Waffle Bytes

Finding good web resources can be the hardest part of the job for an educator.  With all the demands on a teacher's time, who has time to spend searching?  If this is you, here are some resources you may found useful.  Please feel free to share with others! General-   Text Mechanic “A collection of free, online, browser-based, text manipulation tools. NOTE: All tools require javascript to be enabled.”  Some of the tools include: word scrambler, word/line count, add/remove line breaks, letter case converter, remove duplicate lines.  Very handy little tool to shorten some tedious jobs! Language- Can You Trust the News? Teacher guides and interactive lesson plans to help teach students the difference between good and bad journalism.  Both printed and Internet guides are available Math -   Get the Math “[A] convergent media project designed to help midd...

My husband and I have been using Dropbox for quite awhile now. We love it as an easy way for us to get files back and forth to each other... via his PC and my Mac (yes, duel platform is important to us!).  Admittedly, we used it mostly for personal stuff at first, like putting the pictures of our kids in there so my husband could make these his desktop background. Or even sharing those pictures with other family members & friends.  But what surprised me was how often we began to use it for work. More and more often on weekends he worked on a file at home on my laptop, and then dropped it in Dropbox so he could access it on his computer at work (For those of you wondering... yes, I lugged my laptop back and forth while his stayed docked at his desk.). Or the number of times one of us would be wrapped up in a project and would remember the other had been dealing with something similar so we would email the other asking for the articles and research to be dro...

This is a special edition of the Five Friday Finds... for art teachers.  Enjoy & share! 50 Awesome & Inspiring Blogs for Art Teachers Some great sites for finding new ideas and resources for the classroom Draw Island Draw online & save the creation…no account or login needed!  Very easy to use Art Project, Powered by Google “Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.” ArtCyclopedia An Internet Search Engine for art National Gallery of Art Classroom for Teachers & Students Connecting art and curriculum

As usual, finding good web resources can be the hardest part of the job for an educator.  With all the demands on a teacher's time, who has time to spend searching?  If this is you, here are some resources you may found useful.  Please feel free to share with others! General - Seven Technology Tips for Younger Elementary Some tips (focused for elementary teachers, but applicable to all) on ways to make technology integration in your classroom more successful. Language - Online Idiom Dictionary Type in the idiom, find out the meaning…over 5000 idioms explained. Math- Online Latex Equation Editor Use the online site to easily create mathematics equations or symbols of all types.  These can then be downloaded, embedded, and saved as a variety of file types… all free and with no registration. Science - Facing History and Ourselves “Helping classrooms and communities worldwide link the past...

Let's have some fun with manipulating graphics today! ( Warning: you will be messing with HTML coding for this. If this scares you, don't let it!  If you make a mistake you can always replace it.) So, here is my title with a graphic as it would be by simply inserting the graphic: Changing the size of an image: I really don't want the graphic so large.  (There are other things I want to change, but we'll take these one at a time.) In order to change it, I click on the < > icon on the right side of the html toolbar. It changes the window so it shows all the html code.  (This might appear as gobblely-gook to you, but it is what is telling the web browser how to display the page.) Look for where it says <img title="... I'm going to add some information (I've added it in blue) to adjust the size of the image by giving it a fixed height, so now it will read <img height="75" title="... The number is how many pixels high I w...

App Title: Combine 4 (previously 24) Grade Level: Grades 5 and up Purpose: A Combine 4 tests the user's knowledge and ability to use the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to combine 4 numbers in a way to equal 24.  Program Functionality:   A The game is very smooth running (I've never had a crash!), and there are enough number combinations that the user doesn't notice any duplication (there are 1362 combinations).  Sound can easily be turned on and off.  Also, the user can set for it to only use numbers 1-10 as possibilities for the 4 numbers, decreasing the difficulty level. There are two modes of play.  Free Play allows the user to take as long as they want to solve the problem, but does keep a timer for how long it does take to complete it.  Speed Play starts with a 3:00 count down, adding 10 seconds for correct answers and subtracting 20 seconds for any passed problems. Overall Educational Value:   A...

As usual, finding good web resources can be the hardest part of the job for an educator.  With all the demands on a teacher's time, who has time to spend searching?  If this is you, here are some resources you may found useful.  Please feel free to share with others! General - Free Online OCR Free service that allows you to convert scanned documents, screenshots & photos into editable and searchable text.  Not 100% accurate on the screenshots I tried, but accurate enough I’ll be using it instead of re-typing information! Language - Random Logline Generator Generates random loglines/writing prompts.  I would not put this up for students as some that I generated I would not consider appropriate, especially for younger students.  But it does give some interesting & thought-provoking prompts! Math - K-12 Mathematics Resources for Teachers & Students Many of these resourc...

Happy Monday, fellow Moodlers! Let’s look more closely at the forum tracking and subscriptions in Moodle.  First, what are they & how are they different?  Both the tracking and subscription help in notifying Moodle users when there are new forum postings they have not read.  The tracking notifies within the Moodle course; while the subscription sends out emails to the user.  Let’s look at each individually: Tracking : Pros -no clogging up your email Cons -if you go into a forum and accidentally leave without actually reading all the new posts, it “unmarks” the unread posts so you would need to look at the individual timestamps to know the newest posts There are 2 steps to go through to make sure that tracking is set up correctly for you. 1.    Go to your profile & click on the Edit Profile tab; click the Show Advanced button; scroll down to Forum tracking and make sure that “Yes: highlight new posts for me” is selected in the drop do...

As usual, finding good web resources can be the hardest part of the job for an educator.  With all the demands on a teacher's time, who has time to spend searching?  If this is you, here are some resources you may found useful.  Please feel free to share with others! General - Doodle For Google Doodle for Google is a K-12 competition where students are invited to “redraw” the Google logo.  This year’s theme is centered around “What I’d like to do someday…” Registration for the current round of Doodle for Google is open until March 2! Language - knoword Timed vocabulary game where you are given a definition and the first letter of a word and must determine the word. Math - Web 2.0 Scientific Calculator Another online scientific calculator, I know, but it is on a very clean interface.  Better yet, you can get a widget of it to embed right in your own website, blog, or other online site. ...