Oct 17 2009
Neok12.com is a website that lists educational videos by subject. All videos can be viewed directly on sites such as Youtube as well, but Neok12 makes it much easier to find them. The videos illustrate a wide array of subjects including math, social studies and science.
Sep 22 2009
by James Hollis from Teachers love Smartboards Blog
If you’re a teacher looking for a good online resource for studying vocabulary, you might want to review the WordAhead Vocabulary Videos and Flash Cards site. One of the reasons I like this site is it allows students to take a greater role in their own education, whether they’re studying for the SAT or the ACT or whether they are using the site as an ESL resource.
The WordAhead site allows you to choose from hundreds of words to review in video format. Each video uses graphics, text, and audio to describe the word, give it’s definition, and present the word in various contextual situations to provide a deeper understanding of the word. You can also view the videos in fullscreen which is great for displaying on the SMARTBoard.
Read the rest of the article here.
Dec 21 2008
So I’ve decided to give the Radical Nation their Christmas present a bit early this year—and it’s a home-made gem that you might just find to be your favorite gift under the tree. Here it is:
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “This guy is giving us an Excel spreadsheet for Christmas and he wants us to be happy about it? Why didn’t he just bust out a few hundred digital fruitcakes?”
Before you jump to any conclusions about the worthiness–or worthlessness—of my offering, though, be sure to give this spreadsheet a good once over. What you’ll find is that it’s a pretty complex little data management document that you might just be able to take real advantage of. I know my colleagues are pretty jazzed about the whole thing. In fact, it’s the first holiday gift that I ever truly made them happy with. Read the rest of the post here.
Dec 14 2008
by
Detecting Plagiarism
1. The most obvious way to check a student’s work for plagiarism is to do a quick search on Google. If you notice that a student has strung together some phrases that you don’t think they’ve written, put the suspected phrase inside quotation marks and search. You may want to search on Google as well as on Google Scholar.
2. The Plagiarism Checker, created as a project for the University of Maryland, is an easy tool for detecting plagiarism. Simply enter a chunk of text into the search box and the Plagiarism Checker will tell you if and from where something was plagiarized.
3. Doc Cop offers a free service for checking small documents and a free service for checking documents against each other. Doc Cop also offers a fee based service that will check large documents and do a more comprehensive check than that offered for free.
4. Glatt Plagiarism service offers a simple self-detect program that you or students can use. Like the Plagiarism Checker you simply type or paste in a document to detect plagiarism.
Dec 14 2008
by Kevin Jarrett @ NCS-Tech
The SLJ Summit last November was chock full of cool library/media specialists who, like my awesome colleagues Marianne Gill and Cheryl Bonsall, “get it” – today’s media center is literally the center of modern media, the nexus where the printed word, audio, video and the Internet converge in schools. Among the signs of this convergence is the integration of books into the online/mass media world that people, particularly kids, are immersed in. I’m writing today about The 39 Clues, a series of books published by Scholastic that combines a cool adventure story with an amazing interactive website and more.
I don’t recall where I first heard about this site but I checked it out and holy moly, has this got potential. Think Harry Potter gets a MySpace account, starts playing Warhammer Online and begins posting his videos on YouTube. Can you imagine harnessing the power of those communities? Talk about impact … whoa!
This is what it’s all about, people … technology being used to foster a love of reading … or is a great story (reading) being used to develop online communities? Take a look at these screenshots!
Main site:
Create an account, answer some questions to determine your ‘family’ to play the game:
Your family is chosen based on your answers!
The game dashboard:
Ready to begin my first mission:
This is positively brilliant. You have to read the books (and scour the website as well as other media) to find clues and solve the puzzle, using your superior reasoning and resarching skills the entire time. Just starting my first adventure to get a sense of it all, the website is incredibly immersive, with incredible production values, rich graphics, outstanding layout and more. There’s even an integrated search capability. The entire experience just screams “information literacy” and “visual literacy.” Imagine what this book could do for the public library in your town! I can see kids sprawled out all over the place, immersed in the books, others searching online for clues, still others meeting in small groups to discuss their adventures. How cool is this? The fact that Scholastic is behind it is also interesting, I wonder what it would take to get The 39 Clues into schools? Could this be their plan? I’m guessing not, since the educational market is a fraction of the general worldwide market, but still…
Check out http://www.the39clues.com/ when you can – it’s really an amazing convergence of multiple technologies that I can see has terrific potential to educate while it entertains!
-kj-
Dec 13 2008
Sparktop.org and Garfield creator Jim Davis have lent their creative spirits to help kids enjoy an interactive website called Professor Garfield. That’s right, everyone’s favorite fat cat is helping to educate young ones in a variety of subject areas like math, language, arts, science and more. Through a plethora of high-energy interactive flash games, students can have fun while not even realizing that they are learning. The games and activities are slick, fun, and downright hilarious. I had a great time exploring the many aspects of the site, and I have been out of school for hundreds of years.
My personal favorite is a reading game called Reading Ring where you’re required to place the panels of a Garfield comic strip in order, and then answer questions about the strip in order to defeat your opponent in a wrestling match. For every 3 questions you get right, you win a round. The whole thing is framed by cartoony wrestling antics and sounds. In fact, the whole site is a little noisy, but luckily, there’s a “quiet mode” which allows you to turn off most of the sounds. Professor Garfield is a child of Sparktop.org, another site that gives students options for being creative on the web while learning their little hearts out. Between the two sites, your students will have plenty to do when they need something to keep them busy on the web. And if you’re a Garfield fan like me, you might enjoy spending time here as well. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN
Hunkin’s Experiments – Cool Cartoon Experiments for Your Classroom
