Electronic Resources

This blog is winding down. Is anybody reading it? I like writing even if nobody is reading. But time is running out for the ER blog. I’ll tell you why next month.

This month though we have some resources of interest. How do I choose resources for the blog? Well stuff from my head that eventually reveals a nugget of information that leads to a website. Therefore, you must put up with my musings to get to the nugget that gets to the coveted website.

* Here’s a little musing brought about by the celebration of the the founding of the Girl Scouts, Mar. 12, 1912. I was a girl scout and a girl scout leader. I sold and bought and ate cookies. This month I hope you support the scouts in the time honored cookie sale.

I come from a short line of Girl Scout leaders – my mother was a leader and I became a co-leader of my daughter’s brownie and then girl scout troop. When my daughter was a 6 year old Brownie she wanted to quit because she was afraid to sell Girl Scout cookies. She was very shy and it was too much stress for her. Being a leader was a very rewarding experience for me and if she quit I would have had to quit. I enlisted the help of her older brother, a born 7 year old salesman, and as a result she and I stayed with the troop for many years. She is a college grad now who is light years away from shy; the girls in that troop are still best friends, sharing weddings, babies and their lives. (It swells a mother’s heart!)

Back to the cookies - those were the days when I could eat them without worrying about fat and cholesterol. I haven’t touched a girl scout cookie in years yet somehow I got fat and cholesterol anyhow! With cookie selling season here, I decided to investigate the good, bad and the ugly of those wonderful cookies (Samoas are/were my fav). If you visit the Little Brownie Baker site - http://www.littlebrowniebakers.com/cookies/cookies.html - you will discover everything you ever wanted to know and more about the cookies – ingredients, recipes, history, cute cookie characters and the fat count!

* Search enignes make online life easier but not too much fun. Want to try a search engine with “tude”? Ms. Dewey http://msdewey.com/ – she talks, she walks, she squawks – get your searching done with fun.

*Interested in reading great literature in small doses? Then Daily Lit may be for you. Free registration gets you your choice of online books delivered to your email .
http://www.dailylit.com/home

Just decided to check my account at Bloglines to catch up with my RSS feeds and I would like to share a few of interest.

I may have dismissed Valentine’s Day in my last blog, but romance has won out - I just found a lovely web page called, Making Valentines: A Tradition in America, designed to show the evolution of the Valentine’s Day card. This was found through the Librarian’s Internet Index feed.

Also in my feed is F.R.E.E. which always has great resources and is worth adding as an RSS feed. A couple websites for science teachers are:

1. Inside the Cell, from National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which takes you on an in-depth exploration of the structures, functions, etc. of human cells.
2. Educator’s Bridge provides lessons, downloadable guides and many other resources for educators to use in Elementary, Middle and High School earth science curriculum.

The week has just begun, stay tuned for more …..

February is an interesting month, short on days, but long on history (and Groundhog doesn’t count, Valentine’s Day is iffy what with everyone on diets). We recognize Black History Month during this time, although one month out of an entire year doesn’t seem adequate. We used to celebrate Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays during this month - a time when every school child knew what Feb. 12 and Feb. 22 meant and when many of us got TWO days off to celebrate. But times changed and now we only have ONE day off ((get ready for the worst English ever) - for that oft misspelled President’s or is it Presidents’ Day and how many Presidents are we recognizing? It’s got to be at least TWO even though we only get ONE day off, so that makes it Presidents’ Day - making a certain calendar wrong, I’m not mentioning any organizations here - except it’s hanging on my bulletin board. Remember my previous diatribe about apostrophes??). (Oh and for those of you who have a week’s winter recess in February, while the rest of us have to work the other days, no Site of the Week for you! And that is the end of my creative writing spurt.

Well enough of all that, getting back to ER where we have more than enough resources for everything. So let’s get to it:
This month’s ER Spotlight’s Theme is Black History Month, listed below is the overflow.

1. Listen to Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, sung during that time in history, at History Now
2. Visit the main page of The Civil Rights Movement at History Now for many more resources.
3. African American Odyssey from the LOC (Library of Congress)
4. African American World from PBS
5. Our Shared History - African American Heritage from the NPS
6. For hundreds of links - Librarians Internet Index

Other Items of interest from February’s Electronic Resources newsletter are:
1. Apply for LOC’s Summer Institutes for Social Studies teachers for intensive study of its resources.
2. The third annual West Point Bridge Design Contest has begun. Its purpose is to provide middle school and high school students with a realistic, engaging introduction to engineering.
3. Elementary students can play math and word games at the Arcademic Skill Builder educational game site.

For a complete listing, read the ER newsletter - I work hard on it!

And probably finally unless I find something else, for Social Studies teachers, I would like to recommend a series of podcasts, by Lars Brownworth, teacher at Stony Brook School (Read in the New York Times, January 31, titled 12 Byzantine Rulers. Think about creating podcasts in your classroom.

And one more thing, there was blog talk on morning TV and Sree whatever the rest of his name is said there are millions of blogs many of which are only read by the blogger and his/her mother. So, Mom, if you’re reading this in the great blogosphere in the sky, thanks.

I wanted to start the week off with some Internet links of interest. I came across a one page .pdf document on the WebEnglish Teacher newsletter. It outlines ideas for observing Martin Luther King Day on January 15.

This FedStats Kids page has a list of kids’ pages supported by various govenment agencies on. You’ll find a lot of interesting and fun activities.

The FedStats homepage is the gateway to statistics from over 100 U.S. Federal agencies

If you are concerned about life on the Net and the social networking sites your students are probably using - the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), a not for profit organization, is the go-to resource for cyber security awareness. Click on the Educator section for free resources, activities and lesson plans. Teachers might be interested in Teachade - an online social networking site for teachers.

Interested in misspellings in high places? - One Sunday morning news show had this floating across the screen during an interview on how to protect against catching cold: “Restrick your workspace”. Shouldn’t spelling be easy as ABC? I guess you can’t spell if you can’t pronounce! Here are a couple of spelling websites you can use in the classroom.
Guidelines from LD Online and Houghton-Miflin’s Spelling & Vocabulary section.

1. The Bill of Rights Institute has a new student website - Do You Have the Right? - targeting middle and high school students where they can explore interactive, multimedia and content-rich pages.

2. Internet2 is the high bandwidth, nationwide network bringing super high speed educational applications to the desktop. Some applications include: broadcast quality desktop video conferencing and distance learning, CD quality audio, AP courses, interactive teaching, virtual laboratories, remote equipment access and whole lot more. Visit the Internet2 K-20 Initiative website . NYSERNet and LHRIC will work with districts to connect.

3. Algebra in Action, Middle School Madness and Elementary Brain Teaser are part of this Problem of the Week Math Contest website from Columbus State University.

4. Eventually we will have snow, and Snow Crystals, is a site that is all about snow crystals and snowflakes — what they are, where they come from, and just how these complex, beautiful structures are created. Make a Flake is website for kids to design their own and a fun follow up to the science at Snow Crystals.

5. The Internet as a Resource for News and Information About Science , a report from the Pew Institute finds that 40 million Americans get their science news from the Internet. This 42 page report was released in November 2006, and should be of great interest to science educators.

6. 20 Voices recounts stories remembered from the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The site includes a video of the events, an interactive section of life in the Ottoman Empire and video of Ellis Island arrivals.

7. The SmARTkids website of the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago was developed to help children-particularly 7-12 year olds-discover ways to look at, think about, and respond creatively to art.

8. Diigo is a Social Annotation website tool which allows you to Highlight, Clip and Sticky-Note any webpage and share it.

Are you a part of the Web 2.0 revolution? For all those who have “seized the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game”, Time’s Person of the Year is for you. Congratulations to us all.

And a special congratulations to our own Time’s Person of the Year, Pete Reilly, for his thought provoking blog, Ed Tech Journeys‘ winning of Edublog’s Award as Best Newcomer for 2006.

For sometime now I have been recommending some of the tools of the Web 2.0 on my website, Electronic Resources. I’d like to mention a few here to implement in the classroom.

BubbleShare is a tool that can be used to upload story albums which have been designed and created by students of any age and can include audio recorded by them as well as digital images. After showing this tool to one of the teachers in my workshop, she did just that with third graders. Very impressive!

SlideShare allows you to take those ubiquitous Powerpoint slideshows and share them with the world.

Every Object Tells a Story collects stories about objects that have special meaning to their owners. This tool would be a valuable addition to any storytelling project.

1. I have been researching the tools in Web 2.0 and placing them periodically on the ER website. If you have missed them, please visit my online bookmarks at del.icio.us/rdesalvo where you will find my beginning list. Stay tuned for more.

2. Here’s a treat for those who appreciate antique children’s books (and who doesn’t?), go to The Children’s Book Online - the Rosetta Project and you will find a collection of antique books online free to download.

3. If you are concerned about the safety aspect of using Blogs (and who isn’t?) visit The BlogSafety Forum, a place where parents, teens, educators, and experts discuss and learn about safe blogging and social networking.

4. The top 100 most influential people in U.S. history is a current list at the Atlantic magazine site. It is a good starter for class discussion or blog.

5. Another Internet tool is WuFoo (I kid you not) - WuFoo is a free tool to build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun.

7. AskCity is a brand new fun tool from Ask.com. It integrates maps with information about local businesses, restaurants, concerts (you can order tickets, too), etc. and highlights the locations. This is SUCH a commercial site but I loved it - I even traveled to my old neighborhood in the Bronx!

The workshop today has been very informative and interesting. As the instructor, I very much enjoyed not only working with the group but also, doing all the preliminary research in planning the session. I learned many new and interesting Web 2.0 tools, I also learned it is fun to express myself through a blog. I hope you all feel positive about bringing blogging and wiki-ing to your classroom.

Open the document for easy access to sites for this workshop.Links for workshop