See and Spell: Practice Vocab or Spelling!

Remember the old See and Say toy from years ago? Now there is a website called Spin and Spell based on the same idea, but this time children practice their vocuabulary or their spelling online! (There is no string or cord to pull to make this work! Ha!)

Basically, you start off by choosing a category of words: animals, transportation, food, clothing, and home. The virtual board will populate with pictures. Students click the picture to make their choice, and then "spell" the word they chose clicking the letters on the see and spell wheel. When they are finished, they can check their work.

If you're students are not ready to spell yet, use it to teach vocabulary! Click the picture, and then instead of spelling it, choose 'Show me the word". The picture will appear with the corresponding vocabulary word.

This is a wonderful site to use with ELL students or primary students, depending on what your focus is. Enjoy!

8 Wonders of the Solar System

I stumbled upon a new site called "8 Wonders of the Solar System". It has breath-taking artwork from artist Ron Miller. and is structured to read like a tour guide if you were to visit these places. Some of the stops on this virtual field trip: the rings of Saturn, Jupiter's Red Spot, Valles Marineris - Mars, Geysers of Enceladus, Geysers of Triton, and a few more for you to discover!

Multiplication Fact Practice on Interactive Whiteboard!

Learn Your Tables is a website from the UK that works well with interactive whiteboards or Promethean ActivSlates. There are 3 different ways to practice multiplication facts: Drag and Drop, Enter the Answer, or Assessment. If you choose Drag and Drop, your screen will populate with multiplication facts on the left and the answers on the right. Use the Promethean board to have students drag and drop the multiplication fact onto the corresponding answer. (See below)

If you choose to "enter the answer", you will presented with one fact at a time, and a keypad in which to enter the answer. This view also works well with the Promethean board. (See below)

Vimeo: Video Hosting Site

As you may have read in an earlier post, I have been piloting Kidblog.org with an 8th grade English class. The teacher wanted the students to interview each other as a historical literary character and post the videos to their blogs in Kidblog. However, we were finding that we were quickly tapping out our 100M of space allotted by Kidblog. Even if the site manager increased our space, we still would not be able to host all of the videos on the kidblog platform. At the suggestion of the Kidblog site manager, we decided to try hosting our videos on Vimeo.com so that we do not take up our blogging space and we can then embed our videos directly into the post. We were pleasantly surprised to find Vimeo very easy to use. In addition, they grant you 500M of space a week! If you decide to upgrade to a paid account, you can get as much as 5G of space a week. One of the features that appealed to us the most was that the teacher could choose to make the videos private so that only select Vimeo members can view them. Another option was to make the video password protected so a user would have to enter the password in order to view the video. This feature works well with Kidblog since the students have to login to Kidblog to view the student posts anyway, and then they can enter a password to view the embedded video. This helps with keeping the video secure. If you choose to make your video password protected, the embedded video player will no longer have the "share" button enabled so others cannot embed the video into other sites. Very nice!

Why is Promethean an Effective Teaching Tool?

Safe Student Blogging at Kidblog.org

Check this out! I ran across this site through my Twitter account yesterday. Kidblog is a site that looks to be a solution to classroom teachers who want their students to have their own individual blog, but don't want to have to deal with the student email addresses tied to the accounts, especially in elementary and middle schools. It's FREE and it allows teachers to create an account (with an email address), add classes and students. When a student is added, the child has access to their own private blog that is accessible though a username and password assigned by the teacher. No email addresses or private information is needed! The student blogs can be completely locked down so that class members can login and view the posts and comments on them, but the posts will remain hidden to the public. Teachers have the option to approve comments AND posts before they are added to the student blogs. Also, teachers can comment on student blog posts and make it private so that only the author of the post can read it. This is perfect for teachers who want to leave feedback on the writing process directly on the blog! There are more things that this site can do, but these are my favorite features!

Create Jeopardy Games Fast and Easy!

Jeopardy Labs is a website that has an amazing Jeopardy game builder. It was built by Matt Johnson, an undergraduate students at Washington State University. His website allows you to build interactive Jeopardy games without PowerPoint and it is MUCH easier than PowerPoint. You do not even need to create an account in order to build your game. As Matt explains on his website: "When you save your template, you are given a URL to play the template. Something like jeopardylabs.com/play/your-title. You are also given a URL to edit the template, something like jeopardylabs.com/edit/your-title. Just type that into your browser when you want to edit."

Creating a game is super easy. Simply click on a category and type in the word to describe your category. Then click on a question with a point value. You will be given a screen where you can enter the question and the answer. Jeopardy labs puts it together to make it pretty. When you are ready to play the game, you can enter in the points of each team manually into the site before proceeding to the next question. Easy! I don't usually recommend Jeopardy because of the time it takes to create within PowerPoint, but this site takes care of that!