Most of us know about the Nobel Prize. Hopefully some of our students do as well. The Nobel Prize site has made available educational games and resources to learn about subjects related to the 6 awards for the Nobel Prize: Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Peace, and Literature. There are over 40 resources and games available for teacher use that relate to the various Nobel Prize awards.
Some of the games are actual games while other are just interactives that teachers can use in the classroom. What is great about this site is that you can find something that will work for all the core subjects because several of the physics can apply to math. I suggest checking out the list to see if there is one that you can use in your classroom.
Mixxt is a European based company that aims to provide its user with the ability to create their own social network for free. Of course the free means advertisements, and you can get a Pro account to remove those, but advertisements online are basically part of our culture now and I think the average Internet user recognizes them and avoids them.
Mixxt is another option for teachers who might want to create a place for students to collaborate with them outside of school. There are several features that are offered that can enhance the collaboration between students and teachers. Teachers can customize and design their layout with total freedom. You can set the network to private or public which can be very important for educators. You can activate and deactivate several modules, making controlling your social network much easier. You can create rich content pages and customize events as well. You can insert media and share files with your members.
If you are looking for a way to connect with students outside of the classroom then Mixxt might be an option worth checking out and playing around with the features.
Hollur is a site that allows users to create 20 second audio files. As a member you create the file and then other members can follow you and listen to your messages. So why 20 seconds? Think about a voice-mail message and how long those are before you tune someone out. For more information about Hollur I suggestion that you visit their Frequently Asked Questions for more information. So why use audio instead of text? Audio makes the message more personal. Sometimes, !!! in text does not have the same effect as hearing those same exclamations in your voice.
Some of the features include the ability to allow you to embed these messages, so you could put them on a website or blog that students use. You can tag the recordings as well to help with organization. Another neat feature is that you can add a link to the recordings so that if you are talking about something from the web, they can see what you are talking about as well.
So how could Hollur be used in education? As a teacher you could create an account and then have students follow you. You could then leave audio messages for your students explaining homework assignments or providing reminders for due dates and test dates. Parents could follow you as well and you could leave short messages to parents letting them know about what went on in class or reminding them to sign permission forms. If you have a Twitter account for your students you could link to this site and your messages for students.
A neat tool to use in collaboration with Flickr is Time-lapse Creator. The idea is rather simple. Take your pictures, upload them to Flickr, then use the Time-lapse Creator to put together a time-lapse of your photos. I know that there are several districts who block access to Flickr, so teachers and students might have to work on it at home to put the time-lapse together.
I could see this being used in science classrooms taking time-lapse photos of experiments catching reactions or in Earth-Space Science classes showing the hydrologic cycle process. I could also see it used in geography classes to show change over time as it relates to climate. It would be neat to setup a camera and do a similar time-lapse of weather patterns outside your school. If you teach Art, it might be worth while to have students take pictures of a project as they work on it.
You will have to sign in to Yahoo to use this service.
After attending and presenting at TeachMeet Kentucky I got more interested in the use of Skype by me and the teachers in my building. At TeachMeet Kentucky, two teachers demonstrated how they were using Turning Point in their classrooms to foster a competition between their two classes. I was immediately hooked on the idea and have taken it back to the teachers at the high schools that I work with. Below are 10 resources, articles, and links to various information regarding Skype in Education.
1.) Recently I came across to great resources for implementing Skype. The first is a great list of 50 Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom. The list is broken in to 5 different categories with links to more information or just providing an idea. This could be very useful for people like me who are interested in starting to use Skype in education.
2.) So the next question then becomes; well who would I use Skype with? Recently shared on Twitter, Skype for Educators is a Google Doc/Website that allows visitors to view educators interested in video conferencing and shares their expertise and contact information. This would be a great place to get discover fellow educators interested in collaborating. You can visit the Skype for Educators Form to provide your information as well.
3.) A similar directory is available through the comment section of a blog post on the Skype in the Classroom Blog. Also worth checking out and adding yourself.
4.) Skype an Author Network is a site dedicated to helping educators connect with authors using Skype. On the left hand side of the screen you will see a list of authors available to Skype with and provides directions for teachers and librarians to use the network.
5.) Politicians and Skype? Yes, they are interested. Here is an article about how politicians are encouraging its us as a form of connecting with constituents. It might be worth contacting your local representative and seeing if they will want to Skype into your government class. I figured this would be appropriate to include considering it is Election Day.
6.) People are always asking me just how handy Twitter and having a PLN is. Well, just today, while looking through the people I follow, one of them, EdTechSandyK shared three Skype resources that are perfect for this blog post. A great article with ideas and examples of Using Skype in the Classroom is a great read. She also Shared Tips for Using Skype in the Classroom which has some useful ideas. Finally, she shared 10 Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom which has some valuable ideas and some tools and other resources to use with Skype.
7.) A Great article from TechLearning by another member of my PLN Shelly Terrell provides links to resources for using Skype. Learning Beyond Walls: 21 Skype Resources is a valuable starting point for educators and contains many of the resources listed above.
8.) From Information Technology Schools another list, but this list focuses on Online classrooms. 10 Ways to Use Skype in the Online Classroom is for those teaching online through computers. This list is great for those in Higher Education, but with the increase in online learning for high school students and students on home-bound instruction, Skype would be a valuable tool for K-12 teachers as well to connect with those students.
9.) A Skype "Techtorial" is a PDF file that introduces people to Skype. The installation process and how to use the software. It is for older software, but the concepts are still virtually the same. This would be a good handout for teachers new to Skype and understanding what it is and how it works. There are also some valuable links within this handout.
10.) Skype for Teachers Introduction - YouTube Video
