Top Ten Websites of 2011

Every week, I post a website that my classes found useful, instructive, helpful in integrating technology into classroom lesson plans. Some, you agreed with me about; others not so much. Here, I’ll share with you which sites readers thought were the most helpful in their efforts to weave tech into the classroom experience. Between these [...]

5 Great Labor Day Websites

I have never had so many kids interested in writing sentences, paragraphs, words than with this program. Why? Once they type their stuff in, the selected dog or cat says it–in a wide variety of crazy voices. This went viral in my classroom!

Weekend Website #76: 46 Math Websites for Tech Integrated Classrooms

Here’s a long list of math websites geared to fourth and fifth grade. I put them on my class internet start page and let kids pick during sponge time–those five-ten minutes between ending a project and starting a new one. A Plus Math Adding Decimals Alien Addition Angles Arithmattack Build a bug math game Count [...]

Weekend Website #53: 41 Websites for Teachers to Integrate Tech into Your Classroom

This list has a little bit of everything, and will kick-start your effort to put technology into your lesson plans: 10 Tech Alternatives to Book Reports Analyze, read, write literature Animations, assessments, charts, more Biomes/Habitats—for teachers Create a magazine cover Create free activities and diagrams in a Flash!

Tech Tip #65: Google Street View

Q: I can’t find enough detail about a particular setting that my character must visit. I’m afraid I’ll get something wrong. Can you suggest a good place to find these kinds of details?

A: That’s a lot easier to do today than it used to be, thanks to Google Street View

Weekend Website #48: Wolfram|Alpha for Educators

Now, they’ve launched an arm aimed at educators, like you and me. This includes:

* gather information on a general concept
* research details of specific topics

Another Hans Rosling Extravaganza–Health vs. Wealth

What an amazing man. I first discovered him through Timethief. He had a wonderful statistical analysis of–well, statistics–that was visual, understandable and addictive.From the BBC: Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores [...]

Weekend Website #45: Google Art Project

Explore museums from around the world with Google’s incredible Street View technology. Discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces. This site provides 360 panorama pictures with zooms to the museum artwork. Museums included are:

Google EBooks is a Year Old. How are they doing?

On Monday, Dec. 6, 2010, Google finally launched the Google Ebookstore. Long-awaited, it’s a viable outlet for ebooks of all kinds. Google Books. It offers ebooks for Androids, iPhone, iPad, Nook, Sony and the Web. All in one place. Doesn’t that sound right? I found one of my books there…

Weekend Website #40: Many Eyes

Many Eyes enables internet users to share data in appealing visual formats. Numeric data or textual data is morphed into sixteen data pigmentation styles, including stack graphs, bar graphs, bubbles, cluster maps, pictographs, scatter diagrams and bar charts and shared with viewers who may then discuss the data results.

Weekend Website #38: DSpace@MIT

Drop by every Friday to discover what wonderful website my classes and parents loved this week. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of yours, too.

10 Hits and 10 Misses for 2010

Since I started this blog eighteen months ago, I’ve had almost 150,000 visitors (113,024), 5,521 on my busiest day, visiting the 360 articles I’ve written on every facet of integrating technology into the classroom. As with most bloggers, I write what’s on my mind. I post 3-4 times a week on a wide variety of [...]

Weekend Websites: Best Sites of 2010

Every week, I post the website that my classes found useful, instructive, helpful in integrating technology into classroom lesson plans. Some, you agree with me about; others not so much. Here, I’ll share which you as readers thought were the most helpful in your efforts to weave tech into the classroom experience. These are the [...]

Weekend Website #36: LearnItIn5

The challenge as the tech coordinator at my school is to persuade teachers to integrate technology into their classrooms. Kids are easy. I know that first-hand because I teach K-8 technology classes also. Kids are ready and eager to jump into the Web 2.0 world. Teachers, well, there’s the challenge. To them, that phrase–integrate technology–means type a report in MS Word or create a trifold in Publisher. They miss the vast landscape of exciting tools in the internet cloud that teachers all around them are using to make education more fun and motivating than ever before in history.

Weekend Website #34: Block Posters

What a great way to upsize student projects. Simply upload a digital picture created by students. Tell the program what size you’d like the poster and the program automatically figures out how to lay it out on 8×10 sheets and its ready to print.

Weekend Website #27: TED

TED, as its tagline says, is truly ‘riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world’. T-E-D stands for Technology, entertainment, design, and gives you a good idea how they approach this avenue for sharing knowledge

Weekend Website #28: Bing Maps

They’ve taken cartography into the world of augmented reality.

Weekend Website #7: Free Flash Tools for your Classroom

Drop by every Friday to discover what wonderful website my classes and parents loved this week. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of yours as they are of mine. This is an update on my original posting on Classroom Tools. Today–how to create free educational games, quizzes, activities and diagrams in seconds! Host [...]

What’s it Like to Be a Blogger?

The bottom line: You’re most likely to blog if you’re a 40-year-old American male With a graduate degree. You’ve been blogging for a couple of years, and watch a lot of TV (that’s the only data that doesn’t ring true to me),

Life is a Computer Program

Don’t take my word for it. Paul Rothemund, a molecular programmer, details DNA folding

Weekend Website #26: Tagxedo

Perfect for visual learners

Weekend Website #24: Office Web Apps

why I’d pick Google Docs over Web Apps: Linux users require an MS license to use Web Apps. This is inequitable and flies in the face of what open source people and others are trying to achieve with cloud computing, which is make more technology available to all.

Weekend Website #7: Create Flash Class Tools Online

Create free educational games, activities and diagrams in Flash! Host them on your own blog, website or intranet! No signup, no passwords, no charge! Create timelines, Venn Diagrams, Ishikawas–all online.

Weekend Website #6: Cool Tools for School (and Homeschools)

A tool for every purpose. It’ll take hours just to see them all, and every one is geared for the classroom or homeschool

#100: How to Web 2.0 Accessorize Your Classroom

If you haven’t tried blogs, wikis, internet start pages in your classroom, get going!

More Free Stuff From Google

Freebies from Google–Earth viewer, apps (like MS Word and PowerPoint), anti-virus program, photo viewer (like Flikr but better), Skype, RealPlayer, and more)

4 Ways to Explore the Universe From Your Computer

Google Earth and Celestia have brought the Universe to the classroom.

Free Online Tech Classes From MIT and Others

Contemporary wisdom is ‘you get what you pay for’. Not always true. Here’s a long list of FREE internet resources that are high quality, useful and simple to install. Top 10 FREE Apps to Install on your computer 5 More Must-Have FREE Apps (including the Photoshop clone GIMP) 4 FREE Online Keyboarding Programs FREE Google [...]

Two Internet Activites For the First Day of Class

In a Web 2.0 classroom, technology is integrated with what is being taught, but a few weeks are necessary to cover transcendental computer skills–where students sit, how to care for the computer, keyboard practice. These activities get students comfortable with the school computers and the every week routine. Here are two great programs to add [...]

Another Big City Goes With Google Apps

Google Apps is Google’s free version of MS Office. Not quite as powerful, but fulfills 90% of what most people require of word processing (how many times is it critical to put a watermark in a document?). It includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites. All of these–but especially Gmail, Google Calendar, [...]

Middle School Programmers: Meet Alice

Programming is hot with middle schoolers. They’ve been using computers since kindergarten and want to do more than Word, PowerPoint, and visit internet sites. Our number one goal as teachers is to make them think (different from the rote learning of your grandmother), so this burgeoning student interest in computers provides us with a rare [...]

Five More Must-have Free Apps

A lot of you read the post yesterday about ten must-have Free apps for a new computer. If you’re a parent, you might like my post on five great Free apps for kids here. Here’s a list of programs I often recommend to the parents I teach (with the exception of Get Social–most of my [...]

Top Ten Free Apps to Install on a New Computer

This is a question I always get from parents of my tech students. My fellow-blogger, Dustin, has a good start, although I’ll add a few more tomorrow. 1. Panda Cloud Antivirus If you did the right thing and uninstalled Norton or McAfee (the two antivirus programs PC manufacturers get paid big bucks to include on [...]