Swimming In The River
Ripples and Splashes from a 21st Century Educator
ClustrMap
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10 Things Teachers Should Know to Get Started with Twitter – Arizona K-12 Center Blog
Great Twitter Beginner’s info!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Free Technology for Teachers: Using Animoto (and Glogster and Wordle) to LEARN
Great ideas for Animoto, Glogster, and Wordle
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Free Technology for Teachers: Five Resources for Teaching About Earthquakes
Blog post with embedded links to help with earthquakes unit
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Took this picture yesterday in our livingroom. My 15 year old son who is either on the baseball field or watching the pros play baseball, would love to become a sports writer. He had started a Braves baseball blog using my laptop (which serves as our home computer) up until his 15th birthday. My oldest son, AJ, got a great little (old!) S-10 pickup for his 15th birthday two years ago, but we decided to get Carlos a netbook when he turned 15. Had to force him to take driver’s ed, so we knew a new car/truck was not top priority for him. However, the laptop has been a perfect investment. He started a new blog and has been avidly posting! Check out his blog if you have a minute (especially if you’re a Braves fan)! I know he’d enjoy reading any comments you’d like to leave!
http://thebravesbeat.mlblogs.com
Carlos getting updates from ESPN on his cell phone and blogging!
One of the reasons I LOVE summer is that I finally get some time to read the great books I keep hearing about! I know I have officially gone over the edge of teacher geek-dom as I continually push away the perfect no-brain-needed beach novel, for the research-based educational read! My family just roll their eyes at this point! Although, I have promised my 15 year old son (also a lover of books) that I would go back and read The Half Blood Prince before the movie comes out next month. I had skipped it to read the concluding novel in the series cause I couldn’t wait to find out how J.K. Rowling ended the journey!
Here are some of the super books I’ve read so far this summer (along with my grade for them!):
1. Why Don’t Students Like School? by Cognitive Scientist Daniel T. Willingham.
Thanks to Scott McLeod and Castle’s book club, I joined, purchased, and devoured! It makes so much sense to tie what we plan and do in the classroom with the way our students’ brains work. This book is a fantastic down-to-earth summary of the most recent cognitive research and how it can be applied to our work with students. I had many “wow, really?” moments while reading this book. I’m working on creating some new posts to let you know about those moments! A+
2. What Great Teachers Do Differently – 14 Things That Matter Most by Todd Whitaker
Assigned to be read this summer by our administration, this is a book that aims at pointing out the 14 things that the author has observed great teachers doing. It is an easy read with some common sense reminders of what we should be doing as caring, effective educators. Nothing Earth-shattering. C
3. Not Much Just Chillin’ – the Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers by Linda Perlstein
This is a fantastic book written by a researcher who lived among the middle schoolers about which she writes. It is a wonderful view of how middle school looks and feels from the students’, teachers’, and parents’ points of view. The thing I like most about this book is that Ms. Perlstein combines the real-life experiences of middle schoolers with current brain research to support WHY they think and act the way they do. If you ask me, this should be the book assigned by all middle school administrators for their staff members to read! Very eye-opening! A+
Okay, now on to Harry Potter! I have until July 15th!
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A backchannel app. that allows you to create your “room”. You can choose how long you want the room to be saved (ie one week, month, year)
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5th grade SCOS with great links
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Great links just for NCSCOS!
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Ideas to Inspire – Inspiring Youtube videos to use in your classroom
Great collection of inspiring videos to use with kids. The first one will be great for my first unit in science; getting kids to understand the importance of observing well.
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Great site for kids studying earthquakes
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Great tutorial for using Glogster including directions on how to embed them onto a wiki/blog
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Text 2 Mind Map – The text-to-mind-map converter
Takes the outline you’ve created in text and creates a simple mind map for you. You can then save it as a jPeg!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Safely broadcast classroom videos and embed them on wikis/blogs
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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The IHMC CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps synchronously (at the same time) with other users on the Internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map.
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The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them – Annotated
Great paper on brain research and the importance of incorporating Concept mapping into lesson plans.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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CK-12 – Next Generation Textbooks
Write your own textbook. Need to look more at this.
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DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS: Tools and Technologies for Effective Classrooms
11 Tips for better laptop learning.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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PBL: Exempary Projects Other Great Projects
Storehouse of exemplary PBL projects
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Could be used by a class to provide instant feedback to a teacher. Set up a topic like “ask Mr. Byrne” and students could submit their questions while a conversation is going on in the room. The same idea could be used by students to ask questions from home or anywhere outside of the classroom. Twitterish
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Directory of Educational Resources on the Web
Tons of great organized links!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
