Thousands of books available online

The Library of Congress and the Internet Archive join forces to digitize thousands of books from the library's collection.  Amazing collection of books, images and sounds.  Check out this video to get an overview of the project.

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4763

Cool way to plan a trip

Do your students do a travel brochure project? How about world language classes looking for a virtual trip?  Check out this visual trip planner. Looks like an interesting way for students to explore an area.

http://duffelup.com/

Join Storytube 2010

Join kids from across the U.S. and from Nova Scotia, Canada by making a short video about your favorite book.  Use the online form to enter and compete for prizes - and, be sure to check out the rules, but here are the basics:

• Videos may be up to two minutes long
• You may make the video by yourself or with a group (the group limit is five people)
• Kids from any state in the U.S. and from Nova Scotia, Canada may enter
• Entries will be accepted from January 20 through February 28, 2010
• To win a prize, at least one person in the group must be school-aged (kindergarten through grade 12)
• Top prizes will be awarded by a panel of judges, who will consider performance, script, creativity, and other factors
• Just-for-fun prizes for other high-quality entries will be awarded through online voting
• You may enter the contest more than once, as long as you promote a different book in each video

http://www.storytubes.info/drupal/

The Wonderful World of English

Trying to teach similes? Want a fun way to do it?  Check out Simile of the Day Generator.  The Simile of the Day Generator will make a new simile every time you press the "Gimme a Simile!" button. Try to figure out how the abstract word and the concrete word are alike! And remember -- Power is like a ball of yarn.

http://www.vigoschools.org/~mjm3/activities/simile.htm

Twelve Essentials for Technology Integration by Richard Byrne

Twelve Essentials for Technology Integration by Richard Byrne is a wonderful publication to get you started thinking about how you can integrate technology into your curriculum.  Give it a look.

http://content.yudu.com/Library/A18dcc/TwelveEssentialsforT/resources/index.htm

Anchor Activities

"Anchors Away is a place where educators can add educational games and activies that students with laptops can do when they have finished their regular classroom assignments. Feel free to request membership to the space and add your own resources. Give this page to your students!"

https://anchoractivities.wikispaces.com/

Great site for free online books

What is Read Print?

Free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.

http://www.readprint.com/

Absolutely FREE online books Thousands of novels, poems, stories Easy to read books online WARNING — The surgeon general reports that having these many free books at your disposal can be highly addictive.

Over 8,000 online books by 3,500 authors at your fingertips!

Safe YouTube viewing

Information is beautiful

This site is great for visual learners.  Lots of graphs and visual tools to explain news items.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Collaborative storytelling

Storybird is a service that uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families. Two (or more) people create a Storybird in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library.  Also good for creating picture books.

http://storybird.com/

Teach with humor

The Museum of Humor has some lesson plans you might want to check out.

http://www.museumofhumor.com/ForTeacher.htm

dotSub

This is a great site that will add subtitles to videos in different languages.  Translate to English or to a different language.  Give it a try.

http://dotsub.com/

Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life is text, images and videos that can be uploaded by anyone who's interested, and content is vetted by expert curators.

The inventory has grown more quickly than anyone expected. To date, there are pages for more than 150,000 species, with contributions from 250 specialists and 1,200 "citizen scientists".

Members of the public have contributed more than 30,000 images via the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) group page on the photo-sharing website Flickr. Once the identity of the photographed species has been confirmed by an expert, the image is added to the main site.

By 2017, the site aims to have collated information on all 1.8 million recorded species. To help the project push on towards this goal, the founding sponsors today announced a further $12.5 million in funding.

24 things about to become extinct

This may turn into an interesting lesson.

24 Things About to Become Extinct

24 Things About to Become Extinct

24. Yellow Pages
23. Classified Ads
22. Movie Rental Stores
21. Dial-up Internet Access
20. Phone Landlines
19. Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs
18. VCRs
17. Ash Trees
16. Ham Radio
15. The Swimming Hole
14. Answering Machines
13. Cameras That Use Film
12. Incandescent Bulbs
11. Stand-Alone Bowling Alleys
10. The Milkman
9. Hand-Written Letters
8. Wild Horses
7. Personal Checks
6. Drive-in Theaters
5. Mumps & Measles
4. Honey Bees
3. News Magazines and TV News
2. Analog TV
1. The Family Farm

Tearch training videos

Want to get a quick intro to a new tool?  Check out Teacher Training Videos.  http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/  These videos were created for teachers to help them to incorporate technology into their teaching. Just click and a video will open and take you through how to use that technology. From podcasting to screen capture to wikis to blogs, there's a video for that.

Publishing student work

Publishing student work usually means photocopying multiple copies for the class.  What if you can create a FREE book of your students' work?  You could publish anthologies, books of poetry, or anything they have done.  Check out http://www.bookrix.com/.  You upload the file and then the book appears as a clickable book.  Read the book online or even download your own copy.  Great for those faraway grandparents.

Another student publishing outlet is LuLu  http://www.lulu.com  Again, upload your files and a book is created.  But LuLu allows you to purchase a print edition of the work.  So you can have your class project available as a free download or as a low-cost print edition.  Check it out.

Scientific American Podcasts

Applications for Education
Scientific American's 60 Second podcasts http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/ could be an educational, interesting, and entertaining way to start a science class. You never know when a student's curiosity might be piqued. Offering students quick lessons from a variety of science topics increases the chances that they may hear something that they want to explore further.

Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
The Why Files - The Science Behind the News
Planet Science - Science Games and Lesson Plans
Great Science Activities from Exploratorium

Educational Games

Now that classes are a bit longer, you may be looking for anchor activities for students. One thing many students love is playing a game on the computer. It can actually be educational. I've been updating the resources on my school page http://library-media-center.rms.concordnhschools.net/ to include many resources for you to use. As I find good educational games, I'll be adding them to the wiki page of games. If you have any that you would like me to include, just let me know.

http://rmsgames.wikispaces.com/

Give Funnelbrain a try

Looking for a fun way for students to review? Give FunnelBrain a try. Students can create their own "flash cards" or access those already made.

What is FunnelBrain?

FunnelBrain.com is an academic question and answer site that provides an environment for collaborative online learning.

What's special about FunnelBrain?

Students work in teams to create review questions and answers, paired with video explanations, for academic subjects. Users have access to wiki-style content creation tools, as well as a learning management application known as the "Funnel" that tracks and monitors learning progress and focuses the student's attention on a particular question at a particular time with a spaced repetition algorithm.

What is the FUNNEL?

The FUNNEL is a learning application that manages the review process to make it as efficient and effective as possible using a spaced repetition algorithm that presents the right question at the right time.

Free Teachers Printables

More than 60 teachers printables and classroom printables that you can download, customize, and print for free. Choose from attendance charts, grading sheets, lesson planning forms, parent communication forms, office passes, school calendars, and more. Or, download the entire collection for $27.00.

http://www.teachersprintables.net/

schoonoodle lesson finder

Tired of going to several different places to get ideas for your lesson plans? Want to save time? Use SchooNoodle to find new ideas to build your curriculum. You can easily locate lesson plans, videos, news and current events, images, and much more…all correlated to the standards for your state, subject and grade.

You need to sign up for this but it is free. It is a new website for K-12 teachers that is part lesson plan depot and part social bookmarking service. The intent of Schoonoodle is to be a place where teachers can find lesson plans and other resources that align to state standards. To build this collection of standards-aligned resources whenever teachers submit a new website they can fill in a form explaining which standards that resource aligns to.

http://www.schoonoodle.com

Good website for DI

If you have students who need a website written at a lower level, this website takes wikipedia articles and simplifies them. Give it a try.

http://againbutslower.com/

Educational games

Want to add educational games into your curriculum but don't know which are appropriate? Check out GamEd 411 from Karen Mitchell, Library Research Technician from Monroe 2-Orleans BOCES. http://gamed411.pbwiki.com/

Reading on the Internet

Students often get distracted by all the pictures and disjointed text on web pages. How great would it be if we could strip all the ads and "noise" from the page. Well, you can. By adding the readability bookmarklet to your web browser, you have your very own tool for eliminating distractions.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Myths and legends

Having your students writing picture book myths and legends? Check out this site. http://myths.e2bn.org/index.php

Meet me at the corner project

http://meetmeatthecorner.org/

Kids can create their own virtual field trips. Put Concord on the virtual map!

Wordle

I have been showing people wordle.net for awhile but in case you haven't seen it, take a look at this great tool. You may have seen some wordles around the school as several teachers have used them. Wordle is a tool generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. These are great for determining importance in a reading passage as the main words stand out. To read an article I wrote about using wordle in education, go to http://www.nhste.org/Connections%20Newsletters/Connections%20AUG%2008%20.pdf The article starts on page 9.

Using book reviews from amazon.com, this is a wordle for one of my favorite books. Can you figure out which one?

RMS Media Center Tidbits

To the Staff of Rundlett Middle School

Welcome to the first installment of the new Rundlett Library Media Center Tidbits.

A few years ago, I had a folder in FirstClass that was home to short notes about resources I came across that I felt would be of interest to teachers. These are short notes that I want to pass along quickly. I had hoped to bring the tidbits folder back to life but that isn't happening so I have found an alternative method for delivery.

I will be adding quick notes as I find interesting web pages or applications.

Please feel free to let me know what types of resources you may want me to include.