Technology+Sharing

=Check out the article from eSchool News: @http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/01/03/our-readers-top-ed-tech-picks-for-2012/ ? (the readers' top ed-tech picks for 2012, 50 technology products and services that are the winners of their Reader's Choice Awards for 2012). Select one or two new technologies that interests you and share your findings on this page. Give a brief description of it, what age groups and subject matters it addresses, how you might use it and what the benefits are. If you have found a Web 2.0 tool not included here, you can share that too.=

Christa:
==== Upon first receiving this article from Emmy, I began to look through at the top listed technology programs mentioned throughout. Some I was familiar with, and some I was not. From its description, one program in particular grabbed my interest and intrigued me to learn more. **Espresso Elementary** (Espresso Education) was described in the article as, “Espresso Elementary is a cross-disciplinary, interactive teaching and learning site for pre-kinderg arten through fifth grade students, filled with thousands of videos and interactive materials designed to inspire children to learn.” [|**http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/01/03/our-readers-top-ed-tech-picks-for-2012/2/**]**?** ==== This description of the program sparked my interest because it was grade level appropriate for class and it spoke of educational videos and interactive materials, which I wish to implement more of now that my classroom has a smartboard (the first year) to utilize. I went on to explore the site and became very excited by what I found. Espresso Elementary was formally launched in 2010 and is a cross-curricular, multimedia learning site for grades pre-K to 5th, containing educational videos, interactive activities, and other classroom resources.  Their mission is to “transform education by encouraging the true integration of technology into classroom instruction through the use of powerful and compelling digital content.” Some of their program’s goals are, “Enhancing the way teachers teach and students learn,” “Providing schools with the highest quality video-rich educational resources,” “Adding meaning and relevance to the curriculum,” and “Helping teachers and students achieve their highest potential as individuals.” “Espresso specializes in taking educational concepts and applying a "real-world" context through video and other multimedia elements. Designed with both teachers and learners in mind, it's a huge resource that makes every lesson memorable.” www.espresso.co.uk After further exploration of the site, I found that the site includes resources to cover all academic areas, including art and health, as well as a section of current events, //called Weekly News Roundup//. Some of the site’s key features include learning modules, fun and engaging characters, current news items, standards-based ready-made lessons, and differentiated instruction support. The activities within the site promote inquiry based learning, are ideal for interactive whiteboards and are accessible at school and at home. When a school subscribes to this program, each student and family is given a code which they can also then access at home. I like this feature, as it is allows more use of the program, benefiting everyone involved- Teachers, students, administration, parents, and community. People working in the area of Special Education have expressed great opinions of this program in meeting all students’ needs. Another of my main attractions to this site is that all resources and activities are correlated to State Standards as well as the new Common Core Standards, which have been greatly stressed and worked towards, within my district this year. Another neat feature of this site is the //curriculum search// in which you type a specific standard that you are trying to achieve, and the site will bring up specific content activities to meet that standard. Because of this I think this site could be a very useful tool for my school to access. I have since signed up for a free month's trial of the site, so that I can further explore its features and try applying them some in my classroom curriculum. I have also talked to my principal and our library/ technology media specialist, who are looking into the program further for possibly subscribing to in the upcoming school year. One final review: //"Espresso offers a great opportunity for students to see how real life relates to what they are learning. The ability to help differentiate a lesson is a great way to meet all of my students' needs. I feel that my students greatly benefit from what Espresso's team has to offer. The ability to tie in the Common Core with technology is a real advantage in today's education world." - //Bill Krakower, Teacher, Beatrice Gilmore Elementary School, Woodland Park SD, NJ

Amy:
== The web tool that caught my eye right away was the one called //Bookshare//. Bookshare is a collection of books for all ages that can be downloaded and then read using adaptive technology. This year, for the first time, I have a boy in my class with a visual impairment. He has a degenerative eye disorder that could cause him to go blind. Even with glasses he has to put his eyes very close to any books or paper he needs to see. Right now the first grade books have fairly large print which is a definite advantage, but that will not always be the case. Even if his eyes do not get any worse, he will need technology to aid him throughout his education. Right now, a visual specialist comes once a week to work with him on the computer. She's helping him learn to type his journal and showing him how to enlarge things on the screen. == == Bookshare has 15,369 children's book titles that could be really helpful. I searched for the author that we are studying in the month of February, Kevin Henkes, and many of his books were on the list. I could not download them without paying for the service, but I am going to present it to my district for purchase. I think it could be a great option for him. == == The //Espresso// site that Christa mentioned above also seems worth looking into. I would be very interested to see how you can utilize this source in your classroom. I think the hard part for me, is finding out what the sites are all about. I do not want a 30 day trial. Instead, I wish they showed you more examples. ==

Carrie:
===I just spent over a half hour looking at watchknowlearn.org. Wow! What a great resource! I created an acct, emailed my kindergarten team telling them all about it and I am SO excited to share it with my students. They have great Read Aloud videos/books for Dr. Seuss' birthday, math concepts (such as counting and coins-which is great for third quarter) and a huge selection of books/videos. What is great about the website is that you can narrow your search by the age group that you work with and add videos that you would like to save to your group of favorites. === ===I also thought Bookshare was a great resource. It didn't seem as user friendly as watchknowlearn, but I also told a colleague of mine about it because she has a visually impaired child in her class. It seems like a phenomenal resource for children with visual challenges. === ===Our school has used Lexia. I've heard positive and negatives on the site. I had a student who loved doing the Lexia program so it was very motivating for him. ===

Jen: I was looking over some of the headings and didn't see any for art, so I decided to try to find some. It has been an interesting search to say the least. I went to one site [|http://www.girlsgogames.com] and was really glad that I didn't have a young daughter at home anymore. The first game on the website I played was cute, a cake decorating game, but then I started checking out others. Wow a tattoo game, a kiss Justin Beiber game YIKES! I never had any problems with Barbie dolls, and never really believed they caused low self-esteem and anorexia, but some of these games go too far with what they promote. I did find a site that was ok for really little kids (pre-K to kindergarten) and had art games on it [] The site actually has a color mixing game that mentions primary, secondary and neutral color schemes. After visiting many other sites and playing a variety of game related to art and art making I came to the conclusion they are very lame and have little to do with creativity or learning. Maybe I need to create my own games.

Irene: BrainPOP BrainPOP is something we have on our school computers, but I never seem to have time to try out all the applications we have available. It sounded great to me, for use with elementary ELLs. A quick visual intro to a topic could be very useful when background language and experience are missing. I found the content a little disappointing, however. The same voice narrates all the videos, and the speaker is a realistic-looking cartoon man with his beeping robot friend. Tthe animation is very simplistic; no actual photography or music was used in the lessons I viewed. I think that with the competition of tremendous visual stimulation that kids are bombarded with, any teaching material has to be as interesting, for them to take it seriously. The information was good, but the delivery was not very engaging. WatchKnowLearn Like Carrie, I thought this one was great! It was what I’d hoped that the last site would be. It’s a free online collection of educational videos that are filtered to be top quality. They are rated by others as one to five stars, which helps when perusing. You can choose an age range between 3 to 18, and then subject areas. Mathematics, for example, leads to subheadings of specific areas such as money, measurement, etc. and then you can scroll through the videos and their ratings. Some categories have no postings as yet, as users sign in and post as they find them. It’s almost a mix of Youtube and Wikipedia, as users may contribute to the site. I liked how well it is indexed. Check out this rap about elements of a story: [] Mark - I wanted to take a different approach. I looked through the website and nothing really jumped out at me. I saw a lot for other disciplines or administration but even the ones social studies minded didn't seem to fit what I was looking for. So I'm going to throw a couple other sites out there. Weebly ([|www.weebly.com]) is a place where you can make your own website. It is very structured so it could be used at multiple grade levels. You could use it to design a personal website for your classes or use it as a student assignment where the kids get to make their own website. As long as you only make one or two sites there is no cost. But if you do not want the website to have weebley in the name or if you want more than two websites then you will need to pay a fee for the year. Like I said the site is very structured. You choose a background for your website and using the tool bar on top you click and drag icons below so you can add text, video, pictures, etc. There is limited minipulation but on the page itself but this makes it very easy to work with. I also searched around for other sites where you can create your own webpage and I found [|www.wix.com] I am not as familiar with this website. It has similar capabilities but is less structured so you have more freedom in your design. I have not used it yet to figure user friendliness but it is essentially the same idea. An opportunity for you as the teacher or students to create a free website. However Wix does seem to have more of a business feel to it if kids were making some type of business or product to sell. The reason I am looking for a create your own website opportunity is because I would like to implement a new project into my American History class. We are getting to a point where students have living or recently passed away relatives from the time periods we are studying. I would like to create a semester long project in which students interview family members or use other sources to learn about their family history and publish their information in a website. This will help reinforce different things we are studying as they see how their family was impacted by events and will also give them an excellent showpiece after they pass the class. Something they can show to their family and say this is what we did in school, and this is the role our family played in our country's history.

Cheri- I spent a lot of time looking through the sites, filtering the ones that would pertain to the high school level and my content. [|WatchKnowLearn is a great]website as has been described by both Irene and Carrie and it contains a few subjects I can use in my classroom. Because the videos are rated I will send less time filtering as I currently due to find appropriate video clips on YouTube.

BrainPop ([]) is another site I spent a lot of time touring. It does not have specific Family and Consumer content but it does have Health, which contains lessons on nutrition and healthy eating. This is always a challenging subject to teach because high school students never think it is relevant to them at this time in their lives. I do agree with Irene it may a little too simplistic for high school but sometimes little “cheesy” gets the students attention if not over used.

I which our school would invest in Turnitin ([]). This program scans a student’s paper for any plagiarism. Now if I suspect plagiarism, I have to send time “Goggling which is very time consuming.

TurningPoint ([]) software is a student response system that allows students who are NOT in the classroom to respond. This intrigued me not only because my action research was on SRS but also as education moves to a more web-based platform this will be useful in the future.


 * Audra: **
 * It's a slow progress to look though these websites. They are fun, but I tend to get sucked in. The first website that I noticed a couple of you had looked at and it was one of the first on the list of pages, was Bookshare. I am very familiar with this website, because for my students who have a "print disability," they qualify for a free subscription with Bookshare to download books, so that they can be enlarged, the font can be changed colors, and/or the books can be read to the student while he/she follows along with the words. I have had great success with downloading a wide variety of books from Bookshare, from textbooks to 4th grade level novels. It's a great tool for special education teachers and students who qualify for a print disability. **
 * <span style="color: #5718c3; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">I also looked into BrainPOP. I subscribed to the free BrainPop Educactor's page, where there was a variety of free resources for the wide range of grades that I work with, K-5 (there were more grade options as well). I had fun looking through some of the lesson plans, activites, and graphic organizers to see what I could use with my students. They also have webinars that you can sign up to watch and learn from. Most of BrainPop requires a subsription, so I wasn't able to do as much digging around there, but there was a button for free resources and I found some neat tools. There were some videos and interactive tools for specific subjects. **

<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Stephanie:
===<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">As I looked through all of the technology tool articles there were a couple that caught my eye right away. I decided to read the article that talked about BrainPOP because I know we have a subscription for that though our school but I have never used it. I think the main reason that I never use it is because I don't know what they offer or how it will fit into what I am doing in the classroom. Over the weekend I explored through the BrainPOP site. It is geared toward all school age children and provides different lenght video clips on a variety of topics as well as many other activities and resources. I was interested in the video clips because our Social Studies curriculum has changed so much and we are always looking for teaching resources. I was able to enter a key word to search for videos relating to our new Social Studies curriculum. I found two very good videos relating to family and family history that I am going to show to intorduce that topic to my students. This site remended me alot of Discovery Streaming which is another site that offeres a large selection of video clips related to just about any topic you can think of. I like the videos because they are appropriate for my students and unlike You Tube videos I don't have to watch through the entire clip to make sure that I can allow my students to watch them. === ===<span style="color: #000080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The second technology article I read was from ST Math. ST Math is a program created through the MIND Research Institute. It is described as "a supplimenal program that takes a visual approach to learning." When I went to the website I was a very troubling statistic. This one is for you Vanessa! By 8th grade 86% of students are not proficient in math. Wow that is actually very sad but I can see how that can happen.ST Math provides a visual approach to engage the student's __s__patial __t__emporal reasoning abilities to explain, understand, and solve multi-step problems. According to the website they claim that "schools which implement more than 50% of the program get fewer students at the lovest performance levels, and more atht eh highest performance levels." The program uses software that must be purchased but includes sourseware that aligns to state standards, games, language-independent software, and self-paced instructional software that makes teaching easier and more productive. ===

Vanessa: I first looked around on the Brain POP web page. This one seems very versatile, covering k-12 and all subjects. I mainly focused on the high school math lessons. They were easy to navigate and sorted by subject and topic. The videos were very short, and a little cheesy, but did serve as a great way for students to visualize movement. In geometry, space is very important and sometimes, especially in three dimensions, hard to understand or visualize. I found the graphics in many of these videos to be helpful and think they would serve a good purpose in my class. There were short, concise, clear, easy to understand, and of appropriate level for the topics covered (high school, in my case). Each video was followed by a vocabulary activity, additional reading material, and a short quiz. I liked that the videos were very short (under 3 minutes) so they could be a little visual to go with the lesson, but I could still teach my own lesson in class. In other words, the videos are not lessons, but rather supplements to lessons. I signed up for a free trial, so I might use this for the next few days in my classroom, but it is not something I would consider paying for. I always look for FREE online tools, and this one is not.

I also looked at the GeoGebra web site. I needed to download this one onto my computer, and I am always worried about downloading things because I worry that they will slow down my computer. I downloaded this one because although I have never actually seen or used it before, I have heard good things about it from a colleague of mine. The program was very similar to Geometer’s Sketchpad. I like Geometer’s Sketchpad more, possibly just because I am more familiar with it. The downfall of Geometer’s Sketchpad is that it is not free (our district pays for it), so GeoGebra would be great to use in a district that does not pay for Geometer’s Sketchpad. Also, I can ask my students to complete activities on the GeoGebra website at home, since it is free! I could not do that with Geometer’s Sketchpad. I think this tool is very beneficial in the secondary math classroom.

I wanted to look into Fluid Math, which looked really cool based on the website. I signed up for a free trial, but have not yet been able to access it. I emailed them and am waiting to hear back…

I also looked at Mangahigh. This one was math games and you needed to create an account, but it was free. The games had good sound effects and got my adrenaline going, but the directions were sometimes hard to understand. I might know the answer, but HOW to play the game was a little confusing and I had troubles inputting my answers into some of the games. I do not really see myself using this one. Also, they had the topics organized so that I could not get to some types of problems until I have passed other levels, so I can not just jump into the game with the type of problems I want my students to be working on.