Monday, December 20, 2010

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

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

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.

Monday, December 6, 2010

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.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

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.

Monday, November 29, 2010

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

Monday, November 8, 2010

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.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

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
Posted by: Jim Fargione
District Lead Teacher for Instructional Technology
Three Village School District