Deb Norton Tech

Along with watching a ton of baseball games, taking classes at Cardinal Stritch and enjoying some time with my family, I have been busy reading books on my Kindle.   I wanted to share a neat site that allows a person to make a virtual bookshelf.  It is called Shelfari .   Shelfari allows you to keep track of books you are reading, have read and want to read.  It also has a place to rate each book and write a synopsis.  The other great thing about Shelfari is that you can share your bookshelf with others and see what your friends are reading.  I see a lot of potential for students to use Shelfari throughout the year to keep track of the books they read and to write book reviews.  You can embed your Shelfari into your blog as I have done below.   Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog If you start your own Shelfari please feel free to follow me and I'll follow you back.  Happy reading! <ul>&a...

Scholastic does it again!  Click here to go to their 50 one stop learning activities. They take between 15 - 30 minutes each and are geared towards K - 2nd grade, but seem appropriate for all elementary learners.  Areas covered include science, social studies, math, Spanish, and language arts.  To see all of the options for a subject area, click the subject area tab.  Click on "Spin it!" to spin the wheel and have an activity chosen for you.  There is a tab for grades 3 - 5, but it is not active yet.  

Cut My Pic is one of the easiest photo cropping sites I've found.  Just upload a picture and round the corners.  You can make a slightly rounded, very rounded or circular photo.  Save or share your picture.  I love easy finds like this one!  Here is a picture of my son, Ryan, and some of his friends I cropped and rounded the edges using Cut My Pic .  Share this with your students next time you are making a photo collage or doing project with photos.

Eyeooo offers a neat service where you can view up to three different web sites at one time.  It's very easy to do.  Just enter the URL of the web sites and click go.   Below I am viewing Amazon.com  and my blog.  Students and teachers could use Eyeooo to conduct a compare and contrast of two web pages or view a dictionary page while viewing a page with text. This is easy to use and very useful.

Our Charter School, Quest, has a greenhouse which I was able to get a peek at the other day.  To help support the curriculum, I would like to share a blog post by InTec InSights, offering several interactive sites about plants, life cycles and photosynthesis.  This is also a great blog to follow for technology integration in the classroom. Click here for the interactive sites on plants.

We have completed several presentations this year with our students.  One tool that I wish we would have used is a teleprompter.  Our students often need a tool like this in order to narrate their videos or presentations.   CuePrompter.com has a free service that is easy to use.  Check it out. Students simply type in their narration and then click on the forward button to play the narration.  Give CuePrompter.com a try!