Waffle Bytes

Here is the latest edition of Five Friday Finds!  Please note that I stuck a foreign language resource in there :-) As always, share with others in your world whom might find it useful.  Have a great weekend!   General Upgrade your KWL Chart to the 21st Century Blog post on a conference idea to update the KWL chart to incorporate higher order thinking. ELA  Visualizing Vocabulary "Simmons presents a series of creative activities that have advanced her high school students' vocabularies and impressed on them the power of words." Foreign Language Pronunciator "60 languages. 3 million lessons. 100% free. The world's largest language-learning service." Mathematics & Science Web 2.0 Tools for Math Educators "This is a continuing series on Web2.0 and other web-based tools for educators. This information is specific to math educators, but there is some crossover into science. Math educators will find a large number of useable interac

Goodness!  It’s Friday afternoon and I haven’t sent this out yet.  I guess many of you will not enjoy it until tomorrow…or Monday now. Here are some resources you or your staff may find useful.  Please feel free to share with others! General - Photovisi – Photo Collage Maker Free photo collage maker; may not be useful, but it can be fun :-) Language - Into the Book “Into the Book provides you with tools to help elementary students learn to use these strategies in reading, the arts, and across the curriculum.” Math - Count Me In Too   “[A] professional development program developed to support the effective teaching of mathematics in years K-6. The program melds findings from research about how children learn mathematics, with research on effective professional development.” Science - Dow Chemical Science videos   YouTube videos created by Dow Chemical on “Science of Baseball,” “Baking Soda Volcano,” and “The Chemistry of Blood” Social Studies- MapMaker Interacti

It’s a new school year and time to share resources again :-) Here are some resources you or your staff may find useful.  Please feel free to share with others General- 20+ Little-Known Places to Get Free Premium Stock Images In the interest of modeling using online materials appropriately with our students, here is a site that catalogs many places to get stock images that can be used for free. Language- Planet 3Book A home for free classis literature that can be downloaded and shared.  (Note if you use iPads: these are pdf documents; if you want to use the built in features of the ePub book you can convert many of these using http://zamzam.com ) Math- Math Pickle Videos Curricular site for K-12 Math teachers, provides math videos to inspire & support mathematics. Science- 6 Little Known Facts About the Earth Provides some facts with thoughts on how these facts can be used in the classroom to drive student inquiry into Earth Science. Social Studies- 9/11 Resources P

(specifically - adding a teacher to the new course you just created...) Another quick YouTube video on how to enroll users in a course: Quick comparison: The enrollment process has changed from 1.9 to 2.+, and it is a big improvement.  Once I adjusted, I find the enrolled users list much easier to use for managing users in a course.   Some of the improvements: One list of users : no longer do you have to check each role area to see where someone is enrolled (this said from someone that has enrolled groups of people in wrong roles and had to spend times combing all roles to get them out...) Assigning/Deleting role assignments : ability to in the enrollment list to add roles (use that big plus sign icon!) without leaving the current window is a huge plus; hitting the "x" to delete a role is intuitive.  (It also works if you are using groups!  How easy to see who is in what group and make adjustments...) Set enrollment parameters: clicking on the edit icon under enrollm

Our organization updated our Moodle server to 2.1 over Labor Day weekend, and the requests for "how-tos" are starting to trickle in.  With the beginning of the school year, here is one of the "biggies" right now: Creating New Courses Here is a quick YouTube video on how to add a new course. Quick comparison : Overall the process has not changed much from 1.9 to 2.+.

(Last week I participated in a professional development day at one of our local school districts. These are the notes from the sessions held in the morning.) I know that there are many teachers that want to integrate technology, but don't. Whether you are not because you are intimidated by it, don't feel like you have to time to learn about it, or just plain aren't sure where to start, this is a session for you. I'm going to overview ten websites and/or tools you could easily implement in your classroom tomorrow. The ten tools I've picked are a variety: some are for productivity, some for communication, and some for creativity. My hope is everyone will walk away with at the minimal one, but hopefully two or three tools you will use beyond today. Tool #1: iTunes U Download Required: iTunes iTunes U is an area within the iTunes Store. It is on this list as (unlike other areas of the iTunes Store) everything there is FREE. iTunes U was firs

(Last week I participated in a professional development day at one of our local school districts. These are the notes from the sessions held in the morning.) I know that there are many teachers that want to integrate technology, but don't. Whether you are not because you are intimidated by it, don't feel like you have to time to learn about it, just plain aren't sure where to start, or maybe you just are looking for something new to implement into your habits or classroom... this is a session for you. I'm going to overview ten websites and/or tools you could easily implement in your classroom tomorrow. The ten tools I've picked are a variety: some are for productivity, some for communication, and some for creativity. My hope is everyone will walk away with at the minimal one, but hopefully two or three tools you will use beyond today. Tool #1: iTunes U Download Required: iTunes iTunes U is an area within the iTunes Store. It is on this list