Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Tech Tuesday - Feb 1



Storybook Web is great collection of activities for young children aged 5-8. The site uses popular stories by authors Scoular Anderson, Debi Glioro, Mairi Hedderwick and Frank Rodgers. There are many interactive activities that teachers can do with their students as they watch and listen to authors read parts of their books and answer questions on how they are inspired to write. The site has writing activities for students that really allows them to connect to the story and the author.

Storybook Web is a great site for teachers to use with students to support their love of reading and writing. More and more computer sites are becoming interactive because kids want to play and learn at the same time. Storybook Web does a great job of combining these two elements into one site. This site is worth saving in your bookmarks for hours of reading fun with with students.



Thanks to iLearnTechnology for the find. 

Chemistry Livebinder

Here is a Chemistry Livebinder from my friend Kelly. She runs an amazing site called iLearnTechnology.This Livebinder is filled with videos, multiple periodic tables, links to various chemistry simulations, chemistry websites and chemistry games. I think this is a great site for Chemistry teachers looking to integrate more technology in their class on on their website. Their are many resources on here that students could find useful.

Mr. Thorne Does Phonics

This is a fun site that helps students with Phonics using videos created by Mr. Thorne. The videos focus on grammar, vowel sounds, consonant sounds, alternative sounds and spellings and much more. I think this is a fun site that would be wonderful for younger students learning to read. These videos could be incorporated to the classroom once or twice a week to change up the normal lessons. See how you could use Mr. Thorne Does Phonics in your classroom.



Edcamp Detroit

Last May, a bunch of teachers organized an event called #edcampPhilly. The event was an unconference. The cool thing about an unconference is that all of the sessions are run by the people who show up. The schedule is loose to allow people to talk about whatever they want. #edcampPhilly was a huge success and edcamps started to appear all over the country. I attended one in New York City and Kansas City to see how they worked and meet some friends that I've been working with online for a few months. After seeing how they operated, I'm proud to announce that #edcampDetroit is open for registration! After tons of planning and organziation, we have a location (Wayne State University's College of Education), a date (Saturday May 7), Sponsors (Click the link to see. More are being added every day) and a price (Free!).

I have spent a ton of time this past year attending conferences and learning many great things. Despite some of the awesome sessions I attended, I always seemed to learn the most from talking and sharing with other teachers around me. The purpose of an edcampis to connect the teachers directly. Teachers have so many great ideas and practices, but they are not often given a chance to share them with others in their own school. Edcamp is a way to bring these teachers with great ideas together from all over to help the students in the classroom.

I would love to see a strong showing from my District at this event. I think I teach in one of the best districts in the country and would love to show everyone the amazign things that our teachers do each and every day. This conference is not a tech conference! This conference is about sharing ideas that work. Best practices for teaching various subject matter. Administrations isues could be addressed. There are countless topics and many conversations that can be had because we all work so hard at our jobs and it would be just greedy not to share with other teachers eager to learn.

We are limited in space (250 Max), so please click here to register. Space is filling up and will get jammed after we spread the word in March at MACUL, so sign up sooner than later. Maybe our district would even give us conference or workshop hours for attending (cough cough hint hint). Please pass this conferecne along to any other teachers you might now. A ton of work goes into putting on a free conference and I would love to share it with some of the best teachers I know. Thanks in advance.

Here is a video #edcampPhilly put together that does a nice job explaining #edcamp.



No comments:

Post a Comment