S'Cool Tools

5 Great Tools to Perk up Your Classroom and Engage Your Students
by Maureen Brown Yoder

Want to add some great new technology additions to your classroom? Maureen Yoder has done her research by asking 5 questions. They are:
1. Does this tool have the potential to enhance teaching in a powerful way?
2. Is this tool easy to learn and well supported?
3. Is this an innovative new tool or a substantial improvement on an earlier version?
The following tech products all received an enthusiastic "yes" by Ms. Yoder.

1. Lego Education's We Do Robotics Construction Set
This was designed by both Lego and a group from MIT. It is designed for kids ages 7 - 11 but Ms. Yoder states it can be used with high school students for certain purposes as well. It includes legos, motors etc. It also has a software component used to create on screen animations and more. This is highly educational and interactive. The cost is about $130 for the manipulatives and $39 for the software. An activity kit is available for $130.

2. Smart Table
This has the idea of a white board yet is able to have up to 8 users interacting at a time.It is a whole learning center with many applications such as putting together tangrams. It is pricey--$8000 but supposedly amazing.

3. AVer Pen
This is an interactive pen that does not need any type of whiteboard. It can capture images, video recordings and many more activities. It costs $799.

4. New Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE'S)
This technology is part of Teen Second Life software. There are many types and topics available. In this program, students can create their own virtual worlds. An example was a solar system project students worked on interactively. Some real estate and building blocks must be purchased but membership is free.

5. Google Apps Educational Community
This is a site for Educators with all kinds of resources. Included is internet searching, collaboration and classroom activities designed specifically for teachers. It also contains tutorials for apps to help teachers and forums. It is a free resource and available online.

I liked reading about these great new resources for the class. I would like to order one of each please! In reality, the Smart Table and AVer Pen sound amazing but are too costly. The Lego kit and software sound attainable and I love the idea of the Teen Second Life software. The author listed several other programs that sounded very intriguing. I will definitely be visiting the Google Apps page for free ideas to enhance and add technology to my classroom.

http://edu.googleapps.com

Students Explore Computer Aided Graphic Arts

Graphic Design Online by Jill Olthouse

In this article, Jill Olthouse discusses the high cost of school licenses for great graphic art programs for school sites. The two she prefers are called Fireworks and Photoshop. Because of their high cost, Ms. Olthouse has researched other options and tells about her experiences using these free online programs with her middle school students at a computer graphic arts two week long class. The National Art Gallery's NGA Kids Art Zone is an online laboratory of artistic exploration. One of the authors recommendation is this organization's "Brushter" program. It enables students to create abstract art and change the size and stroke of the paintbrush. Kids Art Zone also has and other applications for 3D objects and collage. A favorite of the students' was "Hero Machine", an application that allows even non-artistic types the chance to design super heroes and create crazy outfits and accessories for them. Students get to work with changing layering in this project. Ms. Olthouse also added a Language Arts piece to the project by having the students write stories and adventures about their super heroes. Next the children worked with Fotoflexer to manipulate photos and sharpen them, take things out and change colors. They then used Aniboom which allowed the kids to work with animation in cartoon frames. They had a difficult time with the "save" feature on this application. The last project the students worked on was one that is not available online as an application. It is Google's Sketchup, a program that let the students work with making 3D buildings and architecture. This is a fairly complicated program and they were unable to spend too much time with it. Ms. Olthouse lists several other online application tools that could be very effective tools for teaching graphic arts skills.

This article was very simple but full of resources that I could one day use with my students. I think that making use of free online resources to enhance and teach our kids is wonderful and so fun for the students. I will definitely take the time to look up the applications the author spoke about. All of these resources could be used to enhance Language Arts projects as well as other content areas. I love the idea of using technology to liven up projects and assignments. It adds a new twist on traditional curriculum.

Aniboom Shapeshifter: www.aniboom.com/
ShapeshifterAnimachine.aspx Aviary: http://aviary.com/home
Fotoflexer: http://fotoflexer.com
Google Sketchup download: http://sketchup
google.com HeroMachine: www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heromachine/classic.asp
NGAKids Art Zone: www.nga.gov/kids/zone/zone.htm
Splashup: www.splashup.com

Tech Enhances Old Standby's

Extreme Makeover: Updating Class Activities for the 21st Century
by Rena Shifflet and Cheri Toledo (June 2007)

This article discusses the idea of using technology to update traditional classroom writing skills. The authors list many "old" writing activities, then correlate each with a "new" idea that can utilize technology to enhance or replace the old way of creating the assignment. The topics discussed all feature a collaborative writing theme which ties in perfectly with the nature of the new technology activities. Newsletters were mentioned as a meaningful class activity. It was noted though, that it is very difficult to have 20+ students working on the same piece at the same time. Ms. Shifflet and Ms. Toledo suggest a free web based program called "Zohowriter" for newsletter work. This program has a built in archive for saving work with a feature that allows it to lock when another person is editing a piece. This is valuable so that work will not be lost from one student to another. The final newsletter can then be posted to a website or class blog for viewing. Blogs are useful in that they allow student writing to be viewed by an authentic audience. Another useful we tool is that of photosharing. Photosharing is a way for students to post photos to add to reports, presentations or blogs. "Flicktion" was mentioned as a site that assists students in writing a story inspired by a photo. The authors believe that wiki's are a useful tool for students in researching and editing. Students can upload their research content and edit the content of others as well.

I liked the ideas presented in this article. Most of the ideas themselves were not new to me, however, many of the free online websites and tools were. I am going to do some research on some of the sites listed to investigate how kid friendly, easy and safe they would be with young children in the clasroom. The authors do point out that the dark side of using all of this new technology is the potential for misuse. They advocate using this as a teaching tool in ethics and responsiblity. I would definitely be willing to try the blogs and newsletter tools. I would need to do more research on "wiki's" before using this tool. I do love the idea of using computers to update writing skills that were formally limited to paper and pencil. Between the articles and all of our projects in Educ 422, I am getting excited about technology and the limitless possibilities that it can bring to our future students.

The following is a partial list of websites/resources organized by topic for your convenience and review (complete listings are in the article):

Collaborative Writing: http://docs.google.com
www.zoho.com
http://www.writeboard.com
http://www.letterpop.com

Blogs: WordPress http://www.wordpress.com
21publish http://www.21publish.com
Blogger http://www.blogger.com
Edublogs http://www.edublogs.org
Gaggle http://www.gaggle.net


Flicktion http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flicktion
Creative Commons Licensing (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Search with Searchme

In her article titled Searchme Simplifies Searching, Kayla Hardin introduces her readers to this online search engine. She cites an example of a student wanting to search the internet to write a report on "tigers". Typing in the word tiger on Google will produce 237,000,000 results including the animal-tiger, Tiger Woods, and the Detroit Tigers. Ms. Hardin maintains that Searchme is a student friendly search engine that will show the user subcategories allowing them to find results for exactly what they are looking for. Another appeal of this site is that the user can flip through screen shots of the topic webpages instead of having to click and visit each suggested website. The user can also create and save "stacks" of information for future use.

I was curious to look up Searchme so did immediately after reading the article. Unfortunately when I reached the site, their was a big banner saying that "Searchme has gone Offline". According to the site, Searchme was the world's leading visual search engine. I was disappointed to not be able to personally try out the search engine. According to Ms. Hardin, the only downside to Searchme in her opinion was that it did not produce as numerous results as other sites. To me (and I believe to students) this would be a plus to have many sites weeded out. Searchme sounded very visual and user friendly. I will look occasionally to see if it comes back.

Can My Space be an Effective Learning Tool?

Liz Kolb wrote a thought provoking article titled: My Space Can Be a Learning Tool. The article began with some of the dangers that using My Space in the classroom could bring. Ms. Kolb maintains that with parent education and some basic safeguards, My Space can be a great way to engage kids in learning projects of high interest using this medium. Most of her examples dealt with older teens. She sites some great uses for My Space which includes actually posting on My Space as a historical or literary character. Students would prepare for this project by reading and researching individuals that they would like to portray. Then they would actually post to their account as that person and add information and messages. Others in class would have access to these accounts and be able to interact. Another idea Ms. Kolb talked about is to have economics students create their own "business" and start a My Space page for the business and test market/research the feasibility of their idea. Another idea for younger students is to have a class My Space or personal My Space accounts in which the children could interact with classmates regarding curriculum projects or perhaps use literature or writing skills with a specific task to post.

I was intrigued by Ms. Kolbs ideas yet very concerned about safety and parental concerns. Although the article sites low statistics for children and teens with My Space accounts being approached with sexual intent (7% of the 1500 kids interviewed), I would still be very concerned about the possibility of either a predator or even another student writing inappropriate content in one of my student's sites. Obviously having parental consent and an informational meeting or session in the computer lab where parents could even help their child create their school account would be one way to safeguard the school, district and teacher. Even with this, I am probably too much of a worry wart to implement this idea. I am all for using technology but would rather use the idea of classroom newsletters, personal student blogs or websites that could be controlled or set to only have members viewing the content. In the future, if I can be assured that my students are absolutely safe in this type or activity, or if some type of software is available to do this, I would love to use My Space or another social networking sites in the classroom.