Deb Norton Tech

Our new unit in Lead 21 is all about Colonial America.  To supplement our reading series, I am going to use a great website called Liberty Kids .  It offers several activities for students. Students can create a Colonial Newspaper . Students can watch short videos on how things were different during Colonial Days.  It is called " Then and Now ". Students can explore and learn about colonial people, items and places in the Liberty Archive called "Who, What, and Where".   With all of these great activities, my students will be busy this week!

To wrap up my Top 5 Lists this week, I thought it was only appropriate to do a Friday Fun post.  Share these fun and educational sites with your students.   Kaleidoscope   Make Your Own Flower    Line Rider   Bloxorz Wake up the Box

Here are the top 5 Tips and Tricks.  I get a lot of positive comments when I post a new trick or tip.  Anything that makes our jobs easier or saves us time is a great find! You Tube   This tip is about using a tool called Clip Converter to download You Tube videos right onto your computer.  The videos can then be inserted into a Smart Notebook page. Gmail Tips   Here are some time saving tips for Gmail. Use Print Screen to Make a Screen Capture   This trick explains how to quickly capture what is on your screen. Make a Shortcut to Your Desktop   Our students have shortcuts to Lead 21, our Wiki, our Weebly, and email.  Check out how to make shortcuts with this tip.   Putting a video into Power Point   One of my most frequently asked questions is how do I put a video into Power Point?  Check out this trick. Use the archive of my blog to check out other posts where I've shared a tip or tri...

I have a total of 168 blogs that I follow every day through my Google Reader.  I add new blogs every week, but try to be picky about what I follow to keep it manageable.  Today I am going to share my pick for the top 5 blogs that I just can't do without!  These are well known blogs that have received awards and are very popular.  These bloggers inspire me daily to keep my own blog going. Free Technology for Teachers  is written by Richard Byrne and read by a daily audience of 30,000 subscribers.   The purpose of this site is to share information about free resources that teachers can use in their classrooms.  Richard  is a  Google Certified Teacher .  Richard's full-time job is teaching US History and Civics in a high school in Maine.   Cool Cat Teacher is written by Vicki Davis. Vicki Davis  is a teacher and the IT director   in Camilla, Georgia.  My favorite thing about Cool Cat Teacher is the Daily Educ...

Digital Storytelling is a great way for students to create online content and share it with others.  Our students have been successful using some these digital storytelling tools. Bitstrips  is a comic strip maker.  It is one of the best digital story telling tools I've seen.  I have written before about Bitstrips  here . Below is an example of one of our student's Bitstrips on the topic of adversity. Zooburst  is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books.  But there's a lot more to Zooburst than that!  Check out the about page to see all that Zooburst allows you to do! Here are two examples of Zooburst stories for you to look at. My Story Maker is so simple to use.  The program walks students through writing a story step-by-step.  My Story Maker will write the story for you or you can write your own.  It is great for younger students.   Storybird is...

This is a list of tools that I can't live without as an educator.  These tools are especially helpful in our classroom for integrating technology into our curriculum. Kidblog.org   --I have written about this blogging platform before here .  We use Kidblog every week.  We use it as an online journal as our students write about their thoughts, happenings, and feelings.  We have requirements that our students must follow such as writing at least 5 fifth-grade sentences and also commenting on 2 of their classmates' posts.  It just doesn't get any better than watching our students communicate with each other and having a window into each student's  mind every week. You Tube   --I have written about You Tube here  and  here .  We use You Tube all the time to enhance our lessons.  Students naturally love to learn though videos.  Although You Tube is blocked to our students, I have found a way to download You T...

Happy Valentine's Day, Well the classroom parties are today, anyway.  Here are a few resources we're using with our students. Hearts Sudoku Heart Break Spot the Difference Valentine's Mazes We will be using some of the interactive activities on this site as well. More Valentine's Ideas Here Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Thank you to Tiffany Oeftger for sharing today's website .  Kid's Health is a wonderful resource for all ages and levels!  I'm having our students use the site to learn about the tongue as we study the digestive system.  One thing I like is the fact that Kid's Health offers information on topics not often covered in other sites.  There are great interactive activities, online quizzes, word searches and more on the section for kids.  Here's what Tiffany has to say about this site: The KidsHealth website ( http://kidshealth.org/ ) provides information and resources for parents, teens, and kids on a variety of topics. If a student or parent is looking for information I am always able to find helpful advice on this site. Tiffany The kid's section is loaded with health topics and much more! The parent section is full of information on health issues and parenting advice. The teen section answers questions for teens in an appropriate way. Th...

Today I have a guest posting on my blog.  Stacey Warner is going to share a Web 2.0 tool called Story Jumper.  I'd  like to thank Stacey for sharing! Digital books are a great way to have students share the information that they have learned rather than just reciting a report or filling in the answers to test.  Recently, we used Story Jumper , an online book making site to create books about famous explorers from around the world.  Story Jumper allowed our students to use their creativity in making pages and pictures and that went along with their research information.  Our class also contains special education students and they were able to successfully create a project that was unique and that they could be proud of.   Story Jumper allowed our students to create a variety of backgrounds using the templates provided by the site.  Each student was able to manipulate the figures and backgrounds so that no two projects looked alike....

Lately we've been busy making radio advertisements for our virtual stores.  The students wrote their own ads and had to rehearse them.  We worked on reading together in unison, using expression and pronunciation of words.  The best part was recording our ads using a free program called Audacity .  Audacity is easy to use and was fun for our students.  We then exported our recordings as an MP3 file.  I was then able to take the MP3 files and upload them to our class wiki.  The students did a great job.  You can check out our Radio Advertisements on our class wiki .  A few students had some extra time and were able to also record a song to go with their stores.   I highly recommend using Audacity as a recording device.  Our laptops have built in microphones, which made it easy to record and Audacity made it easy to edit our recordings. If you would like to know more about using Audacity or setting up a wiki, I'd be happy to ass...

Dear Students (and Teachers), If you sometimes feel tired answering basic computer questions frequently asked by your mom and dad (and maybe your grandma), then you’ll love this new site called Teach Parents Tech . Created by Google, this one-page site helps you send basic how-to videos in one email so that your parents can learn by watching.   OK, let's be honest.  I actually needed to watch some of these videos myself to answer a few of my own questions!  Videos like these are very useful even for somewhat techy people like you and I!   Enjoy

It's a snow day for us today.  So here are a few sites for you to peruse on your day off. Valentine's Day Livebinder Superbowl XLV Livebinder Web 2.0 for Schools Web 2.0 for Kids

Last week I shared a blog post about using You Tube videos to enhance your lessons and to host your videos online.  As we all know, You Tube does have some distracting advertisements, additional videos and sometimes inappropriate comments.  So I would like to share two ways to view You Tube videos in a way that eliminates the ads, sidebar and comments. The first way is called View Pure .  It is very easy to use.  All you need to do is copy and paste the url of the You Tube video you would like to see and then click on Create. Here is how a video is displayed on View Pure: The second way to view a You Tube video is called SafeShare TV .  This site works much the same as the previous one.  You will paste the url of the You Tube video into the site and click "Generate Safe Link".   Then SafeShare will give you a new url to copy and paste for safer viewing. Another thing that SafeShare allows you to do is crop a video if you only want to sh...