January,  2010                             Issue  5    
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Find resources faster!

Search the OLC Website by grade level, theme or key word! Use the Google Search on our main page or the Online Resources page to locate resources quickly and easily.

THIS MONTH'S FEATURED RESOURCES: 

Getting Ready For The Olympics - The Olympic Games create a wonderful opportunity to teach our students in unique and interesting ways. Get ready for Winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver, BC, Feb. 12th to 28th.

 January Resources - Winter's snow and chilly temperatures offer a teachable moment that should not be missed. The lessons and resources on this page are meant to help all educators bring the wonder of winter into their classrooms!

• Consider using a digital projector to project the multimedia items for entire class viewing (Flash movies, interactive tours, graphing activities, etc).
• Many of the sites have printable resources for students and teacher facilitated lesson plans.
• Send home website addresses connected to your classroom topics in your newsletters or list them on your classroom websites. Parents and students can explore the sites from home.
• Consider assigning websites for additional practice, a place to begin research, or as an enrichment activity. 
• Use online resources as CARE partner activities.

Web Sites for Teachers and Students

•  21^st Century Technology and Marzano’s Effective Teaching Strategies – A wonderful shared presentation! Technologies mentioned in this presentation:(Continued from December’s newsletter)
  • Nonlinguistic Representation
    • Graphic Organizers
      • Bubbl.us – Free online graphic organizer
      • Mind Meister – online mind mapping tool
      • Gliffy – online diagram  software
      • Creatly – Online diagrams and design
      • Inspiration – visual thinking and learning tool – on the K-8 minis
      • Kidspiration – visual learning for  literacy and numeracy skills for K- Gr. 5 students - coming soon on some of the K-8 minis
    • ToonDo – Cartoon strip creator
    • PhotoStory 3 for Windows – great for digital storytelling - Available on the Dell minis
    • PhotoPeach – Create slideshows
    • MAKE BELIEFS COMIX!-  Online Educational comic generator for kids of all ages
    • Flickr – a way to share photos online
    • Ed.VoiceThread – Share images, documents and videos.
    • Scratch – Create interactive stories, art, etc.
    • DoInk – Create custom animations
    • ReadWriteThink: Literary Doodle - Pairs an online drawing space with writing prompts
    • Museum Box - Tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box.
    • Animoto – Make 30 sec videos – free to all users
    • Slideshare - Upload and share your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF’s. Share publicly or privately.
    • Smilebox - Combine your photos and music to slideshows, ecards, postcards and more.
  • Cooperative Learning
    • Wikis
    • The Amanda Project - An interactive website and eight-book series for readers aged 13 & up. Readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for Amanda
    • Creatly – Collaborate online diagrams and design.
    • Storybird – Collaborative Storytelling
    • Webspiration - Think visually and work collaboratively online.
  • Generating and Testing Hypothesis
    • Invention at Play
    • Amusement Park Physics
    • SimCity Classic!
    • Exploratorium: Online Activities
    • Nobel Prize Educational Games
    • PBS Building Big
    • Welcome to Smart Skies! Fly By Math
  • Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers
    • Webspiration- Think visually and work collaboratively online.
    • Draw Anywhere -Create diagrams online and collaborate!
    • Exploratree -  A free web resource where you can access a library of ready-made interactive thinking guides or organizers.
• Google Wonder Wheel - Shows related search terms to the current searched query and thus enable you to explore relevant search terms which might be the ones you originally wanted to search for, or simply give you more options to gain more information.
  • Google Wonder Wheel – Step by Step
• It’s Google, but Squared! – The search results are presented in a table organized by attributes.
  • Google Squared – Try searching for Canadian Prime Ministers.
• Wordle - A free website that creates "word clouds" or "tag clouds". Simply copy/paste text and in seconds Wordle gives you a visual representation of word frequency.
• Why Wordle – An article from Tech & Learning
• Build Literacy Skills with Wordle
• Ideas to Inspire – 43 Ways to use Wordle in your classroom
• Guess The Wordle
• Wallwisher - An online noticeboard maker where a group of people can easily communicate with each other by sticking virtual notes. These notes can have text, images or include online videos such as from YouTube. It's basically an electronic wall upon where students and teachers can share questions, notes and ideas.
  • 16 Ways to Use A Wall - You could also do these things on a regular wall in your classroom but try it out Wallwisher for yourself.
  • Fifteen Interesting Ways to Use Wallwisher in the Classroom
  • Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
  • WallWisher: Online Noticeboard Maker
  • Share questions, notes and ideas with Wallwisher
  • Wallwisher - Examples and a tutorial
  • Using Online Sticky Noticeboards
• Web 2.0: Cool Tools for Schools – Links to lots of Web 2.0 tools – broken into categories.
• GeoGebra - is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for learning and teaching. Check out their screenshots and examples.
  • An article about this free math software
  • Also developed an International Wiki which is a free pool of educational materials for GeoGebra. Everyone can contribute and upload free materials there. See http://www.geogebra.org/en/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and http://www.geogebra.org/en/wiki/index.php/English
• 100 Best Blogs for School Librarians - Excellent reference resources for learning about everything from library technology to young adult fiction.
• Inspired Picture Writing - Remember poetry fridge magnets? Try it online with pictures. Drag and drop the images and the words or you can go ‘freestyle’ and add your own text. Images can be saved and easily embedded into a blog, etc.
• Spelling City – Online spelling and word games
• Math Playground – Practice math skills, word problems and logic problems.
• Inkless Tales - Animated Alphabet, Online Stories, Games, Songs and Learning Fun!

   

  If you would like to contribute websites, lesson plans or ideas on how you have used online resources in your classroom, send your ideas to byersj@spsd.sk.ca
  
  Browse previous issues of newsletters at http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/news.htm

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