Deb Norton Tech

Wednesday, February 5th Welcome to a new episode of Chat with Deb: Here are some great sites to use with your students on DLD.  Most of them do not require a log in, so you and your students can be ready to go.   Big Huge Labs   edit photos and share    Jigsaw Planet create and share a puzzle.     QR St uff create colorful qr codes.     QR Island    read a qr code with your PC webcam  ABCya's Go Animate   create an animation and save it to your computer. Tackk  create a webpage with images, text, video, audio, hyperlinks, maps and more.  Easily share with others. Scribble Maps  use drawing tools to draw on top of a map.  Easily download and share your map with others. Magnoto  create an online poster similar to a Glogster.  You do need an account. Padlet  online sticky notes with capabi...

Have you heard of the website IXL.com ?   IXL is a site with math exercises.   I have seen this site many times over the past year, and I have used a few of the activities with my students on a few occasions, but I have never really looked into what IXL has to offer. Then, one day, my 6th grade son, Robert, shared at the dinner table that his favorite class was math because he had finally mastered an activity on IXL that he had been working on for a few days.  I asked him more questions about the IXL site and he told me that his math teacher assigns different math activities for the students to work on and that it was fun and really challenging. Seeing how enthralled my son was with this site, I knew that I had to look further into IXL . So, I signed up for the free one month trial membership and made a class roster which created logins for my students.   IXL costs $199 per year for a classroom account. Then I realized that the unit we were abou...

We all know that students love to learn through games, so I believe it is well worth the extra 10 - 15 minutes of your class time, once or twice a week, to allow students some gaming time on the computer to reinforce the skills that you are teaching.  Too often we don't want to give students any "free" time because we have so much to teach them, or they need extra time to get their work done.  I tend to think differently.  I think students will learn important lessons from the challenge and self-discovery of exploring a game on a site that reinforces what I have taught them.  I'm willing to cut my lesson short once a week to allow for some gaming time.  I'm even willing to shorten an assignment once a week to gain some extra time.   A few guidelines to consider:  Play the game yourself and see if the game  appropriately challenges your students.   If the game has directions, I don't teach the game to the students.  They need ...