Tabbloid

Tabbloid is a neat tool for creating a pdf of your rss feeds. So if you have a some great math rss feeds but have teachers that are not inclined to to subscribe to rss feeds this would be a great way to introduce them to a wealth of information without having to set up an rss reader. The layout looks great and will arrive to in your inbox on your email. You do not need an account so even your students could set up their own tabbloid from rss feeds for current events, topics they are interested in, and much much more. Give it a try and see if you like it.

National Novel Writing Month

Even though the month of November is almost over, this site has a great challenge that could be used at any time for an English teacher. There are two sites, but they both have the same goal in mind, write the majority of a novel (50,000 words) in one month.
The first is the National Novel Writing Month also known as "NaNoWriMo".They provide you inspiration with help hints, forums to ask questions, and a Young Writers Program as well.
The Young Writers Program has a similar site as well but with it geared towards teenagers instead. They have games and suggestions on how to get rid of writers block.
This would be ambitious for any teacher to have their students write this much, but they could easily adapt this exercise across a semester or year.

I found three tools for use in the classroom from the NY Times "The Learning Network" today. "The Learning Network" is a blog by the NY times that reports on educational issues and provides some useful resources and tools.

The first is called News Quiz where they ask 5 questions about today's headlines. The NY Times include a link to the headlines of the day with the story's that the questions are based on. This is a Monday through Friday post that started on October 15, 2009. This would be a great warm up exercise for a social studies teacher or a reading teacher.

The second one is called "Fill-In" which is similar to a Mad Lib style exercise that is based on an article. It has been happening since October 23, 2009 but they had such an overwhelming positive response to it that they decided to make it a weekly event. They tie their "Fill-In" to a real news story and you can either have the students fill it in with their own words or you can give them a scrabmled list of words that were removed for the fill in the blank part of the story. The NY Times also gives you a link to the original story as well.

Finally, the NY Times provides a "Word of the Day" complete with pronucation and definitions. This is weekday post and they use words that most teenagers should learn. When you go to read more about the word they explain how often it has been used in NY Times articles and then try to use the word in context as well. They also have a link to a tool call the visual thesaurus as well.

Technology In The Classroom

Over the past 10 years technology, has a played an ever increasing role in how we teach and how students learn. Frontline, a PBS show takes an in-depth look at how technology is being used from use of cell phones, Internet censorship issues, what roles do paper books have, what are some of the drawbacks of the use of technology (the myth of multitasking), and many more topics. The web site is broken down into 4 large topics that are called concentration, games that teach, literacy, schools. I would spend some time exploring each category and watching the videos that seem interesting to you. It is a very up to date series of videos that takes a well balanced view towards the pros and cons of technology in schools and learning.

These videos could lead to some great discussions and writing prompts in an English classroom or tech integration class as these are the questions that we as educators are constantly dealing with.

Other Resources
USA Today: Future of Library - An article about the use of kindles in a library setting.
IS 339 - A public middle school in New York that was transformed using Google Apps.

uMapper - More than Just Maps

After reading one of my favorite blogs Free Technology for Teachers and his post about uMapper. I started to realize that the geodart game could be used for more than just maps. You can upload any image that you want to and create ballons on your image and create a random study aid for your students or have your students create them for themselves or classmates. So I decided to do one for the first 20 elements for the periodic table and included pictures on two of them. You can do either text or pictures but not both. With text you can add hyperlinks to other web pages as well. Have fun creating games to use for your students to study for your next skills assessment.

Image Stamper - Stay Copyright Left

Image Stamper is a sweet tool for those that use flickr for images for presentations as it allows you quickly keep all the important information you need about a particular photo. What is the license of the photo, who the author is, when did you first use it in case the license changes, and you can tag your photo with important key words for searching your database of stamped photos for later.
For me this tool instantly became a favorite of mine as it allows me to quickly save pictures to database that is searchable and not saving each photo as it own bookmark. I put a lot of presentations together and this will save me a ton of time when it comes to finding, storing, saving all the important information that I need from the image.

ABPI - Resources for Schools

ABPI - Resources for Schools: "ABPI Resources for Schools website provides curriculum related resources for use by teachers and their pupils. The resources have been developed by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and many link topics studied in school to their application in industry and in research."

Sometimes it feels like the UK is far ahead of us when it comes to an online resources for students, parents and teachers to use to help learn material. Here is a wonderful website that has interactive animations on a variety of science and health topics.

Teachers there are a lot of links to explore as well that can be found under the title useful links to even more science based websites.

Teaching to the Test

School Testing - leads you to the cartoon that I can no longer embed.
See Cartoons by Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

I am really glad that we as district have not reached this point yet. School should be more than what you know at a snapshot in time. Test should just be a gauge of what you know and don't know yet and should enlighten the teacher, student, and parent what the student still needs to work on before the end of the year. This is where tests that are objective based instead of chapter based would help everyone learn how to become "learners" and not "cramers" when it comes to the skills that are necessary so that no student is "Left Behind". Parents may think that schools are just teaching to the test, but that is where we as teachers need to find ways to showcase what we are doing in schools is more than just wrote memorization. I will be working with teachers on displaying examples of students work online so that anyone can see how creative students are today.

BioVisions

BioVisions

I learned about this site by watching a video on Ted TV by David Bolinsky on animating a cell for Harvard's BioVisions website. The website BioVisions was highlighted by ABC news and is available for viewing at their website which you can click on above. It last eight minutes and brings a dull lifeless picture of the cell to life and will allow your students a better understanding of how a cell really works. By clicking on the name "David Bolinsky" it will take you TED's website where you can see viewers comments, see a transcript of the speech, and learn more about David as well. BioVisions also has some other resources as well for aspects besides just biology. I have not tried out any of the other resources as of yet.

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools

FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools | SAP Web 2.0:

"There are currently three tools:
* PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar
* PowerPoint Twitter feedback slide
* PowerPoint Twitter voting"

This has some unique potential to make your PowerPoint presentations unique as you can embed live twitter feeds, have twitter feedback on one slide or even do a twitter poll. The best part of this is that it is currently free. The worst part of this is that is currently blocked most districts firewall due to social networking issues.