Teacher Trinkets

Fliggo For Better Video Posting

2009-07-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

YouTube can be awesome, but first and foremost, it's usually blocked in any school district. Even if it's not, there is a lot of junk out there, and teachers just KNOW that some students will wander around looking at rap videos or exploding mentos videos.

Fliggo is a great alternative. You can still embed and upload videos, and you can even link to YouTube videos. The difference is that you can control the site and customize it to what you need. You can change the appearance of the site, control the privacy of it, and best of all it doesn't take a lot of technical know how. I wish I had known about this earlier - I could have posted all the science videos my students made, without worrying about random strangers looking at it. What a great tool, especially if you are worried about your student's privacy!

SlideShare

2009-07-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

This past year, I was faced with the challenge of teaching 4th and 5th graders how to use computers. A great majority of them had never really used one, and even the few who did were unfamiliar with the terms and use - we spent a long time talking about how to select choices with radio buttons, how to use the trackpad, and how to save files. But there were never complaints, and anytime I asked my kids to do any task that would have usually been met with groans, I told them we would do it on the computers and they did everything I asked so as to get on the laptops ASAP. They were so excited to use Power Point, and were really positive on their feedback of other student's presentations. They asked if I could share the presentations on my Science Class blog, but I soon tired of embedding.

SlideShare is a great alternative. You can create an account, add tags, and even mark if you don't want others to download the presentations. It works for documents as well, and you can search other people's documents to see if there is anything you need! I shared my jeopardy power points, so that I can just email other teachers a link and they can use it directly from the site, or download to their computer. Also, I feel like I always email attachments and then the next day improve the file somehow. This way, I can improve the file and the changes will keep updating the original file. Click the link above to see what I mean, and you can leave a link to your page in the comments as well!

Google Gadgets For Vocab

2009-05-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

Google Docs' official blog just announced Gadgets that are perfect for classroom use. You can read all about it on the blog, but here is a quick rundown:

Flash Cards: Put your vocab words into the spreadsheet, add the gadget, and voila! You can play a little game to check out your vocab skills.

Word Study: Play vocab games, and you can type in your own clues or have them fetched from the internet!

Interactive Word Search: Great way to help with spelling, and you can play in the browser.

What a great way to get kids excited about vocabulary. I can see some of my students even working on these outside of school!

Online Science Demos

2009-05-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

Part of my current position is integrating technology into the pre-existing Science curriculum. The extra challenge is justifying it to the teachers who have taught (exceedingly well) for years without computers. I think that University of Colorado's Physics site is a great example of a worthy investment, time-wise for the students. My favorite part is that is simulates lots of concepts, and lets you play with variables to really get a good idea of how things work.

You can employ this site in a few ways:

show it on an LCD projector with the whole class, while discussing/asking for hypotheses as to what will happen next
You can let the kids loose on computers in groups to play around with it.
There are also lesson plans for certain demos, if you want to use those as well.

Please feel free to look at the lesson plan I made for the 4th grade Electricity and Magnetism unit.

Need some words translated?

2009-05-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

I speak pretty decent Spanish, but there are times when I need to make a phone call home to a Spanish speaking family, and I get really nervous about saying the wrong thing. Of course, I write out a script, but I also keep my web browser open to Google Translate in case I need some support on the fly.

Of course, it's not perfect, but I think translating has come a long way since Babelfish, and it's quick and easy to go back and forth (there is a "swap" button at the bottom, to switch translations quickly). It also came in handy during my French course!

Bonus: It can also translate web pages - useful for sending home to parents in-class blogs or textbooks resources. Check out this blog in French!

Play movies in class!

2009-02-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

I wrote earlier about how to play YouTube in the classroom even if it's blocked by district firewalls. I mention Miro which is a great player of videos, where you can search, subscribe to channels (I love Discovery Science!) and download videos to play later. Here is a "How To" to get you started:

How To Use Miro

kittehs help wif science!

2008-11-12T15:33:00.000-08:00

There is a quasi-cult following to "I Can Has a Cheezburger" blog, which is a lot of funny pictures of cats (lolcatz) and very grammatically incorrect captions. I think they are funny, some people think they are hilarious, but it is unique sense of humor you have to have. Anyways, here is a science picture!

Google Docs/Forms for quizzes

2008-11-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

I love the idea of using Google Docs to have students type up reports, book answers, or whatever, but I still hae to figure out how to get around getting 200 accounts for my elementary school kids, whose parents might not want them to have email. Until then, I realized I can still use Google Forms!

Google Forms allows you to create a questionaire, survey or quiz and let your kids fill it out simply by accessing a web page. Of course, the URL is nasty but I just shortened it with TinyURL with the name of the quiz, it's much easier that way.

Sample Form (please fill out!)

After (or while) the students are filling out the forms, you can get a spreadsheet of results WITH graphs of how they answered! Check out the responses to my Sample Form.

You can make questions mandatory or optional, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the spreadsheet, and you can sort the spreadsheet by last name (I made two seperate questions to facilitate this, "first name" and "last name", and "teacher's name" since I am in 8 different classrooms).

Finally, my favorite part - you can select a column to code for right or wrong answers. I asked it to highlight everything in red that said "no", "east" or "west" (to answer, what are magnetic poles called), and whatever else signaled a wrong answer. Or you can code green when you ask an essay question that signals a correct answer for using key vocabulary (pole, attract, iron for magnet concepts). It makes everything so easy to grade!

How does using Google Forms help you in your classes? Any questions or tips?

Classroom Blog

2008-11-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

I obviously have been lagging in my posts for this blog, but I wanted to share what I have been spending time on in class. I made a blog specifically for my class and have been encouraging my kids to use it and comment on it. We actually spent some time playing some science games, and then I asked each to comment on the game with a tip, a question, or a statement about the game. It's pretty exciting, and it gets the kids used to computers and teaches them to be responsible about computers and the internet. Plus they love using the laptops!

In my 5th grade classes, I am working on teaching them Power Point by assigning them a few words, and having them use PP as flash cards. They will then teach the words to their classmates. We'll see how it goes, I may post some up here!

How do you integrate teaching technology into your curriculum?

Live Blogging at the Innovative Learning Conference

2008-10-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

Follow me on Twitter @ilc2008 for notes, power points, and TONS of resources! I'm here Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday... so interesting!

Teacher Comedy!

2008-10-08T17:53:00.001-07:00

Ok, I love comics and jokes and laughing, so here we go - a funny trinket, courtesy of Toothpaste For Dinner...

YouTube in the classroom!

2008-10-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

Wow, why did I not include this earlier! This trinket comes from one of my favorite websites ever, Lifehacker.com - a forum for, well everything. They published a post on the Top 10 YouTube Hacks which is a teacher's dream!

My biggest problem is showing YouTube videos in class, because my district blocks YouTube. One way is to use TeacherTube.com but they may not always have the video you need. Solution? I use Miro (get it at www.miro.com), which fetches the videos and downloads them (beginner) so it's a file instead of a webpage, but you can also subscribe to channels (advanced) and it will automatically download new videocasts for you! For instance, I subscribed to the Amazing Human Body channel, and anytime I needed to fill 3 minutes in class, I had a video ready to go on superhuman strength, bones, or muscles.

In conclusion, there are some GREAT Math, Science, and of course English and History videos, so use them in your class, even if you have a firewall :) Please please PLEASE use the comment section to link to your favorite videos, or talk about other YouTube hacks!

Free Energy Workshop in the Bay Area

2008-09-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

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