Wednesday, July 8, 2009

World Images Kiosk -- FREE images!

The World Images Kiosk hosted by San Jose State University offers more than 75,000 images that teachers and students can use in their academic projects. All of the images can be used under a Creative Commons license that requires you to give proper attribution when necessary. You can find images by using the search box or you can browse through more than 800 portfolios and groups organized by subject.

Friday, May 15, 2009

SkittleMania

A few posts ago, I wrote about an afterschool class I was facilitating. We used Skittles to create stop-frame animations. The final movie is done and I am posting it here! Enjoy!!!


Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Electric Box


It's getting to be the end of the year and I am winding up a lot of my bigger projects. That is such a great feeling -- however, I still have classes until early June and I need to find some shorter time-framed activities. So in my quest to find some new things I ran across this great website game in the Candystand.com site. It's called Electric Box and is a great tool for students who have had a circuit/electricity unit in science class. I had my 5th graders do it this last week and they were so engrossed in this activity!! They were collaborating and teaming and sharing information and ideas. It was great!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Seed Ball


A friend pointed me in the direction of TVOKids.com for some great educational activities. I found the Seed Ball game and thought of my first graders. They have been working on charts and grids in Math class and this activity fit very nicely with those skills. Check out Seed Ball and have fun!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Skittle-ation

I started an afterschool group a few weeks ago. The class is made up of about 16 4th and 5th grade students. We are working in groups of two or three. We are learning the process of animation using digital cameras and SKITTLES! The process is really cool and we are having a blast doing it. The kids are thinking of design or picture ideas they want to create using the Skittles and then set them up and take pictures one skittle at a time. They import the pics into iPhoto for storage and will later use iMovie to create the final movie. We are planning on making one long movie comprised of all the small group movies. I am posting a few of the pictures with this post -- and when the final movie is completed I will post that here as well!






Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Great Website! or two....well, three!

After looking through all of the Web 2.0 tools (many of which are great), I narrowed it down to a couple that I use quite regularly.

The first is Rubistar. This is a great FREE website that allows the user to search for or create Rubrics that assist is evaluations. If you register on the site, you can actually save your rubrics for later use, edit them to fit another project, and access them at home or school. There are premade templates to assist you in creating the rubric -- or you can edit and fill in the areas to fit your own specific needs. It's a great tool to have at your fingertips.

The second website that I have used in the past is Create-A-Graph. I use this site every year in grades 3-5. One of the skills that students are tested on is reading and interpretting graph data. What better way to know how to READ a graph than by learning how to MAKE one. This is a very user-friendly tool and allows the user to customize his/her graph for their specific needs. It's a great introduction to creating graphs in Excel!

Lastly - FreePlayMusic is one of my MOST favorite sites for finding and downloading royalty free music for use in podcasts, slideshows, or movies. The database is organized by "style" of music and there are various lengths of music clips that can be downloaded in .mp3 or .aac format.