Free Energy Workshop in the Bay Area

PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electricity) is holding free Energy workshops in the bay area on October 4th.

Teachers who attend the 6-hour Solar Schools workshop will receive:

• $100 Saturday stipend for attending K-12 teachers.

• $400 "Science of Energy" Hands-on kit that explores energy

transformations from one form to others (chemical, electrical, motion,

sound, etc.).

• Grade-level Solar Energy Hands-on kit worth up to $350.

• Additional energy curriculum worth approximately $100.

• Strategies for teaching about energy in all content areas!

• Continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.

• Information on Bright Ideas grants and Solar Installation grants.

What a great deal!

See what is blocked before you click!

How many times a day do you google something, find a bunch of results, and then they are all blocked?! You know that you don't want your kids seeing certain things on the internet, so you are of course thankful for filters at school, but how frustrating can it be to click, back, click, back, click, back until you find a relevant page that isn't blocked? SO FRUSTRATING!

CoolPreviews is a nifty Firefox add-on for Windows, Mac, and Linux that you install and will let you see a preview of the webpage the link is connected too. This helps you figure out what you need faster, doesn't take as long as going back and forth between search results and each page, and will tell you right away if the site is blocked or not from behind your school's firewall.

There is a cool tutorial video about CoolPreviews if you still aren't convinced, and as always, feel free to leave thoughts or questions in the comments!

Search for yourself before your students find you!

We all know that you can "google" someone to find out a lot of information about them. Which means your students probably will do it at some point too. The best thing to do is search for yourself to see what is visible.

iSearch is a search engine that is specifically for people. It will find things from social networks, and compile info about any name. I had to go through a lot of Christina Green's to find me, but you can also narrow it down by city and other factors.

So, in conclusion, search for yourself and find those college pictures so you can have them taken down before your students find them and post them all over the school - just a word to the wise!

See who sees your site, and who reads your blog!

 Today's Trinket is more of a behind the scenes tool for teachers, and is probably for more advanced users. But feel free to ask questions of me in the comments!

Ok, I am a huge Goog-a-phile. They have so many things that are teacher friendly, and have really changed the way I use the internet. My latest favorite is Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track traffic to your site or blog. Web Analytics is a new up and coming field that looks and where people are looking at your site, how long they stay, how many repeat users you have, what pages they look at, etc. It's pretty simple to use, and very entertaining! 

For instance, a day after I started this blog I saw that I had 13 unique visitors to this site, which was viewed 20 times! That means that some of those 13 people went to my blog more than than others (let's call those people my favorites). I can also see that there are people in Mountain View looking at it (want to hire me yet Google?!) and also people in Illinois. The average time on the site is 2 minutes, so I know I need to make my posts short for their attention span, but it looks like people are reading it! 

So, sign up (you don't have a google account yet! Oh my! Get one NOW and turn your life around!) and put the code they give you into the HTML (lots of webpage tools or blog tools have a spot where you can "edit html", find that and stick it in - don't worry, it's invisible to everyone else!). Then watch the graphs, see if your children look at your site, and think about maybe how you can improve based on this info.

Any other ideas? Leave some comments for others to read!

TinyURL is a website where you can enter a long nasty web address and it will spit out a nice short one. This is great when you want to show students an article or website, but you want to send them to the direct page and its a million characters long. For instance, instead of asking each student to type in:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/09/11/national/a023751D20.DTL&tsp=1

to see an article in the SF Chronicle about how 9/11 is being remembered around the country, you could go to www.tinyurl.com, put that link in the box, and get out

http://tinyurl.com/4ulfde

So much easier!

Also, you can pick the ending! I chose http://tinyurl.com/green1 for my last name, but to make it easy you could also put Remember911 or something of your choosing at the end.

Enjoy!

Teacher Tech Tips and Tricks

Ok, so I kept thinking of all these ideas for how to use different websites and plug ins at school, and I get so excited I want to share everything! This is my way to do it. My idea is that someone will see something useful, and pass it on. As a teacher in a low income school, I know you can’t always assume everyone has a computer at home, so many things are in class, but for those with populations where computers are easily accessible, I will add cool stuff students can see from home too!

So, for starters, I invite you all to see my Life Science webpage at msgreenscience.googlepages.com, and more updates to come as I see fit