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!

Shahi has a great visual dictionary for kids.  When searching for a word, this dictionary gives images from Flicker, Google and Yahoo along with parts of speech and a definition. All pictures shown on my searches were appropriate.  Of course if a student types in an inappropriate word, they will get inappropriate pictures.  I would use Shahi on my Smart Board so that I could control the search.  Shahi is a great way to introduce new vocabulary or look up new words.

Edutopia.org has videos for Professional Development.  They are up-to-date and very well made.  I have found a lot of great information from Edutopia.org for my master's classes as well as for use in the classroom.

Pedagonet offers math tricks to explore.    For example, one of the tricks is known as the Phone Number Math Trick .  In this trick a person writes down their phone number, uses a calculator to perform the following steps, and eventually get an answer that is their phone number in the end. Here are the steps: Find a calculator Insert in the first three digits of your phone number ( not the area code) Example  : (905) 567 - 1111 Multiply these three numbers  by 80 567 x 80 = 45360 Add 1 45360 + 1 = 45361 Multiply by 250 45361 x 250 = 11340250 Add to this the last 4 digits of your phone number 11340250 + 1111 = 11341361 Add again the last 4 digits of your phone number. 11341361 + 1111 = 1134272 Subtract 250 1134272 - 250 = 11342222 Divide number by 2 11342222 / 2 =  Magic phone number Answer:  567-1111   Here is another trick called Book Math Trick .  This one has been captured with a You Tube Video. Another trick is...

Lemelson Center's Invention at Play is a fabulous site for exploration.  It also has stories about inventors.  Here are some of the highlights. Tinker ball (click here) Place the gadgets in the correct place in order to get the ball to drop in the cup.  Cloud Maker (click here) Design your own cloud and watch it move across the sky. Puzzle Blocks (like tangrams) (click here) Place the blocks in the correct place to fill in the shape.  Blocks can be rotated.  Help will show the lines where the blocks should be placed, but only for a short time. Stories about Inventors (click here) Includes stories from little know and well know inventors. Lemelson Center's Invention at Play is a wonderful site.  It offers a place to read about different inventions and inventors, but also a place to explore, solve puzzles, and create.  This one is worth bookmarking!

SpiderScribe is a mind mapping tool that has been mentioned quite a bit lately.  There are a lot of mind mapping tools for teachers and students, such as Bubble.us and Mind42 , but this may be among the simplest and most creative of all of them. SpiderScribe is incredibly easy to use and it offers some great features like the ability to upload files, use a Google Map, or add pictures, text and calendar events.  Here is a short video showing how to use SpiderScribe. Below is an example of a mind map I made using SpriderScribe:  In order to use SpiderScribe , you need to create an account with an email and password.  I could see students using SpiderScribe to create a mind map on a specific location, or a topic that centers around different locations.  It took me about 2 minutes to create the mind map above. 

Image Detective is an interactive site that has students analyze a historical photo and make conclusions about the photo.  Their job is to figure out what is going on in the photo.   Students work through a four step process: 1. Form a question 2.  Gather clues 3.  Get information 4.  Form a conclusion. There are 9 photos to choose from.  Take a look at this screen capture. Every student could be assigned the same photo to analyze or you could divide the photos up among your students.   To give students a better idea of how the detective process works, I would first show the students the example of how a scholar investigates a photo.  It is in the bottom left corner.   I had fun trying several of these Image Detective Photos.  And I learned some things along the way!   With a little pre-teaching and preparation, I believe that Image Detective could be a great learning experience for students.

Edutopia is a web site that spreads the word about ideal, interactive learning environments.  The site contains best practices, classroom tips, and stories from the field of education.  Edutopia is a wealth of resources for educators.   Here are some highlights: 1.  Edutopia has a learning style inventory for students (and adults for that matter)  This is a great way for students to evaluate themselves as a learner. 2.  Edutopia has a vast amount of videos .  They range from project-based learning to authentic assessments to building community through morning meetings.  Edutopia relies on schools and communities to help make these videos authentic. 3.  Edutopia focuses on six core strategies.     When exploring each of the six core strategies, you will find articles, videos and examples to explore.  I often spend a lot of time in the technology integration section . Edutopia is one of the mos...

Once again, here is a neat thing you can do with a Power Point presentation.   Present.me allows a person to upload a Power Point presentation and add themselves in video format so that they can present their Power Point in person. Check out my presentation on the immune system.  Isn't that amazing?  Present.me uses your webcam to record your video.  This program does not require a download.  I did sign up for a free account using an email and username.  I could see students using Present.me on their own.  It was really easy to do!   The hardest part was watching myself and feeling self-conscious!! 

Last week while our class was on a visit to the Middle School, one of the science teachers (Mr. Goretski) took a few minutes to show our group some amazing science tricks.  The students were extremely engaged and impressed.    Then I had a thought, science shouldn't only be exciting for students when they visit an 8th grade teacher's classroom!  So I searched and found a web site called The Surfing Scientist . The minute I started looking around this site I was impressed!  The Surfing Scientist , which is really a guy named Ruben Meerman,  shows all sorts of amazing science tricks and conundrums.    After seeing how impressed the students were with Mr. Goretski's science tricks, I have decided to show our students that there are plenty of amazing things to learn on the Internet about science.  And The Surfing Scientist is a great place to start!  Of course, nothing can replace the atmosphere and learning environment that Mr. ...

Most of us have heard of and/or used Voki in some way.   Read the Words is a site that uses a Voki in a useful way.  Watch this You Tube Video to see how it works. I played around with Read the Words and took some text about the founding of Ripon and made an audio file.  I then took the embed code and embedded the file below.  Take a listen. 

As promised earlier, I made a Jog on Jog the Web to share this week's Friday fun! Here is a collection of fun drawing tools.  These really bring out the artist in all of us! Click here

I recently came across this Mind Map of tools for teachers and was quite happy to see that I knew pretty much every one of the tools listed here.  Check it out and see how many you are familiar with.    Mind42.com is the site where this Mind Map of tools was created.  The neat thing about a Mind Map is that it can have all of the tabs put away for simplicity or the tabs can be expanded for more details.  Check out the pictures below to see what I mean. If you see a green globe, this will take you to a link to the Internet.  An icon of a little page will give more informational text about a topic.  I think these mind maps are a great tool for outlining and organizing a huge amount of data.  I would like to create my own mind map, but I first have to decide on a topic, and at the moment I don't have an idea. Older students would be able to create their own Mind Maps !  Here is what Mind42.com says about their site, " Colla...

Today I would like to share a great site called Smartr.edc.org.   This site came to me from Melanie Oppor, our district Curriculum Coordinator.   The best way to describe the site Smartr is to quote what they have to say, "Welcome to SMARTR! The only math and science site around created by youth just like you! Here you will find some amazing math and science games and activities. Search by topic (e.g., Weather) or subject (e.g., Math). Sit back, relax and EXPLORE!" Smartr has games, activities, simulations, and careers on the concepts of math and science.  There are also YouTube videos with each topic.  I have spent some time exploring the different topics and I find the resources to be very interactive.  When you click on a link, it will take you to a site on the Internet that has an activity or video.   Here are some of the places I explored: Under Science and Body I found this Interactive on how big microorganisms are compared to a p...

Jog the Web has been popping up all over the place lately!  Jog the Web is an easy way to share sites with others.  It reminds me a little of Livebinders .  When you are on the Jog the Web site, you can search for Jogs made by other people covering all different types of categories.  I did a search for educational Jogs.   Here are some examples of educational Jogs created by other people on Jog the Web : 1.  A Jog about Fractions for grades 3-5  (Click here ) 2.  A Jog about Electricity and Magnetism  (Click here) 3.  A Jog about Educational Technology Tools  (Click here) 4.  A Jog about Math  (Click here)  I think Jog the Web is a great place to search for sites related to any topic you'd like.  There are thousands of Jogs available. You can make a Jog without signing up for an account, but if you want to save your Jogs and edit them later, you need an account.  Signing up for a...