Nassau BOCESDepartment of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology

Google Earth makes an excellent teaching tool, allowing educators from a wide range of disciplines to present information from many subject areas in a geographic context. Computer mapping offers engaging visual context and reaches digital learners by tapping into their natural passion for technology and multimedia platforms. Join Mike Senise from the San Diego Unified School District and learn how to go beyond the basics of map navigation and use this spatial visualization tool to meet a variety of needs and objectives.

A great Google Earth overview is below.

Officially joining the browser-based productivity game, Microsoft late Monday released the browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

The Office Web Apps, as the programs are dubbed, are slimmed down versions of the desktop counterparts, allowing for document viewing, sharing, and lightweight editing. Files are stored on Microsoft SkyDrive which provides 25GB of online storage as a part of the Windows Live service.

Screenshots here: http://workspace.officelive.com:80/en-us/FAQ/thumbnails

Get started here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/office-web-apps/default.aspx

Those thinking about the Live@edu service should find this to be a very nice compliment to the offering.

Back in February, I posted about a new technology available from Microsoft at no charge for classrooms.  Mouse Mischief is a tool that Microsoft makes available free of charge, and that allows teachers to work with Microsoft Office PowerPoint to make interactive presentations.

The video below provides a nice overview of what is possible with the technology.

Scholastic Story Starters is a fun site for students in kindergarten through sixth grade to use each day as a quick writing activity.  Students type in their name and select a grade to begin.  Students are taken to a special Story Starter machine that generates writing ideas for newspaper articles, letters, notebooks, or postcards.  They can get a new idea by keeping some elements of the idea and spinning again to change elements.

Find it here: http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/storystarters/storystarter1.htm

Developed by the Department of Health and Human services, the site is a comprehensive collection of anti-bullying related resources for kids, parents and teachers.

The site includes such resources as videos designed to teach students how to recognize bullying and how to respond to it themselves, or is they see someone else being a victim.  As we know, bullying does not just happen on the playground anymore, it happens online and through text.  The site covers the various mediums through which bullying occurs as well as provides discussion guides to use with students.

This fantastic resource can be found here: http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids/

If you use word clouds in your instruction, or as a tool for students, Tagxedo deserves a look.  One of many services that turn text, webpages, articles, etc. into tag clouds, this tool ads a little style too.

From the site: Tagxedo turns words — famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters — into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

Check it out here: http://www.tagxedo.com/

Know of other tools for wordclouds?  Please list them in the comments on this post!

Students and authors, publishers, illustrators, and all of the possibilities that is held within that can now take advantage of the current devices that support the ePub standard.  Best of all, it can be done for free.

The ePubBud site is completely free and ad free.  The site looks very much like Youtube and shares similar functionality.  The tools provided allow you to search for existing works, create your own and download them to your device.  The organization will also accept childrens books that you mail to them, which they will then take and digitize.

This sites and ones like it are certainly tools to keep an eye on and use moving forward.

You can find it here: http://www.epubbud.com/

Google has just announced some nice additions and updates to Google Docs.  Some of the new features include new editors for documents and spreadsheets that they believe “push the boundaries of what can be done in the browser.”

They have also now added a separate tool which is called “Drawing.”  This is a collaborative drawing editor that allows for the creation of organizational charts, flow charts, design diagrams and a whole lot more.

Google continues to impress and add features all the time, often without notice.  These new additions are substantial enough to deserve mention.

Take a look at some of the new features here: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html

To blog or not to blog?  This is the question frequently asked in the context of teaching and learning.  I think we can all agree that blogging creates a great environment for students to publish and gain feedback on their work, among many other things relevant to learning.  A blogging platform also opens the door to the many competencies of 21st century learning.

One aspect that must be considered when opening this door to blogging and authoring is safety.  Who can see the postings?  Who can comment on the postings?  Are they moderated?  These are just some of the more common questions that get asked.  In this context, it may pay to take a look at KidBlog.org which does a nice job of addressing the features and functionality required for blogging, as well as many of the concerns.  It is also free.

Take a look at this resource here: http://kidblog.org/

OffiSync delivers real-time collaboration and document sharing right from where you like to work. Adding the collaboration capabilities of Google Apps as a Microsoft Office Extension, you get access to Google Docs and Google Sites for document, project, and team collaboration.

Once I installed this tool and integrated it with my Domain through Google, I was able to seamlessly open, save and collaborate with documents in MS Office just as I would with Google Apps.

Check out the screen shot below and the site here: http://www.offisync.com/ (there are free and paid versions).

Google Fast Flip is an online news aggregator from Google Inc. that mimics the experience of flicking through a newspaper or magazine, allowing visual search of stories in manner similar to microfiche.

The site presents images of stories from Google’s news partners, which can be clicked on to navigate to the story on the news provider’s own website.

From Google: Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

Check it out here:  http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

See a list of sources here: http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/sources

Weblist is a new way to gather and organize content on the web. Create your list of URLs centered on a specific theme and they will be combined into one easy to navigate URL.  Once you have created your list you can save it as a smart bookmark or as a customizable home page.

Weblist is a free service and registration is optional. If you choose to register as a user your entire list will be saved under your account and you will be able to edit, delete and add to your lists.

Although the service is still in alpha, it is a great site to start taking advantage of and there are certainly many uses for both teachers and students in the classroom.

You can find it here: http://weblist.me/

Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is a new Windows product that allows multiple users to simultaneously share one computer.  Those of you familiar with NComputing will understand this concept right away.

From Microsoft:

Student success is your top priority, so you need to make learning more motivating, relevant, collaborative, and engaging for today’s students and their varied learning styles. Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is a cost-effective solution that was designed to help you accomplish your goal.

More information on MS Multipoint Server here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/multipoint/learn-more.aspx

Mouse Mischief is a tool that Microsoft makes available free of charge, and that allows teachers to work with Microsoft Office PowerPoint to make interactive presentations. With Mouse Mischief, teachers can add multiple choice questions to their presentations, and large groups of students can answer the questions using mice connected to the teachers PC.

Learn more here: http://www.microsoft.com/multipoint/mouse-mischief/default.aspx

THE Journal article here as well.

Field trips, school events, class projects and anything else where photos and video is captured becomes suitable for shwup!  Sure, there are many sites and utilities that allow you to create slideshow and multimedia projects, but shwup is unique in that through “invites,” multiple people can all upload their media into a project album.  Instead of having to collect everyones images, the shwup services provides an easy way to consolidate everyone’s photos and video in a private, shared online album.

Give shwup a try here: http://www.shwup.com/

Google recently announced two new enhancement to Google Books. You can now browse through many of the Google Books categories using a horizontally scrolling interface. This same horizontally scrolling interface is also applied to the collections of books that you build within your Google Books account. Now you can create your own public and private “bookshelves” in your Google Books account. Users of Shelfari will probably note some similarities in the two interfaces.

Those of you not familiar with Google Books may find it to be a great resource.  You can find it here: http://books.google.com/

Those of you familiar with Prezi know it as a dynamic presentation tool that puts a creative spin on the powerpoint presentations we all know.

Due to an overwhelming request for “educator” accounts, the company has responded with an enhanced account just for teachers and students.  You can learn more and sign up here.

For Those of you not familiar with Prezi, I encourage you to take a look and experiment with the site here: http://prezi.com/.

Access the Custom Search here and feel free to share!

As I am sure many of you do, I usually maintain a list of sites somewhere (probably bookmarked) where I can find resources related to what I do. Instructionally, I can provide staff with a list of sites I would recommend them exploring. I can’t help but believe that some of them never bother due to the time it takes to navigate to these various sites to find what they are looking for. That is why I created the below. It is a custom search that will return various interactive activities and SMART notebook files specifically from sites that are relevant to instruction.

It remains a work in process and I will be tuning it as I go. If you have a great site with a bunch of resources, please contact me so we can add it to the search.

You will also note that I have added a page (Interactive Activity Search) to this blog site specifically for the search so that you can share it directly with that URL.

Two can be better than one when it comes to using the SMART Board interactive whiteboard. With the new SMART Board SBD600 series, two people can work on SMART Notebook software files simultaneously, using their fingers or a pen. The press of one button in the SMART Notebook toolbar creates two separate workspaces on the board.

The SBD600 takes innovation and collaboration to new levels, enhancing both teamwork and individual instruction. Plus, the SBD600 gives more students access to the interactive whiteboard.

Information on the new board can be found here: www.smarttech.com/SBD600

Shared by Paula Pisano

K12 Insight is fundamentally transforming the way in which district leadership incorporates the diverse perspectives of the various members of their constituency – students, teachers, parents and the community – into their decision-making.   We bring efficiency by providing a way for districts to replace ad-hoc, silo-centric and fragmented surveying with a centralized, comprehensive, district-wide survey solution giving you visibility, access and control over all surveys in the district.

http://k12insight.com/