Is your class excited about the Winter Olympic Games approaching? If you are mathematics, science or physical education teacher, you might want to explain the physics behind all the sports presented at the Winter Olympic Games. NBC has created a video series entitled “Science of the Olympic Winter Games” and Lessonopoly has created student activities and lesson plans to support that video series. By completing these activities with your students, they will learn about friction, movement, momentum, center of gravity, chemistry of material and many more. The activities are aimed at students grade 6 to 9. Some of the subjects include : Aerial Skiing, Slapshot Physics, Cross-Country Skiing, Competition Suits, The Science of Skis, The Science of Skates, Science of Friction in Curling and many more. What a great way to get athletic students more interested in science.
Archive for the Category ◊ Lesson Planning ◊
“I know that” is a great site to access fun learning activities about math, the arts, social learning, science, language arts and social studies. It is also possible to access the learning activities by grade (for pre-kindergarten to grade 6). The activities are very visually attractive and user-friendly. To experience the activity, you need to open an account. You can get a free guest limited account that includes advertisement. The advertisements do not seem to target children. By subscribing to a paid account, you can eliminate the ads and have access to many premium member features. With the teacher’s paid account, you can even track the progress of your students. The site also promotes “social learning” by encouraging users to create an avatar and posting about their successes.
Bubbl.us is a free web application to produce mind maps for brainstorming or to help students organize their ideas. It is very similar to Smart Ideas or Inspiration except that it is 100 % free and available as a web application instead of a desktop app. The application is a bit difficult to use at first, but once your realize what all the little icons mean, it is a pleasure to build a mind map. The help file is a great way to know how to use the interface. As you hover over a bubble, the help section will actually change the content based on where you are. You down have to open an account just to build a mind map, however, by creating an account you will be able to share and work with friends, embed your mind map in your blog or website, email and print your mind map and save your mind map as an image.
At the beginning of the school year, we always want to get in our classroom and get ready for the arrival of the students the following day. We want to decorate our classroom, make sure we have enough desks and chairs, do some photocopying, get the necessary textbooks, plan the year, look at schedules, prepare the daily lesson plans for the first few days and learn the names of the students. Unfortunately, this is not always the reality as we happen to be stuck in staff meetings all day. We feel that most of the information in those staff meetings could have easily been e-mailed to us in a memorandum. We are wondering why we get paid often close to $100,000 to listen to that information when we could better serve our students by preparing for their arrival. If you want to show to management how this (useless!) meetings cost them, you should use Meeting Ticker. This nice web app will work in your browser on your computer or on your smartphone. All you have to enter is the number of attendees, the average hourly salary of the employees and the time when the meeting starts. As the meeting is taking place, the price of holding the meeting will increase on your screen. Maybe by seeing that, managers will try to keep their meetings as short as possible focusing only on the essentials!
We are only a few days from back to school and sometimes, when we get our class list at the beginning of the school year, there are some names that we have no idea how to pronounce. Yet, we want to be fair to these children with names that are unfamiliar to us as a teacher and we would love to impress them by pronouncing them properly when taking attendance on the first day of school. There is a solution: Pronounce Names is a great resource with a database of English and foreign names with phonetics pronunciation. In addition, some names even have an audio file that you can listen to. If you know how some names are pronounced, but unfortunately, the database doesn’t include an audio file, you can contribute to the site by recording your voice and uploading it. I hope this website will be useful on your first day of class. Happy back to school!
Today, this resource is a little treasure for your students who need some help with studying. Both students and teachers can use it. Study Stack is a website that lets you enter data that you need to memorize for a test (or just because you want to remember it). Once the data is entered, you can easily produce flashcards, study stack, study table, matching exercise, hangman game, crossword, word search game, unscramble game, fill in the blank and a bug match game. The best thing is that you can even export the data and games for various portable devices such as the iPhone or the iPod. You can also get embed code of the flashcards to include them on your website. Your Study Stacks are available to other users and you can access the Study Stacks produced by other users. You need to create an account to produce your own data, but the site is compatible with Facebook connect. Students can access your content without creating an account. On the picture to the left, I created a Study Stack about the Canadian provinces capital.
If you use YouTube to look for educational videos to use in your classroom, you might be interested in using EduTube. It is like YouTube, without all the cut cate videos or teenagers doing dangerous stunts. Videos are not hosted by EduTube, but are categorized and filtered by this site. Original videos are hosted by video sharing websites like Youtube. It is an excellent way to find resources for teachers and students. You can also use it as a way for your students to search videos ensuring they only have access to quality educational videos. It is also possible to contribute to the website by recommending videos or links to educational videos. The interface is available in various languages.
A Kid’s Photos is a website that provides you pictures for you as a teacher or for your students. The photos are available in four main topics : animals, scenic, flowers and objects. They are not very high resolution, but for most student projects, they will be appropriate. The photos are taken by the two authors of the website and the terms of use state that you may use the photos in any of your projects under the provisions that you may not include the photos in another collection for distribution, you may not claim the photos as your own and you do not directly link to the photos. Even if the collection is not complete and will not answer all your needs for photos, it is a great resource and you may always opt for a membership at www.clipart.com if you need more.
“Graphic Organizers” is a great website offering printable graphic organizers in Word or PDF format. Using those tools, students will be able to better organize their ideas when writing text. They can also use those graphic organizers to sort their knowledge in mathematics, science and social studies. There are over 70 organizers that you may download for free on that website.
Graphics organizers may be used to sort information, to compare and contrast, to research, to study, to sequence, to create a hierarchy, to determine cause and effect and to present concepts. Some of the organizers available on this website include : Two-Way and Three-Way Venn diagrams, Spider Web, Who/What/When/Why/How/Where, Compare and Contrast Charts, Comparing Maps, T-Chart, Source Cards, Boolean Search, Research Planning, Division of Labour Chart, Cycle Chart, Event Sequencing, Branching, etc.
Word searches are an excellent way for your students to review important vocabulary. Making one yourself can be painful and very time consuming. “Make Your Own Word Search” makes the development of new word searches very easy. In order to produce your own word search, all you need to do is to enter the list of words you want to include and then click the “Create Puzzle” button.
After you entered all the words, the system will then generate a grid with all the words that are included in the list. You can change many parameters before starting your grid including: Rows, Columns, Font Size, language on the grid and Background colour. Have fun using it!
If you are the kind of teacher using multimedia presentations a lot but you find the background included with PowerPoint to be a bit boring, this website is for you. It includes tons of new PowerPoint templates (backgrounds) that you can include in your multimedia presentations. Categories include business, creative, education, finance, humour, holidays, social, spots, science, technology, abstracts, frames, textures, etc. All backgrounds are available as pictures so you can use the Format Slide Background menu to change the picture. Instructions are included with each package on how to do it in PowerPoint. In total, there are 720 new backgrounds on this website.
“Quiz Myself” is a good tool if you want to prepare computerized multiple-choice questions or flash cards for your students. You can produce quizzes even without opening an account, but you won’t be able to modify them if you don’t have an account. Opening an account is free.
This tool is a bit different from one I presented a few months ago. “Hot potatoes” let you produced computerized quizzes but you need access to a server to upload the files to make them accessible to your students through the web. “Quiz Myself” will host the quiz for you. Once the quiz is complete, you get a URL (a link) that you can give to your students. When preparing a quiz, you can assign a category, a discipline, a subject and even a specific course.
Here is a quick tip for today. If you need free clipart for your class and you don’t need hi-resolution, this website contains many royalty-free cliparts that you may use for worksheets, lesson plans, quizzes, websites, and other classroom needs or the students may use in their assignments. However, the liscence agreement, requests that you link back to the « Free Clipart at School » website.
There are multiple subjects available including sports, books, religion, money, military, medical, science, animals, plants and computers. The cliparts are very small in size with low resolution. They are ok to be used on the Web or in small formats on worksheets, however, if you enlarge them, they will become pixilated.
You want your student to be more “Web Savvy” by having them practice with exercises on the Web? These types of exercises seem more appealing to your students? You found some websites with exercises on the Web but they do not match the content of what you are teaching to your students or they do not match the curriculum of your region, province, state or country? Why not produce them yourself? You have no experience in coding interactive websites? No problem! “Hot potatoes” is a tool that will fulfill this need easily and painlessly.
This program includes six parts:
JQuiz: will let you produce web-based quizzes using multiple choice, shot answers and true or false questions.
JCross: will let you build crosswords of any size.
JCloze: will let you build fill-in the blanks exercises.
JMatch: will let you build association exercises.
JMix: will let you build jumble exercises.
Masher: will let you build entire learning units.
The program will let you know export the file in Unicode, which means that you can produce exercises in foreign languages. This is very useful if you are teaching French, German, Spanish or other languages. The program will also run on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Once the file is exported, all you have to do is to upload it to a web server. “Hot potatoes” does all the formatting for you.
