Wordle

Wordle

Voice Thread

Here is an example of a very simple voice thread created by two fourth grade students. Teachers can use Voice Thread in many ways and with a wide range of age levels. If your students are too young to search for their own pictures, you could set up a folder for them to upload from, or you could even upload the pictures and let each student add the comments that he or she has created. You could also let your students create pictures on "Paint" and upload those, or scan their drawings in and record their comments about those drawings.

Click here to see a voice thread on 100 ways to use this tool in education. 

Just for Math Teachers

Illuminations is an incredibly rich, standards-based resource for K-12 math teachers. It offers 105 activities, 551 lessons, and hundreds of reviewed links.There's also a Dynamic Paper Tool that allows you to "create customized activity sheets for your classroom! Nets of 3‑D shapes, tessellations, coordinate graphs, and more — all based on your input."

An Incredible Array of Ideas for Using Technology With Younger Elementary-age Students

Here are two sites well worth exploring for elementary school teachers. This blog is authored by Ozge Karaoglou. "Technology4kids," penned by Ms. Karaoglou and Shelley Terrell, is a wiki. 

Special note to kindergarten teachers: try this link for ideas that are tailor-made for your students!

Instructions+funny drawings+art+math+science+fun=Howtoons!

This is the kind of material that's both informational and inspirational. The basic premise is that if you blend humorous, comic-strip style drawings with equally humorous but instructional writing, the result will be clearly-written, easy-to-follow (read appealing) instructions on how to make just about anything: a marshmallow shooter, a pinwheel, even spring-loaded chopsticks. There's also a store from which to purchase kits for making some of the items, t-shirts, books, etc. See all this and much more here!
(Shout-out to art teacher Jan Hillmer for sharing this excellent site with me!)

Videos: From Pre-K to Tweens on totlol.com

This site offers a wide variety of videos that can be set by the teacher for different age levels. The range in subject matter and age appropriateness is very wide. There's an infant setting, more alphabet songs than most of us could ever imagine existed, and in the "Tween" section, an hour-long documentary exploring the nature and meaning of time. There's also a wide selection of clips from the television show, "How It's Made."One thing: there is a fee for using this site, but it's minimal. Click here to try it out.

These are videos you can use to view in class or, of course, to upload to Voice Thread for just about any type of project you may have your students working on.

How Can I Find Good Images and Sound (...and use them legally)?

Search for "ladybug" images.

We've all probably found a great source (image, video, sound, etc.) and then had to forgo using that perfect source because of copyright concerns. Creative Commons can help you save a lot of time and headaches for several reasons. One is that you can select "safe search," which gives some comfort to those of us working with younger children. Another is that it's easy to see right away if you can use the resource you've found and what kind of, if any, credit you need to give to the creator. See the site for a good explanation of how to use resources legally and comfortably.

 

Another option is veezle.com.  Students can search pretty safely on this site for royalty-free pictures to use.