific information from a web page. The Clipmarks plugin lets you clip specific pieces of web pages, then share what you clip with your friends on Facebook, MySpace or anywhere else. Unlike bookmarks that let you share a link to an entire page, our free clip button lets you capture and share the highlights from the page. Clips can also be saved privately, emailed or printed.