Collateral Learning

Science Links

Dynamic Periodic Table
This periodic table helps in keeping elements apart. You can highlight them by their aggregate state (solid, liquid, gas, unknown) or group (nonmetals with subgroups and metals with subgroups). Clicking on an element or group will launch a separate window with the matching Wikipedia article  (shhh…. don’t let the Library know I’ve sent you a link to Wikipedia!).

Periodic Table of the Elements
This periodic table is more compact than the previous one and it’s great for a quick summary for each element. As can be seen in the screenshot below, all elements are represented by a matching image and clicking on it launches a small information window.

Molecular Workbench
Includes curriculum ideas for you to use to help incorporate it into your classes.  The software is a stand-alone application that requires Java to run.

Math Link

Mathway
This is an online tool that will help solve your math challenges. Just enter the “problem statement”, select a subject and hit solve for the solution including the steps taken to get there.

Language Arts Links

VerbaLearn
With VerbaLearn you can improve your English vocabulary with online study sessions. The tool learns with you, keeping a record of your progress and weaknesses. You can listen to your study list offline to better memorize the words and practice the pronunciation and online you can read examples of how the word is being used.

Bullfighter (MS Word and PowerPoint Plugin)
Similar To VerbaLearn, this tool is designed to improve your use of the English language. The tool will analyze your texts for jargon. The higher your Bull Composite score, the higher the chance people will actually understand what you are trying to say.

911 Writers Block
I love this site!  You can use this to help generate all sorts of writing ideas.  Need a character to write you story about?  Press “2″ and see what it gives you.  Great starting point for some in-class creative writing projects.

Web 2.0 Tools:

Voicethread
Voicethread is audiovisual tool that gives users the ability to upload images or video files and then add audio or text comments.

Internet Activities:

Internet Hunt Activities
The Internet is an enormous collection of answers. The challenge is to find them. These information scavenger hunts will help you discover how diverse this resource truly is. You will also gain experience harnessing the Internet. There are over 200 activities offered.

Digital Storytelling:

Kerpoof
Kerpoof is a site that provides a variety of creative tools for animation, drawing, and movie creation. Users can choose from a range of preset characters and environmental options, or they can create their own. The site offers drag-and-drop simplicity coupled with advanced animation and editing capabilities.

Tweet This Post 

Technorati Tags: Effective Writing, English language, rhetoric writing, science, writing

This week’s links of the week:

Images
The Big Picture - The Inauguration of President Barack Obama
The Big Picture is a great site with high resolution pictures of current events.  These make great additions to classroom lessons and excellent focal pieces for writing inspiration.  This collection is from the Inauguration and has pictures from around the world.

Teaching Copyright to Kids
Copyright for Kids
Easy to follow, step by step lesson that helps teach kids what copyright is all about.

Free Online Conference
FETC

Timeline Creation Websites
time rime

xtimeline

Web 2.0 Tools of the Week
Off Beat Guides
Create your own tour guide.  Great for trips you are going to take or even to help with geography and economics projects (given a budget of $x.xx, where could you go, where would you stay, what would you eat, what kind of transportation could you use, how long could you stay, etc.)

Create a Graph

Resource of the Week
Today’s Front Pages
Just put your mouse on a city anywhere in the world and the newspaper headlines pop up.  Double click on the front page image and the page gets larger.  Great to use for current events studies and foreign languages.

Articles for this Week:
Cheating Goes Digital

Video Games Help Music and Math

My favorite error screen of the week:

Tweet This Post 

The economic Armageddon of the past year or so has led to devaluing of employees.  I’ve heard the same statement from a number of different people: “just be glad you have a job.”  Granted, in many fields this might be true: bad loan writer, Wall Street Broker, or Private Jet Pilot for the Auto Industry; but in education that’s not really the case.  Over the last week we’ve seen thousands upon thousands of job losses from some of our biggest companies (Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Circuit City, and more).  Even Google employees are being asked to scale back (loss of monetary bonuses, but at least they get to keep the free massages!)  Even amid all of these job losses, Education is one field that continues to grow.  Our educators are the visionary leaders of our schools who are devoted to the mission of education that drives the success of our schools.  Alex Iskold  over at Read Write Web said it best: “Great companies are defined by the great people behind them. There are no great companies without visionary leaders.” We should not devalue our educators by telling them they should be “glad” to have a job.  We should be proud of our visionary teachers and just be glad they’ve chosen to work with us, for us, and for our children.

Tweet This Post 

Technorati Tags: economy, education, job

This weeks links:

Make your own Jeopardy Game!

Create Flash games easily without having to know how to code in Flash!  You can create a Jeopardy game, “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, and a board game.  Also a few “classroom management tools” like random name generator (instead of pulling a name out of a hat) and other somewhat goofy but useful programs.

Screen Toaster

Screen Casting - Create a video capture of your screen and include voice over and even video from a webcam.  Fairly straightforward- create an account, start recording, send out address - not much to it.

Popfly

Make your own games!  Some fun, some just to waste time, and some are actually educational (okay, mostly just great wastes of time!)

Myths and Legends Story Creator

Create your own animated stories.  Add your school to the site so that students can turn in assignments for teachers to view online.

Blog Posting of the Week:

Wordles of Inaugural Addresses

Wordle.net is a site where you can place text in and it will generate a “Tag Cloud” of the text (showing what words are used more frequently by words being larger and bolder.)  It is a great site to use to help students to see their papers differently.  This post has a number of presidential addresses as Wordle sees them.  Interesting to see what was going on at the time and what topics were more important to those presidents.

What is Wordle?
http://www.collaterallearning.com/2008/09/what-did-i-say/
http://www.techedknow.com/?p=56

Tweet This Post 

Technorati Tags: Myths and Legends, Tag cloud, Wordle

Many schools are moving to a “paperless” campus.  A paperless campus is a double-edged sword:  sure, there’s less paper work to deal with, but at the same time if you accidently lose a digital file, there is a good chance that you will never retrieve it. While evaluating the pros and cons of going paperless, a school must first look at why it wants to be paperless.

There are three reasons to go paperless:  economic, environmental, and logical.  The economic argument: “We’ll save money on paper” is countered by the cost of the technology and training that it will take to move to a paperless system. Think of it this way, a ream of copy paper costs roughly five dollars.  You would have to save 240 reams of paper to equal the cost of one $1200 laptop.

Environmentally you may be able to save a few trees, but how large is your carbon footprint when you have 750 laptops, five copy machines and 20+ desktops running every day? Part of facing our environmental responsibility is taking note of how we create excess waste.  By moving many documents from paper to electronic formats, we have been able to eliminate a great deal of wasted paper.  In order to honestly make a paperless campus “Green”, we also have to look at the carbon footprint created by so many electrical devices.  We need evaluate lower power/ energy saving equipment as well as better practices we can demonstrate to our students (dual switch classroom lights, lower wattage bulbs, more environmentally friendly batteries, more consistent recycling programs, etc.)

Logically, will it save you time?  Will it become easy to manage the data?  If it is logically justifiable, then the cost can be weighed and balanced (make sure the machines are more than just document processors and bring an added value to their educational use), and the environmental situation can be better evaluated to ensure that you are practicing better “Green” habits (not staying plugged in all the time, using lower power systems, turning off lights, using more environmentally friendly supplies, etc).

Resources:

• Green Your Home Office [Environment]
• GoGreen Online - tips for “greening” up you life

Tweet This Post 

Technorati Tags: best practices, Environment, Recycling