Memory Mates

Although it was a few years back, I distinctly remember the hours I spent studying to memorize the steps of how a bill becomes a law. Passing the Constitution test was a requirement for passing the eighth grade, so it was a pretty big deal to us at the time.  I made a Velcro study board so I could practice putting all the steps in the right order.  It was a low-tech study solution, but the hands-on nature of creating and using the board was very helpful to me.  There are all kinds of online tools that your students can use to study and memorize things today.  Between these tools and good old-fashioned studying, our students can master memorization this year!  These examples are about how a bill becomes law, but the tools and techniques are universal.

Tickle their funny bones: Students can create comic strips or children’s books about the how a bill becomes a law.  Writing and illustrating the process can help students “own” the information.  This site lists some good online comic generators, but you can also assign this with pen and paper.

Show off the learning: Students can make posters of the process, tying the review process to their creativity.  There is something about working on a huge poster board and markers that has always appealed to me!  If you want to go high tech with this one, let your students create and present interactive online posters.  Try making a glog on Glogter or a Prezi. 

Hollywood Style Learning: Let your students get really creative and have them create movies or slideshows to share with the class.  Tools like Powerpoint, Windows Movie Maker, and iMovie are all great, but there are also free online tools for educators like Animoto.  I listed Prezi as an interactive online poster, but it is also a great replacement for Powerpoint.

Put it in a Binder: Somebody might already have collected resources for the topic you are studying in a LiveBinder.  If not, it would be a great thing for your students to create themselves.  Check out this tool that allows you to compile all kinds of information to save and study later.

In a Flash: Studying flashcards is a very effective memorization tool.  There are online flashcard generators and smartphone apps that can bring flashcards to your digital devices and prevent writers cramp at the same time! Quizlet is a neat flashcard generator that you can access from a computer or smartphone.

Memorizing facts and procedures can be a daunting task, but hopefully some of these 21^st century tools can male it more manageable and fun.

~Peggy's Corner - July 14, 2011~

State of the Art

We all know that the current economy has forced schools to make some difficult cuts. In some districts, arts education is being downsized, or eliminated entirely. Throughout history, the arts have been central to people’s enjoyment and understanding of the world around them – art is deeply embedded in all world cultures. Art can be incorporated across the curriculum in a variety of ways: using different types of media to illustrate a book report, to highlight historical events, to illustrate or explain scientific theories – the possibilities are endless. The resources below are a sampling of some free online tools from The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, one of the crown jewels of American museums. Created in 1937 for the American public by Congress and financier/art collector Andrew W. Mellon, the Gallery has long been instrumental in educating visitors about art. The NGA – far from being a fusty mausoleum – has created the Art Zone, a neat nook on their Web site where users can create interactive art online. All animations require Adobe Shockwave.


BRUSHster
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2010-03-22.7667464831/
Subjects: Art
Grades: K-12

Your students can get in touch with their inner Jackson Pollacks or other abstract artists with BRUSHster, an interactive painting tool that allows them to create art online. Colorful and easy to use, the program is appropriate for students of all ages and experience levels. BRUSHster offers over 40 online “brushes” of all sizes in addition to various textures and transparencies; there are also over 25 different special effects where students can blur, ripple, fragment, smudge, and blend colors. The program can be used to design screensaver art, as well as wrapping paper, notecards, and similar items. The “Auto” feature is a handy option for very young users, who may find the multitude of choices overwhelming.

Dutch Dollhouse
http://67.23.47.252:82/thegateway/recordBase/dcrecord.2010-03-22.4509012962/
Subjects: Art
Grades: K-12

Vermeer is one of my favorite artists, so I was immediately drawn to Dutch Dollhouse, an interactive 17th century Dutch house where users can redecorate rooms, add figures, and so forth. The various rooms of the doll house are representations of rooms in paintings by famous 17th century Dutch artists, and include a kitchen, art studio, courtyard, and other rooms. Here, students can change the lighting (day to night, for example), create decorative objects, and add, remove, or relocate objects from room to room. The program also includes a fun virtual lacemaker, an important economic industry for generations of Dutch.

Photo Op
http://67.23.47.252:82/thegateway/recordBase/dcrecord.2010-03-22.3574356762/
Subjects: Art
Grades: K-12

Photo Op is an interactive tool that the NGA bills as a “two-part introduction to digital photography and image editing.” The program allows students to use a virtual camera to capture images, and then edit them online. Users can employ the editing tools to radically change their image; features include the ability to warp, change color, mirror, and make collages from their images. In the process, students can learn about focus, lighting, shutter speeds, layering, filters, and image composition.

~Joann's Picks~

Combat Cyberbullying with Cybercitizenship

In previous posts, Joann and I have advocated the use of Web 2.0 tools and other emerging technologies in the classroom. We have tossed around ideas about using cell phones, wikis, and social networking in class. Teachers are using these tools to help students understand, summarize, collaborate, and present ideas in subjects from art to math and everything in between. Many of these tools allow for a greater level of interactive communication among students and between students and teachers. With this increased interactive communication, there is a new platform for the age-old problem of bullying. According to CyberSmart!, who provided resources focusing on this issue, “When kids are intentionally and repeatedly mean to one another using cell phones or the Internet, it’s called cyberbullying.” Preparing our students for success in the 21st century includes preparing them to deal with this type of cyberbullying, both in and out of school.


Just as schools must take traditional bullying seriously, we need to look at the problem of cyberbullying carefully. Cyberbullying can be very harmful to our students. Many schools and districts are taking a stand by blocking certain sites and applications to avoid the bullying, but that can limit what teachers and students can do in class. A recent discussion on Twitter, #edchat, revealed a fear among many educators about the inappropriate use of the internet in school and a fear of cyberbullying. Our focus in this week’s discussion is how students can prevent this negativity so they can use cell phones and the internet positively in class. EnGauge created a list of important 21st century skills and a featured skill is interactive communication. Today’s students need to understand the proper etiquette and rules of this type of communication to use it effectively. The CyberSmart! resources Joann highlighted this week on The Gateway help students and teachers better understand the problem of cyberbullying and what they can do to stop it or avoid it all together.

If you follow Joann’s links to each of these resources, you will see that each of them connects you with a letter to educators about cyberbullying. This letter was very helpful to me, since I had a very limited knowledge of the problem. Each of the activities is self-explanatory, and shouldn’t require adaptations to fit into most classrooms. The activities and worksheets can be a discussion starter for students and teachers on the subject. There is a printable flyer to send home with students, too. This is important for getting parents into the conversation, since much of the cyberbullying our students are facing probably occurs outside of school.

Allowing your students to do a short, multimedia project on the topic might be a fun way to help the ideas from the lesson sink in a little better. I like letting my students pick what type of project they want to do from a list, so I have all different types of projects to grade at the end. This creates more variety for me, and a little choice seems to make students more excited about their work! Some ideas I have used are creating a short commercial on the subject, designing a comic strip, or writing a picture book to help younger students learn about cyberbullying. Better yet, actually have your students present their projects to another class at the end.

For some lists of web 2.0 tools you can use for student projects and presentations, please refer back to the links and examples in our posts on tech tools for teachers. We have a discussion about the subject on our Facebook fan page as well. You can use the links to create a list for students to choose project and presentation ideas from. Encouraging creativity can add variety to the discussion of this challenging topic and allow your students to open up more on the topic. If you have any ideas or comments about cyberbullying and its’ role in 21st century education, please share them with us. We love to see how these resources are working for you.


~Peggy's Corner~

A Wiki What?

While browsing through the resources Joann highlighted this week in her post, I was struck by two things. First, there is a huge amount of free technology available to educators who want to bring 21st century tools into their classrooms. Second, I will need to do some serious research to figure out some of the terminology associated with these great technologies. If you are already incorporating some web-based tools in your class, good for you! Bear with me as I dedicate this column to the tech-newbie’s among us who still have a little (or a lot) to learn to keep up with our students. The internet is quickly becoming a big part of our everyday lives. Our students are using it outside of school, and web-based technology can keep our daily classroom routines fresh and relevant.


Many of the tools Joann referred to in her column this week are known as Web 2.0 tools. While the original internet was focused around the passive viewing of information, Web 2.0 applications allow greater interactivity and collaboration. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, and Wikispaces are sites based on user-generated content and are all examples of Web 2.0 technology. One application that is used by many teachers is a wiki. This type of website allows for collaboration between many authors, i.e. students in a classroom. Students and teachers in a class can upload files, embed multimedia presentations, and post images on a class wiki as the school year progresses. You can control the privacy settings to allow the content to only be visible to members of your class. K-12 teachers can create wikis for free on sites like Wikispaces. This type of technology and collaboration can be very useful for generating discussion and sharing ideas between students and teachers. Wikis are pretty simple to set up, even if you don’t have any website building experience.

Our Gateway members are at all different levels of technology integration. Have you already created a wiki for your class? Are you interested in creating one, or do you want to focus on other areas of technology? Do you currently use any Web 2.0 applications to augment your teaching? If we can work together and share ideas, we will be able to bring these types of applications into our classrooms much more easily. I will be posting questions on Facebook and Twitter over the next few weeks to see what technology you have incorporated, which new applications you want to add in your classroom, and what might be holding you back from implementing certain technologies. Be sure to follow us there, and chime in to let us know what you think! Your questions, comments, and successes in all areas of 21st century skills are a crucial piece of the Gateway. You are the driving force behind the resources we highlight and discuss every week.

I created a word cloud on http://www.wordle.net/ by pasting in the text of this column.  This is an example of a quick and easy way to integrate technology into a lesson. I discovered the Wordle application on Jose Picardo’s A-Z Internet Resources for Education (See Joann’s column for the link). This is a very interesting exercise to assign, since students will have fun getting creative with the design of the words, and it helps show the important terms in a particular piece of writing. This word cloud only took about five minutes to create, and wouldn’t take very much advance preparation by a teacher.

This week, I challenge you to look over the resources Joann has presented in her Tech Tools post. Find a new type of technology that you might be able to use in class, and think about how you will implement it this week, this month, or even this year. You may want to have your students create a word cloud like the one I created on Wordle to turn in with an assigned essay. You can have your students create a cartoon strip with an application like ToonDoo instead of a book report. If you are thinking about assigning posters, try out Glogster, where students can create multimedia online posters. If you have a class wiki, you can even embed them there! Voki can be neat, too. Students create avatars and record their own voices. The avatars can present the information for them! All of these examples were pulled from this week’s highlighted resources on the Gateway. Take some time to browse through them yourself. I think you will find some really neat ideas.

~Peggy's Corner~