Teacher+Stuff

Digital Storytelling: Here is a site with a wealth of information!
http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools

A gaggle of collaborative classroom techniques: VoiceThread, Cover It Live, Etherpad, Instructify, and more. media type="custom" key="4555186" VoiceThread Do's and Don'ts (created by Bill Ferriter) The simplybox which has all the sites mentioned [|www.simplybox.com/public/?id=109459] A great site to discover all this fun is [|www.instructify.com] Why not just use the RSS feed and have it come to you? Wordle can be found at [|www.wordle.net] Those phone polls? [|www.polleverywhere.com] The microblogging site? [|www.coveritlive.com] Great collaborative sites: [|www.google.com] (go to docs) or [|www.etherpad.com] or [|www.zoho.com]or [|www.spinscape.com] A great post it site: [|www.wallwisher.com] Want to make these cool web recordings? [|www.jing.com] and/or [|www.screencast.com] Edutopia Top Ten Technology Tricks Horizon Report on the Future of Technology K12

**And don't forget - the best of the best - wikipages! Start your own for yourself or for the students to create.** [|www.wikispaces.com]
Henrico County Public Schools

__**Authentic Presentations(VoiceThread) in the Classroom. October 12, 2009.**__
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__**Sites mentioned during this presentation:**__
[|www.voicethread.com] [|www.polleverywhere.com] [|www.wordle.net] the simply box- shown below but if blocked [] the voicethread do's and don't's worksheet Edutopia Top Ten Technology Tricks Horizon Report on the Future of Technology K12

__**Did You Know? This great Sony video says it all...**__
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====WOW! All that technology and ideas can be overwhelming- even for a geek like me. This __**Simple Top Ten pdf from Edutopia**__ is sweet! Short, clear, concise, and visually appealing. Great ideas that you can implement in no time at all! Check it out.====

__**Tag Clouds and Wordle as an beginning- of- the- year Icebreaker!**__ go to [|www.wordle.net] and with a little prompting you have an uber-modern approach to the traditional icebreaker. Here's a picture of a sample.



__**Google Earth fun**__ @http://www.gearthhacks.com/

__**Artistic Fun**__ bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php allows users to create magazine covers using Flickr pictures blabberize.com allows users to create talking pictures by selecting an image and recording their own voice-overs kerpoof.com allows users to create their own cartoons

__**Video creation**__ www.animoto.com Quick movies with great music you can embed in your wiki www.xtranormal.com makes text into a movie www.animoto.com quick video production with images and music.

__**Free - Large As You Like - Posters**__ I encourage you to use the not copyrighted images found on creative commons sites (listed below) but [|blockposters.com] will take any image and print it on 8x11" paper which you can piece together (like a puzzle) for the largest poster you would like.

**__How to download and convert videos from Utube and place them in a PowerPoint.__** There are lots of resources for this item and it is different for a Mac rather than a PC but give it a try! There are lots of ways to do this and they are explained in the powerpoint explanation below but one short way is go to[| www.zamzar.com] and post the url from the utube video and upload.They will convert (you want .wmv for a PC or .mov for Mac quicktime) and they send you a link via email. Fairly reliable stuff.

__**TED - Technology, Education, and Design**__ Fantastic website with superb videos to foster discussion across all groups. I just can't recommend it enough! I'm including one of my favorites. [|www.Ted.com]

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Sources for Images (especially for VoiceThreads but good for any project)
Courtesy of one of my favorite technology guru/educator Bill Ferriter ([] [] Utter the word Wikipedia in most schools and you'll be met with grumbles, won't you? Most teachers see Wikipedia---the free online encyclopedia maintained by thousands of Internet users---as the root of all digital evil! "It's unreliable!" we cry. "You can't trust the content that you find there." And while some of those arguments may be true, Wikipedia users are some of the most open content creators in the world. Wikimedia connects to a collection of images and videos posted in Wikipedia that are often copyright free---or free for use in most situations with nothing more than a citation of the original source. This site will introduce you to the Wikimedia collection, which is sorted by category and nothing short of impressive. [|http://www.morguefile.com] Like Wikimedia, Morguefile is designed as a warehouse of images that are copyright free and available to any user for any project with little restriction. The photographers who share their images in Morguefile are working to create a set of reference images on common topics for the world to use. They take great satisfaction in lowering the barrier to incorporating high quality photography into school-related projects and often only request an image citation or an email for a picture to be used. As described on Morguefile's website, "The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. This is the world wide web's morguefile." [] Flickr is another one of those websites that has probably earned its share of grumble from teachers and district technology leaders in your community, right? Chances are that it may even be blocked by your district's firewall! And while there are legitimate reasons for concern with Flickr---users can definitely find inappropriate content posted by others!---Flickr also has an absolutely INCREDIBLE collection of images that photographers have made available under [|"creative commons" licensing]. Images found in Flickr's creative commons gallery can literally be used for almost any project that is related to education with nothing more than a credit to the original photographer. Because the quality of the images shared in Flickr are so remarkable---and the size of the Flickr CC collection is huge---this is a resource that teachers are going to want to explore when creating Voicethread presentations. [] One of the most valuable lessons that students can learn by using digital warehouses like Flickr Creative Commons is how to give proper citations to the photographers whose images they use. Often, the importance of giving credit to photographers for images is poorly understood by children, who have grown used to Googling for images and using whatever they find. Image Codr is a free service that can help teachers and students to act responsibly when it comes to the use of Flickr images. By coping and pasting the link to a Flickr image into Image Codr, users are automatically informed of the range of uses allowed by the original photographer and given an automatically generated Creative Commons citation for use in digital projects.
 * Wikimedia**
 * Morguefile**
 * Flickr Creative Commons**
 * Image Codr**

[] Recognizing the changing nature of new media, the Library of Congress is working to make as many images as possible available to users in a digital format. This link connects to the Library of Congress's Print Reading Room, which contains almost a million digital images. What makes these images particularly valuable is that they are grouped into user-friendly categories like "People," "History," and "The Environment."
 * The Library of Congress Print Reading Room**

[] One governmental agency that takes remarkable pictures is NASA...and we shouldn't be surprised! Heck, they've got some serious cameras in some seriously amazing places, don't they? This link connects to NASA's image gallery, which contains thousands of pictures that your children will find fascinating. With a few clicks of the mouse, you'll be able to find shots of stars, planets and space craft that will spark your imagination---and (like all images taken by government organizations), these pictures are a part of the common domain and not subject to copyright protections. [] As described on the Trek Earth website: "The underlying theme of TrekEarth is learning more about the world through photography. TrekEarth fosters this by allowing photographers to display their work grouped by regions in a supportive and orderly environment. This is accomplished by an easy-to-use system which encourages people to critique each other's work. Integrated with this system are [|forums] designed to encourage discussion about specific photos, countries, and general topics."
 * NASA's Image Gallery**
 * Trek Earth**

[] One of the most interesting uses for Voicethread has been to engage students in conversations around political cartoons. The images are interesting to students---and are great ways to teach students about bias and hidden messages. This website is a terrific source of political cartoons from around the world. The images are categorized by topic and the artists are categorized by country. If you decide to work with political cartoons, consider sharing images from artists in different countries who have different perspectives about the same issue. 
 * Cagle Cartoons**

Citing Images
Luckily, Voicethread makes citing images easy. First, each image that is imported into Voicethread can be tagged with a title and a weblink. This allows users to include a direct link to any image that they've retreived online. More importantly, however, Voicethread allows users to upload documents to their strands of conversation as well. That means that users can create a "Works Cited" page in a word processing application and upload it at the end of their Voicethread presentations.

And here's a PDF created by the University of Cincinnatti that outlines the rules for citing images: [|CitingImages_PDF_000.pdf]

=**Free, legal, music sources**= [] [] [] [] [] [] [|http://www.musopen.com/] This site allows you to embed music!

Micro-blogging in the classsroom!
 * __Cover It Live__**

Looking for a way to make your classes more interactive? [|Cover It Live]allows for live blogging in class and there is more! You can use Google Doc surveys and import quick polls into your class event. As students listen they can comment, record, you can interject those polls, they can see the response and best yet you can save the whole session, post it to your blog, and those absent students can view it for themselves. It's cutting edge and above the curve of 21st century standards. IT'S FREE!

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 * Practice Cover It Live**

**Easy and fun source of great tips and tricks**

__**Instructify**__:
==== The educators' dream site. This is where I find all the easy, fun technology ideas. Full of easy to use, engaging 21st century ideas and links. Left navigation bar arranges everything by subject. It is incredibly easy to use this site! [|Instructify]====

__**Flowing Data**__
An exciting way to show data- visualize it! Check out [|Flowingdata.com]. FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.

**Collaborative discussions in the classroom!**

__**Voice Thread.**__
====The newest form of web 2.0 discussions. Post up any material (images, presentations, documents) and anyone can offer comments. They post by cell phone, microphone, video, or simple text. They can use their own photos or any image. They can doodle too! You could have a discussion among your class or with a class halfway around the world. Best discussion group ever! But far more engaging! I've enclosed samples below. [|Voice Thread]==== One suggestion: I haven't had time to adapt these VoiceThread forms yet but NC teacher Bill Ferriter of the blog //The Tempered Radical// uses these accountability, process, and permission worksheets.

My VoiceThreads - click on each side icon to see/hear comments.

Civil War and Reconstruction //(My lesson learned...all students commented on 1st image only...next time I rearranged to accommodate comments on each slide)// media type="custom" key="3098298"

Our newest VoiceThread on The League of Nations' failure to prevent World War II - //An adaptation of Mike Hasley's excellent interwar activity// //(My lesson learned...group work, assigned slides, garnered more exacting comments)//

media type="custom" key="3480342" BEST ONE! Fun US History VoiceThread - Comparing Presidents FDR and Obama //(My lesson learned...aha! this worked well. Requiring students to comment on both slides worked. I also linked websites to each slide for further investigation by students)// media type="custom" key="3956627"

**Need to make a video - quickly? Use to spark interest in a subject or to capture a summary!**

__**Animoto**:__
====Easy as pie. Only 3 steps and your students can be creating this cool, professionally designed mini movies. I use them as introductions to units...it engages the students. In turn, my students have used them to summarize significant historical issues. I've included a student created summary on the Mexican War (selected by their peers as the Academy Award winner!) and a sample of what I used to generate interest in a new unit on Enlightenment. [|Animoto]==== media type="custom" key="3093454" media type="custom" key="3097762"

**A simple way to grab pictures of websites that link to the sites themselves - then box them to share!** __**Simply Box**__ Great way to share predetermined good web research sites with students or you could use it as a collaboration tools. Simply Box allows you to gather web sites to share and it is simple as pie! Check out my favorite collection of technology fun -and you can keep it up to date with Twitter or Delicious. [] I've used this to direct students to acceptable research sites with great success. You can email them to others or make them public. Here is my fun technology box which I'll share with you so you can see how it works. Just click on the arrows. media type="custom" key="4156441"

**How to make movies of what you use or "do" on the web.** ====Screencast is the way to go. Just think, you could load up a presentation, voice over the comments, then email it or post it for any student to access. Come see me for help or here is the link. [|Screencast.]====

Instead of going to all your favorite sites to see what is new let them come to you. A RSS feeder allows you to have one reader page where all the updates come to you.
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**Want a clear explanation of the credit crisis?**
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**__An explanation of the benefits to be found in Student Led Conferencing__** media type="file" key="Student Led Conferencing Currituck M Lynde 09.mov" width="300" height="300"