2nd Life/Facebook

I checked into 2nd life and was impressed with it. I am not aware of this idea of a virtual world that you can manipulate and contribute to. I thought it was pretty cool. In fact, I might spend the rest of my kid's naptime this afternoon working on making my own world more complete. This can be used in the class room to simulate the real world and help students see what it's really like to live on your own. They have to maintain their currency so that they can buy land and build a home to live in. Now there are plenty of other educational ideas floating around in this idea however, it's probably better suited for a college audience because there is an age limit of 18 on second life. There is a teen version however, which I haven't looked into yet.

I found a few ideas of the use of facebook in education. You can find others in your classes, share notes with them, start a forum discussion, do a video chat and more. You can also keep track of assignments, upload your own notes and manage your course activities. I was surprised quite frankly to find any ideas on how to make facebook more useful at all considering that I find facebook to be a waste of valuable time.

Also, an educational store, institution, or professor can create a facebook page and post valuable information they have. Friends can easily comment and share with one another. This seems to be a pretty smart idea because only those who are invited (as friends) can access the information and make comments. Therefore, this is a little bit better controlled than a blog.

I like the idea of having a protected page on the internet like facebook, although I would use other routes to protect my information with students than facebook. For one, facebook has a reputation/understanding that it is a social networking site and as a teacher I would not consider it professional to give students a facebook page to visit and participate in. Instead, I would create a private blog or a private wiki and request they use that route to view information I have for them.

Google Earth

Hi Alison,
I'm sorry I'm a day late. I checked out google earth on my computer and tired a few different locations out. Now I've never used google earth before and it seemed cool but I wasn't sure where to go with it. I googled kmz files and found all these cool files from google earth that give you views of all sorts of fantastic stuff. I looked at the following kmz files:

1. golden gate bridge
2. statue of liberty
3. large V of geese
4. cairo pyramids
5. herbert volcano

I choose the first two because they are places that I have never been and would like to see some day. The large V of geese was great because I talk about that in my classroom how birds fly in a V formation to reduce wind resistance and therefore save energy. The cairo pyramids I took a look at and appreciated through the computer because although I would love to see them I don't like to travel enough to go to Egypt in order to make that happen. And the herbert volcano was just an impressive site. I saw some beautiful patterns of nature with the aerial views that google provides. I just love nature.

I found a couple other interesting leads which I took a look at. Google sightseeing (http://googlesightseeing.com) was a cool sight because each new day google takes you on a sightseeing tour of different places around the world. Another website worth mentioning was http://www.googleearthcoolplaces.com and this is a site where users upload a cool place they found through google earth. The website organizes and keeps track of all of them.

I checked into lesson plans for using google earth in the classroom. The only idea that I have (and still have) is to use google earth to show students poverish conditions in a 3rd world country, where sanitation is very poor and water is contaminated leading to all sorts of diseases. I have pictures of this for my classroom but to pull it up on google earth would have a greater impact.

I found a couple of good sites for google earth use in the classroom. I used scoopler, a real time search engine, which I am really liking :)

http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2610 a list of 23 different ways to use google earth in the classroom

http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/2009/06/great-video-of-ideas-for-using-google-earth-in-the-classroom.html a blog by a guy named ollie bray who posts a video of himself explaining what he does with google earth in the classroom.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/ this has become a favorite of mine. Mr. Byrne is nothing short of a genius in his compilation of ideas for using technology, not the least of which is google earth.

Gapminder

I checked out gapminder today and took a close look at it. I changed the graphs around several times and took the time to interpret what I was seeing. There would be good use for this site in a science classroom because students always need more practice reading graphs. Now it would be very useful to input information into gapminder and see the results. My students would be interested in graph information they have obtained in the classroom. I have an activity where we graph the success of a population and that would work out nicely in gapminder. I checked out the requirements for adding information to gapminder and it doesn't look too bad. I'll try it once I get back to class :)
The graphs on gapminder are pretty complex to interpret which is why using this would be good practice for my students. They need as much exposure as possible to graph interpretation.

YouTube in the classroom

I had an idea to check a real time search engine for good videos to use in the classroom from youtube. I checked this out on scoopler.com and came up with this website: http://www.classroom20.com/profiles/blog/show?id=649749%3ABlogPost%3A177332&page=2#comment-649749_Comment_351425 which is a list of the top 100 videos on youtube to use in your classroom. It's awesome. You've got to check this out!

Links of interest I found

http://www.obsurvey.com/ (Another survey creator)
http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/vocab/ppt-vocab.html (templates for several games on powerpoint, such as bingo, wheel of fortune, 25,000 pyramid, jeopardy, who wants to be a millionaire)

Motionbox

Hi Alison,
I looked into Motionbox because I've been looking for a good video editor for awhile. I liked this one although I had a few problems that are mostly related to a poor internet connection. I'm visiting my parents in Utah right now and their internet connection is touch and go with my laptop. I was able to upload a video and edit the video with ease but getting the video to play back to me was a challenge. I had a difficult time finding the buttons I needed and once I did the video played back REALLY slow but that's an internet issue. I think this would be a good tool for science projects because students love to make videos for presentations and this allows them to edit the extra/time consuming stuff out of it. Using this site is going to help them create concise and efficient presentations. I like this! Here is the video I created. It's nothing intriguing really. I took a 3 min video and cut it down to 18 seconds. I would like to do more with it, such as combining different video clips but with my internet limitations it just can't happen right now. But I'll keep it in mind for the future. Once I get done with this vacation I plan to put together video clips and post them on my blog. I'll try out motionbox for that and see how it goes with a high speed connection.

Online Testing

Take our online test
Here is the link to the online test I created using classmarker. When I was teaching middle school the life science department collaborated on every unit. I loved that. We worked together to write tests, assignments, etc. This would have saved us a bunch of time and effort however we would have had some difficulty executing the use of this online test. Having a student go home and take the test seems too loose. They could easily cheat. But, there are only two computer labs available to us so we would have to stack our classes over the course of a week and with that kind of delay in time the last classes to have taken the test would be aware of what was on the test because they would have talked to their friends.

Alison, have you ever used an online test? Do you have ideas on how to make this option work? It seems that this would be really quick and useful if you had enough computers in your classroom to have the kids take the test in one class period. Grading would be a cinch! But without that you've got problems.