The Science of Football

The Science of Football is a series of ten videos from NBC Learn explaining and demonstrating math and science concepts as they relate to football.

The Science of Football could be a good way to get students who enjoy sports, but don't necessarily enjoy math and science, interested in learning math and science. Lessonopoly offers lesson plans corresponding to each video to support your use of the videos in your classroom.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:

The Science of Skateboarding, Bicycling, and More

Sport Science - The Science of Baseball

ESPN's Sport Science

3M and Discovery Education Launch Interactive Web Portal for Families and Teachers Celebrating the Science of Everyday Life

Science of Everyday Life provides teachers, parents and students with a fun and interactive platform to explore the surprising and important role that science plays in our daily lives. Science of Everyday Life introduces a new opportunity for fun and creative learning with family activities and interactive tools designed to encourage exploration and engagement with the science that is part of the most relevant “laboratories” in our world – our homes, classrooms and communities.

Science of Everyday Life provides content to empower teachers and engage families and students including:

• Innovations from yesterday to today through brain teasers, virtual labs and an interactive timeline.

• Unique inquiry-based lessons, aligned to national standards, addressing key areas of science and the technology and innovation behind them.

• School-to-home family activities encouraging students to discover the real-world science around them and make connections to what they are learning in school.

Lets Crate File Sharing Web

Let's Crate is very easy to use. To use Let's Crate just drag a file from your desktop to the Let's Crate page. After a short uploading period they'll be stored on the cloud. Let's Crate then creates a unique url that you can send to others so that they can access your file. The unique url expires after 30 minutes unless you create a free Let's Crate account in which case you can keep files on Let's Crate as long as you need them. Let's Crate is a nice alternative to sending mass emailings of large files. Instead of emailing documents to students and parents you can just direct them to a URL. This frees up space in your email application and in your recipient's email application.

Writing Prompts Designed To Use with Elementary and Intermediate Students

The Teacher'scorner.net has writing prompts designed to use with elementary and intermediate students. Each selection has a good visual (If you choose PDF and print) as well as the prompt. There is a list of links for prompts for each month about halfway down on the page.
Thanks to Andy Weik, CES at Mount School for the website.

Babylon’s dictionary and translation software available to K-12 schools and their students free of charge.

Babylon Ltd., a provider of language learning solutions and dictionary and translation software, has announced a new donation program for K-12 schools worldwide, called “Babylon in Every School.” The program makes Babylon’s dictionary and translation software available to K-12 schools and their students free of charge.

“Our solutions bridge the gap of languages for more than 80 million people worldwide,” said Alon Carmeli, Babylon’s CEO. “Our generation’s mission is to leverage the internet and technology in order to make it a better world for the younger generation. Bridging the language barriers improves communication and knowledge. We believe that Babylon’s project will help today’s youth become tomorrow’s leaders.”

Babylon’s dictionary and translation software offers results from more than 1,500 sources in 75 different languages. It provides access to dictionaries and encyclopedias from some of the world’s most distinguished publishing houses, such as Oxford, Britannica, Merriam Webster, Pons, Duden, Larousse, and more. In addition, Babylon provides full text and web page translation in 33 languages and delivers results in more than 25 languages from Wikipedia.org, the company says. http://www.babylon.com/k12-program.html

Seven Search Engines for Students

Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. In addition to the general search engine, Sweet Search offers five niche search engines. The niche search engines are for Social Studies, Biographies, SweetSites (organized by grade and subject area), School Librarians, and Sweet Search 4 Me (for elementary school students).

KidRex is a new kid-safe search engine powered by Google custom search. KidRex uses a combination of Google's safe search mode and their own database of filtered keywords, phrases, and websites. In the event that a questionable website does get past the filters, KidRex has a site removal request form.

 Ref Seek is a search engine designed for academic use. Ref Seek seems to eliminate the advertising and paid links found on Google, Ask, Yahoo, and other commercial search engines. Ref Seek's intention is to serve only search results that are academic in nature. The difference between Ref Seek and a generic Google search lies lower than the top results in search returns. As you compare search results between Ref Seek and Google you will find that the second and third pages of search results on Ref Seek contain results that seem to be more "academic" than what is found on the second and third pages of a generic Google search.

Famhoo is another option for kid friendly searches. Famhoo draws on the collective results of the major search mainstream search engines like Google, AOL, and Yahoo. Famhoo simply provides a stricter family filter than the filters available on mainstream search engines.

Ask Kids is the kid friendly, kid safe version of the popular search engine Ask.com. Ask Kids is divided into five categories of which one is a general search option. The five categories are School House, movies, games, images, and video. The School House category provides students with suggested topics and links to resources for those topics. The School House also serves as a general search tool. In the other search categories Ask Kids makes suggestions for search refinement. A great aspect of the search results that Ask Kids provides is the option to refine searches based on a student's age.

Wolfram Alpha is billed as a computational search engine and this is exactly what it does. If students have any questions involving numbers, Wolfram Alpha is the place to go. Wolfram Alpha can be used for other searches, but it's not nearly as useful for general inquiries as it is for computational questions.

Google Scholar is one of Google's lesser-known tools. Google Scholar is a search engine designed to search scholarly journals, Supreme Court records, and patent records. In some cases the results will link to abstracts of books and articles that you will then have to obtain from a library or book retailer. In other cases results will link to fully viewable documents.

That Quiz - Math test Activities for Students and Teachers of All Grade Levels

Register now for a free teacher account and assign our quizzes and tests of your own design to your students. You receive complete test results including all grades and wrong answers

Free Worksheets for Teachers

http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/

Free worksheets for teachers that can be used with the document camera, scanned for an interactive white board or printed for student use. Math ELA, science and social studies categories as well as early educaiton and seasonal topics.   Thanks to Jason Hugues from Minnesauke Elementary school for this link.

Your Next Read - Book Recommendations

Your Next Read is a neat little site that provides you with a web of book recommendations based on the authors and books you already like. Here's how it works; type in the title of a book you like or author you like and Your Next Read will provide you with a web of books that might also enjoy. Click on any of the books appearing the web to create another new web.

Applications for Education: Your Next Read could be a great resource for teachers that are trying to locate fiction works that their students might enjoy. Rather than having to rely on your own list of books, you can have students name books they've enjoyed in the past and instantly find some other appealing titles.

School Clip Art - Hundreds of Free Files for Students

School Clip Art is, as the name implies, a resource for locating free school-safe clip art. School Clip Art's galleries contain hundreds of files that teachers and students can use in slideshows, videos, and other digital presentations. You'll find galleries for sports, seasons of the year, holidays, and other special occasions.

Applications for Education: If the standard clip art that comes with PowerPoint or Keynote doesn't have what you're students need, have them browse through the galleries of School Clip Art.

Free PDF to Word Converter

PDF to Word is a tool that extracts the text of your PDF document to your choice of a word document or rich text file (RTF). To use it simply upload your PDF document, choose Word or RTF conversion and enter your e-mail address. (don't forget to opt-out of markeing e-mails, unless you like spam). PDF to word will e-mail you when your file is ready for download.

Veezzle - Find Free Stock Photos

Veezzle is an image search engine that should bring some clarity to that process. An image search on Veezzle will yield results that contain only royalty-free, free stock images.
Applications for Education: Your students could use the advanced image search tools of Google and Yahoo, but those options aren't always easy for students (or teachers in some cases) to understand. Veezzle provides students with a simple way to find images that they can use in their digital presentations

THIRTEEN launches new Regents Exam test prep video collection with REGENTS REVIEW 2.0

THIRTEEN, one of the public broadcasting stations of New York, in collaboration with the New York Network, a service of SUNY, presents a newly launched collection of 50 short-segmented video resources on VITAL New York, an extensive library of free digital media resources produced by public television. These resources are designed to help students prepare for the Regents Exams. The videos, presented by New York State teachers, cover Chemistry, Earth Science, Living Environment, Physics, Global History & Geography, U.S. History & Government, Integrated Algebra, English Language Arts, French and Spanish.

Regents Review 2.0 on VITAL NY
Regents Review 2.0 Broadcast Schedule on WLIW21

Regents Review 2.0 Full Length Programs from NY Network

VITAL NY: http://vital.thirteen.org/

EduTecher offers links to hundreds of web tools and sites and provides concise information on how the tools may be useful in the classroom setting. On this site teachers can:
Explore valuable webtools and resources
Share links with colleagues and students
Contribute by sending in your favorite links
Narrow or expand your search by clicking on subjects and grades on the left of the links page.
The homepage also provides a “recently added links” panel on the right for up-to-date links.

The Comics Lab

The Comics Lab is a non-traditional (also called FUN) exercise in which students can develop and refine their creative writing skills, while learning how to develop storylines or plots. Comic strips contain similar attributes to short stories, with a beginning, middle and end. The Comics Lab aligns with the standards for the Language Arts. These standards can be found here.

There are 5 main components to the Comics Lab site:
The Interactive Comic Creator
Comic Strip Templates, where students can draw their own comic strips by hand
Video instructions on writing
Video art instruction
Written instructions

Most students tend to start out creating a comic strip without adequate preparation and let the plot develop in a haphazard manner. It is important for the instructor to have the child think through the plot development in a structured manner. Do you write the punch line first…and then backup two frames to make a creative statement? Some of these questions and techniques are covered in the instructional videos.

National Archives Digital Vaults Project

..."browse through the hundreds of photographs, documents, and film clips and discover the connection between some of the National Archives' most treasured records.” Excellent way to obtain primary source documents for social studies classes. This Flash-based site (also available in HTML) allows you to collect assets, track your path, search, and create a poster, movie, or your own pathway.

Readability

Readability is a simple tool for your computer at home that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading. You can select from a variety of font styles, sizes and margins. Just install Readability in your Web browser at home. This will make reading from the web free of advertisements or frames with other data from the webpage. Play the tutorial video on the website to see how to install on your own computer.

Download Online Video for Classroom Use

Have you ever wanted to convert files without the need to download software? ZamZar will convert the file and alert you via e-mail how to download the file to your computer

Daniusoft Video Converter Free


Daniusoft Video Converter Free is an easy-to-use and intuitive free Video Converter that can handles all video audio even HD videos in batch conversion mode, this great Video Converter can not only convert video/HD Video to AVI, WMV, MPEG, MOV, FLV, MP4 easily and quickly. but also can extract audio from video to MP3, WAV, WMA.

Thus, With this free Video Converter Software, you can convert video to YouTube compatible video formats FLV to share your movie on internet, make your video files editable as wmv, avi so you could load them on Windows Movie Maker, or convert video for portable media players like iPod, PSP, Zune, mobile phone, etc.

In addition, this best free video converter allows you to DIY your video with video editing options: cropping video, trimming video length, merging two or more video clips, adjusting video effect etc.

 
Other sites you can use to download YouTube videos for use on your local hard drive.

Catch YouTube is a free tool for converting and downloading YouTube videos. Catch YouTube offers eight formats for video conversion. The video conversions are fairly quick depending on the length of the video.

Convert My Tube is a free service that allows you to convert a video to your choice of eight different formats for use on your local hard drive. To use Convert My Tube, simply enter the url of the video you want converted, select your desired format, and then download the video.

YouTube Snips is another good tool for downloading YouTube videos for use offline. To use YouTube Snips simply enter the the url of your chosen video and download the video in your preferred format. YouTube Snips gives you the choice of three formats, MP4, 3GP, and FLV. In my test of YouTube Snips the download was very quick.

http://mediaconverter.org/

Additonal video resources for teachers provided by Richard Byrne a high school social studies teacher from his blog http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

http://snagfilms.com/
http://schooltube.com/
http://dotsub.com/
http://teachertube.com/
http://ted.com/
http://history.com/
http://bigthink.com/
http://fora.tv/
http://current.tv/

Earth Day Resources

Brought to you in partnership by Waste Management and Discovery Education, it's your complete source for exploring the 4 R's of environmental education - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Recover. This Earth Day, it couldn't be easier to turn over a new leaf. Whether you're looking for quick Earth Day project ideas or year-round resources, ThinkGreen.com/classroom is the answer. Visit today to access nearly 100 K-12 lesson plans, videos, activities and interactive tools. That leaf, and the tree you found it on, will thank you.
What you'll find:
New Earth Day project ideas for K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12
Lesson Plans, Videos and ActivitiesK-5: Teachers and students discover different properties of various recyclable materials and learn surprising new uses for old things.
6-8: Students consider the environmental impact of too much waste, and take action to design solutions for the problem.
9-12: Students explore the process of recovering energy from waste.
Supporting videos, interactives, virtual labs, worksheets, and more

Connect with the Microsoft Office community

There are many great ways to get help from Microsoft experts and other Office users. Office Answers is a community-based support site where you can ask and answer questions, or just browse other's answers. Check out the different forums on Microsoft Office. The Office blog has the latest information from Microsoft Office experts including free clip art, templates, media, video, training and news. You can also follow Microsoft Office on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Top Resources on this site are:
Get up to speed with Microsoft Office Word by taking our free, self-paced training courses.
Free training
Video demonstrations of many of the top tasks in Microsoft Office Word.
Video demos
Updated solutions and information for your Microsoft Office Word Questions.
Solution Center
Microsoft Office Word 2007 Top Issues, Most Read, Most Searched, and Usage Help for features.
Help and How-To
Office Online includes a variety of Templates, Downloads, Clip Art and more to help you create professional looking documents.
Templates & Downloads

The American Association of School Librarians Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning

AASL Announce Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announces a new resource for school library media specialists and their teacher colleagues. The Best Websites for Teaching and Learning, a list honoring the top twenty-five Internet sites for enhancing learning and curriculum development, is considered the "best of the best" by AASL. The Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning were named so because they foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation and collaboration. All sites are free, web-based sites that are user-friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. They also provide a foundation to support AASL's Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. Valuable information on each site, including tips for effective classroom use are available at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/bestlist/bestwebsites.cfm

The Library of Congress now offers a free resource for educators

• The Library of Congress has designed this new resource to facilitate the process of integrating primary sources into classroom teaching. This online resource includes professional development modules and classroom lessons and primary sources from the Library of Congress arranged thematically. It is designed to teach both content knowledge and critical thinking skills.
  
  Created by teachers for teachers, these ready-to-use materials provide easy ways to incorporate the Library’s unparalleled primary sources into instruction. Teacher-created lesson plans using Library of Congress primary sources.
  
• Themed Resources: One-stop access to the Library’s best exhibitions, activities, primary sources, and lesson plans on popular curricular themes.
• Primary Source Sets: Sets of selected primary sources on specific topics, available as easy-to-print PDFs. Also, background information, teaching ideas, and tools to guide student analysis.
• Presentations & Activities: Presentations and activities offer media-rich historical context or interactive opportunities for exploration to both teachers and students.
• Collection Connections: Historical context and ideas for teaching with specific Library of Congress primary source collections.

Convert Microsoft Office 2007 files for use with version 2003

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats
If you are using Microsoft office 2007 at home and want to open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the 2003 programs Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file formats to use at school you can install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. You will then be able to save and open your files in the 2003 version at school. Just click on the Office Logo to the left and follow the download instructions

Thanks to Ed Moloney, Technology Education Department at Gelinas JHS

Web site offers free online math lessons

Although this item deals with math, the link itself has other disciplines as well:

This web site offers free online math lessons. The California-based Web site Brightstorm offers online math help for students with video lessons created by teachers. Most of the site's math lessons are free, but the company also offers fee-based lessons in preparation for standardized tests. "Anybody who is confused with their homework can come to our site, search for the concept, find it really quickly, and then they can get an explanation that is concise and to the point from a really talented presenter who is also a great teacher," http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/drive_to_discover&id=7196389 or http://www.brightstorm.com/

(this from Alan Baum, Principal WMHS)

SMART EXCHANGE

Find resources for your classroom and connect with other teachers who use SMART boards. On this website you can search for lessons, images and web pages that can be used with the SMART interactive white board. You can browse by keyword, subject, grade or NYS core curriculum. Teachers can also upload and share a resource that they have found successful or connect with other teachers on the message board. This website is a great compliment to the SMART Notebook lesson activities on the SmartTech website.

View,Save and interact with SMART Notebook files online.  This website will provide a way for you to access update and edit your SMART notebook files when you are on a machine that may not have SMART notebook software loaded.  This website can also be used by parents/students to view lessons at home that you have created in SMART notebook and posted to Moodle