Here is a link to an article about 25 free resources provided by Discovery Education.  These are fabulous free resources.

Animations and Classroom Web Resources

Animations and Classroom Web Resources

Be The Beat - New with the American Heart Association is an Interactive heart and virtual CPR simulation.  Students can explore the differences between a healthy and unhealthy heart as well as to see what happens during cardiac arrest.  This would be great when you study the circulatory system.  

Medial Animations Library  - The University of Pennsylvania has an animations Library of over 200 videos.  These are defiantly worth a look before you teach your next science lesson. 

Internet4Classrooms - An organization of excellent and free online Language Arts and Math resources that can be used in the computer lab or in your classroom with your projector.  Internet4Classrooms also has some great assessment resources you should explore.  I found some percent resources that I am going to use this coming week. 

 WolframAlpha - One of Nancy's favorites, WolframApha is an excellent way to search for a quick "facts sheet" for a person or location.  A quick search of Grand Rapids pulls up population, weather, influential people, cost of living and more.  

AlphaMaps takes the power of WolframApha and Google Maps and overlays them together.  Next time you are looking for some quick fact, try WolframApha and AlphaMaps instead of or in addition to your google search.  

Top 100 Educational Tools

We all recognize that today's students are different than the students of 10 or even 5 years ago.  I think of how many things my 6th graders are involved in after school, how many "conversations" they have with classmates from the time they leave school to the next morning and the increase in their desire to have questions answered immediately.  Yet I still see that excellent teaching continues to follow the ideology that if I tell them a fact they will forget it, if I show them a demonstration they will remember, and if I involve them they will gain understand.

With the tools available to us today at ACS, we can be thankful that we can actively involve our students in learning.  As you engage your students, think about how many of the the 4Cs (Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Collaboration, and Creatively and innovation) you are asking your students to use.  These are the skills our students need to be practicing in our classrooms.

Digitally speaking, here is a list of the top 100 educational tools used in 2011.  How many did you use this past year?

In the comment sections below post which of the top 100 are your favorites.

How Cheatable is your Class?

There is a cool tool I just learned about in the Moodle News Blog I follow: "Measure of Course Cheatablitiy." This tool will help you think about how easy it is for students to cheat in your class.  It is also aligned well with thinking about how well you are creating assessments that use higher order thinking skills.   

I took the eval and scored 56.17 out of 100.  Definitely have room for improvement! 

Here are a couple interactive resources to help you teach about Martin Luther King Jr.

Elementary:
Martin Luther King Jr Book from MightyBooks.com:

MightyBooks Matching Game- Read the story above then match the vocabulary:


Grades 4 - 6:
Martin Luther King Jr's Brainpop video, activity and quiz

Grades 6 - 8:
Mapping Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.: A fact or opinion activity

PowerTeacher Gradebook Update

An upgrade to PowerTeacher GradeBook will now let you see student attendance and tardy totals for each term right within your Gradebook - nice information to have!

If you are ever curious exactly what days a student has been tardy or absent, remember the backpack feature in Powerteacher.

Click on the backpack, then select a student and choose "meeting attendance".  You can then cycle through each student.

*** For MS Staff - Even though we don't report attendance for each class period, it might be nice to know how many times a student is absent from your specific class.  Why not try to take attendance each class period and see how it goes for you. 

Projects That Engage Higher-Level Thinking Skills

How are we doing engaging student in higher-level thinking skills?  I came across this blog post today that I found helpful and encouraging.  Take a couple minutes to reflect on your current classroom activities as you read this blog.

Try some New Features in Power Teacher!

Now that you are used to using Power Teacher, we have a few new tricks to show you.  We think these features of Power Teachers will be ones you like and can use daily in your classroom.  Here is a 3 and a half minute screen cast to show you some new tricks.

Tip: Log into Power Teacher in one window or tab of your browser and have this running in another one so you can follow along.

Quizlet

This is a GREAT program, you will love what you can do with this.  Henry used this to teach 50 history terms in his classroom.  He created and embedded a quizlet into his Moodle page.  It is wonderful - true differentiated learning.  Students use this tech tool to study their terms.  The kids really enjoy it!  Take a look at it:

www.Quizlet.com

Need a tutorial that shows a teacher using it:  watch this - note - - there are a lot of tutorials on Youtube - - you might be able to find one that specifically applies to what YOU want - - this is just a nice sample of someone using a version of Quizlet.

A lists of sites for you to try from Nancy

Jing - Screen Capture!

Best Weather  (Noaa.gov)

Online Educational Games (will YOU lose to Computer #3?)

Wolfram Alpha - Computational Search Engine

Tagxedo - Tag Cloud Shapes

Gutenberg - Free Books Online  (Got a Kindle?  Use Calibre to convert library epub books!)  Link to Calibre

Fantastic Contraption - GREAT Physics/Engineering game for your students!  Also a Green version - FC2

Odosketch - drawing program!

Vocaroo - record your students and send their voices to their parents

Bibme - Bibliography Tool

R U A Cartoonist?  

Brainpop -  User Name: adachristian   Password:  explore2011

Discovery - lesson plans, teaching ideas, contests....

Thinkfinity.com - take a look at this!!

www.thinkfinity.com  Is AWESOME - - full of lesson plans, videos, links, ideas, worksheet, curriculum enhancement to the max - - you really should take a look at it!