Thinglink: Create and share interactive Maps

"Thinglink" is a tool that you can use to create interactive images. It allows you to create an image that students not only can look at, but interact with. I've posted an example of a thinklink I created for my students to help them review in preparation of the Map challenge coming their way. The map is a blank map of Mesopotamia that I just found on Google Images. I uploaded it into Thinklink and then attached "tags" to various places on the map. The students can see the "tags", think about what that location is, and the hover the mouse over the tag to see if they are right. It's an easy, fun way to review. You can also link the tags to external websites, making it even more interactive and dynamic. The possibilities and uses of this tool are endless! Create one with a plant, an atom, a battlefield, a scene from a story.. You can sign up for free with your google account. 

A few Resources to Browse

Sharemylesson.com is a resource website worth looking at. It is a website that provides an online sharing community of teachers and lesson plans. It is free to join. You can create an account and browse/save lessons. You can also "follow" other teachers so whenever they post something new, you will get notified. To find lessons, simply use the search box and the most relevant items will pop up based on your search. This is a good website to find ready made lesson plans or to get ideas of lessons that you can modify/adapt to what you are doing in your own class. 

Ducksters.com is another great resource that provides informational text on a wide variety of topics. The articles are designed for elementary/middle school. In addition to the informational text, there are some games that you could offer as a motivator or reward. 

French and Indian War Interactive: Searching "interactives" is another way to find engaging activities that the students can do online. My daughter has been learning about the "French and Indian War" in social studies, so I searched for an online interactive tool to help her learn and understand this topic. Add "interactive" behind any topic you are searching for and see what is out there. 

Lessonplanet.com is another great resource site with thousands of lessons and ideas. Unfortunately, this website is not free. It costs a little over $4 per month. 

Teacherspayteachers.com is a unique website that offers many resources made by teachers throughout the country. It is also a place for teachers to share/sell lessons they have created. It is free to join the site but it costs money to download lessons that you want to use. 

"Today's Meet" allows for online discussion (Try it below!)

I have been searching for a web tool that would allow my students and I the ability to discuss and communicate online. The days of calling on one student at a time to share their thoughts and opinions while the rest of the class sits there, happy to not have been called on are becoming less and less. Getting everyone involved in class equals getting everyone involved in learning. We want students "into it" and participating, not sitting back while the others do the participating. With "Today's Meet" everyone is involved. Today's Meet allows you to open a "chat room" for a certain amount of time and and communicate online with your students. It is a free service. Simply go to Today's meet.com, name your room, select how long you want the chat room to be open for, and then simply share the link on your website for students to access it. Once the chat room has been created and the students have clicked the link, they simply enter their name to join the room and begin discussing whatever the topic might be. One the right side, they can type (talk) and on the left side, they can read all the dialogue (listen).  
Application for Education: If you are going to use "Today's Meet," I would suggest starting out by taking your class to the computer lab so you can all do it together. This will allow you to show how it works, how to get in the room, and proper etiquette and citizenship. This is a great way to get all your students involved with any discussion. Pose a thought-provoking topic, discuss a current event, discuss a reading passage, answer questions, etc. I have done a variety of things with Today's Meet. I have had "challenges" in which I post a question and the first one to find and share the answer wins. This competition angle makes students more engaged. Now, you don't want to do stuff like that the entire class period, but a couple challenges are good. Today's Meet could also be used as a "homework helper" tool. Create a chat room and have it be available the night before a test or during the week to be available for help. Students think it is really cool that they can get help from their teacher from their house, knowing you are actually in the room too. 

Click HERE to check out a Today's Meet chat room and try it yourself!

(closes by 11:00 p.m. Tuesday) 

Choose your own adventure

Get kids involved with a "choose your own adventure" challenge. Kids love playing video games because they get to control things, make choices, and interact with what's on the screen. Create that same type of atmosphere in school and you will see engagement rise and behavior problems sink. A "Choose your own Adventure" is nothing new. Books have been around for many, many years that allow the students to make a choice, then turn to a certain page to see what happened. If we make these on the computer, we will save paper, can share the link, and create a more dynamic activity. Create a "choose your own adventure" activity to put the students IN the activity and give them to power to make decisions. The decisions they make will determine the outcome of their game, just like in video games. 
Application for Education: Creating a "choose your own adventure" activity is time consuming, but once it's made, you always have it and can modify/adjust as the years melt away. Or, you could have your students make a simplified version of this activity and have them share with each other. This would really put the learning in high gear. I use these to introduce the ancient worlds that we study. Going into this game with little or no knowledge of the ancient world really makes them think about what they should do. They are eager to see if they made a good choice or not. They learn a lot from these games because they are engaged. It is a challenge. They want to score points. They want to survive. I have used Frontpage in the past to make these.  Interested in getting one started? Let me know and I would be happy to help. 

Here is an example of one I created for ancient Rome. 

Second Look: Animaps-Bringing maps to life

I posted about Animaps last week and it was posted during a no school day, so I thought I would repost it in case you missed it. This is a great, powerful tool that I think you should check out!
Animaps is a website that allows you to make animated, interactive maps. This is NOT just a geography tool, it can be used in any content area. With animaps, you design your route/path and can show points of interest along the way. Animaps uses google maps, so you are able to use real streets, towns, countries, etc.  It is a great tool for showing a path or route and what happens along the way. I used it to show my students the Silk Road path and things that happen along the way. It would be a cool tool to use to show a character's journey in a book or the spread of a disease. Animaps does take some time to figure out how to use it and make your product, but it is worth the time. Let me know if you would like me to show you how to use it. Once you get the hang of it, it is a lot of fun.

Get your students thinking with Lino It! (Try it yourself HERE!)

I have posted about Lino It before. Lino It is a virtual wall that allows you and your students to post "sticky notes" onto the virtual wall for everybody to see. This virtual board/sticky note concept is quite popular: Lino It, Wallwisher, corkboardme are some examples of websites that do this. Finding these tech tools is one thing, but how should we use them? One example of Lino It that I have used with success and found to really make my students think is a "Category Organization" activity. On Monday, I post a Lino board on my website. I set the settings to allow anyone to post a lino sticky note. I tell my students that throughout the week, they need to post a lino sticky note with any fact about Egypt (we were currently in our Egypt unit). I told them the requirement was 2 sticky notes per student. I used a different board for each of my five classes. All 127 students on one board would not have been good. At the end of the week, I took my classes into the computer lab and they needed to organize all the sticky notes on the Lino board into 4 specific categories: Nile River, Mummification, Religion and Miscellaneous. I told them that they needed to find at least 5 sticky notes per category. This gets them thinking about what categories each fact belongs to. It also can produce some debate on where the fact belongs or fits the best. If you can not get a computer lab for the organization activity, simply tell them to do it on their own.  Try it below!

Three Headed Monster: Think, Write, Read

I like to refer to blogging as a Three Headed Monster. When a student sits down to my blog, each time they must do three things. First, they must THINK about what they are going to say. Next, they WRITE what they want to say, what the answers are, their opinion, etc. Finally, they go back and READ what their classmates have shared as well. When you can come up with a tool that forces the student to think, write, and read and have it be something they WANT to do, then why wouldn't you use it? If you could go to Target and buy such a tool, you would. But you don't have to because blogging is free! All you need is a google account and an imagination. There is a wide variety of ways you can have students interact with your blog. Posting comments is something we do a lot in my class. A few examples of comments my students post:
1. Vague post: At the beginning of a unit, I often tell my students to "just tell me something" about the world we are about to start. I provide them with appropriate websites and they browse at their own leisure and share with me and their classmates what they want. Good way to get them in the "mood" for that ancient world. 
2. Imaginary Conversation: Students love to imagine, especially middle schoolers. So let them! To show me what they know, I like to have my students post a comment in which they have a "conversation" with an imaginary friend about a certain topic (pyramids, Nile River, Greek Mythology, etc). Students really get into this because its fun for them to choose their imaginary friend and pretend to talk to them. This is a really good example of the Three Headed Monster because students really enjoy looking through the comments and seeing what their classmates did and who they talked to. 
3. The Great Debate: Middle school students struggle with opinions. One thing that prevents them from sharing their opinion in class is they are afraid they are "wrong" or don't know what to say. Help foster their opinion forming by giving them a way to think about it first instead of on the spot sharing in class. I pose a question and have the students post a comment about what they think and WHY. This is a good way to have all students share what they think instead of waiting for their turn. Again, students then read through their classmates opinions and continue to discuss. 

There are many, many different ways you can have students post comments but they can't do anything unless you have a blog! 
I recommend using blogger.com.  Though there are other options such as wordpress and edublogs.

Wallwisher: A collaborative Virtual Wall

A week ago, I posted a virtual wall/sticky note tool called "Lino" which is found at linoit.com.  There is also an iPad app for Lino. I also wanted to share with you Wallwisher because though it is similar to Lino when it comes to a virtual wall with the ability to post sticky notes, Wallwisher is slightly different. Again, imagine a huge virtual wall and you have a big stack of virtual sticky notes. On those virtual sticky notes, you can write statements, questions, opinions, answer, and/or thoughts. With wallwisher, the teacher, or whoever owns the account, can change their virtual wall to the option of "edit by others" which gives other people (students) the opportunity to add sticky notes and/or edit preexisting sticky notes. 
Application for Education: I have used Wallwisher in the past in my Greece unit. I used wallwisher to help students review by responding to questions by each other. Their task was to post 2 sticky notes. The first sticky note was a question about a greek god/goddess. Their second sticky note was an answer to a fellow classmates' sticky note question. So, by the time we were done, our virtual wall was covered with greek mythology. The students can see other questions, so they know what questions not to post to prevent doubling up. Great way to make reviewing interactive and excited about learning. Students love to see when and who responds to their question. Gives them ownership and pride that someone responded to them!
Above is an example of how I have used it. 

Tagxedo: A Word Cloud better than Wordle

We are probably all familiar with word clouds. They can help a student understand a theme, help a student show understanding, or provide an image describing a topic. A popular word cloud is wordle. This world cloud option allows the user to customize the wordle but only provides one option for presentation: a group of words. So perhaps you want more flexibility and creativity in your world cloud? Well, the answer is Tagxedo. This word cloud option allows the user to customize the words to be used, either by typing them in or entering a URL. The cool part about tagxedo is that the user has a ton of options on how the Tagxedo looks. Tagxedo is a useful, visually pleasing creation tool.
Examples of Use: I have attached an interactive tagxedo to this post from my Stone Age unit, you could provide the student with a link (example here), or post it as an static image only.
Application to Education: student can create a tagxedo about a certain topic and have the overall shape of the word cloud be a central theme. Teachers can create a tagxedo and post it on their website to convey an idea/topic to their students.

NearPod: A Must Have iPad App

I discovered the Nearpod app a couple weeks ago, but only recently had the chance to try it out with my students. Nearpod is an amazing app that has so much potential, all we have to do is brainstorm and "think" in terms of Nearpod and I think we can come up with some very dynamic lessons using this app. Once we know what Nearpod can do, then we can start thinking about ways we can use it and start developing lessons. Nearpod comes with two apps: student and teacher.  At BVMS, all the iPads have the student app, but iPad #1 has the teacher app, so that is the one the teacher would use. With Nearpod, the teacher can develop an interactive presentation and control it during class. All the iPads are synced with the teacher app (#1 iPad) so whatever the teacher is looking at within Nearpod, the students see on their screen. This is very useful to make sure students are on task and not going ahead. Whenever you change the screen and go on to the next slide or activity, the students' iPads change as well. The feature about NearPod that I like the best is the sharing feature. I think its great to have students share what they think and what they know. But when you call on a kid with their hand raised, they start talking and everybody else starts doing nothing. They just sit there, half paying attention/half daydreaming. With NearPod, all the students can share at the same time and have their thoughts and opinions shared throughout the whole class. For example, maybe the kids just read a story and you want them to think about what will happen next. You give them that task within NearPod and they type their answer. Once they submit their responses, you can see their answers on your own iPad. At this point, you can scroll through all of their responses very quickly. If you see a response that you want to share, simply touch the 'share' button and it instantly pops up on everyone's iPad. This is a great way to share thoughts quickly. The best thing for you to do is to check out Nearpod and simply play around with it.  
Features of NearPod
-sync all iPads
-quick and easy sharing
-create interactive presentations that include:
  **Pictures/PDF files
  **Opinion/open ended questions students answer with text
  **Quiz feature
  **Q and A
  **Drawing/Sketching on blank canvas or picture canvas