Fliggo For Better Video Posting

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!

Online Science Demos

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.

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!

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!