Did You Know 4.0?

Have you seen this yet?  What do you think?

Try Something New This Summer?

My favorite blogger has been at it again, putting together another information-filled document for you to check out and try some new tools.  Take a look, check out some of the links, and maybe try a new tool to use in your classroom this year. If you see something that catches your eye, let me know, maybe we can work on it together!

Biographies, Poems, Journals Oh Joy!

I am so proud of the hard work that has been going on in the lab this spring.  Our new favorite tool has definitely been Glogster.  I was lucky enough to sign up for Glogster and was offered 200 student accounts, all on the free account. Students have their own username and password all under one teacher, myself.  They love the creativity aspect of creating a glog and are always teaching me something new!

Check out the work of our 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders on Runkle Technology.

Check it out - Khan Academy

If you haven't checked out Khan Academy yet, it is definitely worth a look.

Khan Academy includes a library of videos that covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even finance and history. Each video is about 10 minutes long and meant to be viewed on a computer.

This is an extremely informative blog post written by Dolores Gende about Khan Academy and how it could be used with small or large  groups in an educational setting. 

Sign-Up Genius

Sign-Up Genius is tool I learned about through my network of Technology Specialists. We learned about teachers using this tool to set up their parent/teacher conferences and wanted to share with you!

From what I can see, it is pretty easy to use. A few teachers have used it already and said it took minutes to figure out and enter all of their conference dates and times. Within minutes of setting up their "Sign-Up," parents were signing up for times. Easy and efficient. Every teacher loves a tool like that.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Have you seen our Structures?

Our third grade students have successfully completed another hugely successful collaborative project - Structures of the World. This is a science unit in thrid grade, but it really is so much more... Science, Literacy, Library, Technology, and Art. Students love researching about their famous structures in the library and in the classroom. Then they re-create the strutures out of all kind of materials.  Congratulations to all students and teachers involved!

See some of their work here:

Structures of the World 2010

View more presentations from Jenny Murphy

Top 5 Tools to Check Out This Summer

I’ve been thinking about what to post for a while now to inspire you for the summer, while you have a second to breathe. Since we can’t enter the OLS for the month of July, I thought I’d share some must-see tools and resources you should check out whenever you have a chance.

1. Free Technology for Teachers. This is an excellent blog that I read almost daily. It is maintained by Richard Byrne, a teacher from Maine, who writes about various technology integration tools, and much, much more.

2. Google Docs. If you’re not already using Google Docs, you should be. Google Docs is a collaborative tool that makes it easy to store documents, share documents, work on documents with others, make presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings too. The third grade team and I have been using Google Docs all year to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets. Here are some useful resources to help learn about Google Docs and what an amazing tool it is.

• Tour of Google Docs from Google
• Google Docs in Plain English

3. Edublogs.org: I started using Edublogs this year and love it so far. Consider a blog as a website for your classroom, or as a way to get students to write more, in a reading response journal for example. 4St has been doing this for 2 years.

• List of teachers using Edublogs
• The Edublogger is a great blog to check out also

4. Ed.Voicethread.com: I’ve written about Voicethread in a previous post, so I won’t go on and on, but if you haven’t gotten a chance to check it out, I highly recommend it. It offers so many potential learning opportunities for students. We found it extremely useful this year in the foreign language classroom. And, Grade 5 did a fantastic project in science using Voicethread. Here are some further links:

• Voicethread4Education
• Voicethread Digital Library

5. Edu.Glogster.com: Glogster is an online poster creation tool. We used this tool in third grade this year and the students took off with it showing their creativity and imagination in ways I never could have predicted. Check out their work!

Hope to hear about something that I shared with you that inspired you as much as these tools and resources inspire me. Happy Summer!