Friday, October 17, 2008

wordle.net - Great for every subject

Thanks to Chris, the math coach, from Todd County, I would like to share a website that builds word clouds based on the input from you, your students, a blog site, or delicious tags. Chris used the site to enter all the words students used to define the word angle as he was determining prior knowledge. Then after an activity to build understanding of angles, he asked them again to write their definition of an angle. The two word clouds were totally different. He was able to quickly assess the student understanding of angle and to also find their misconceptions using wordle. You could also use this site to find focus in your work, to find the main focus of a blog or a delicious site. I tried it with the TIE Teacher Blog we are now in and found that children and students are the main focus. I was very happy with that result. Our focus in the teacher blog should always be on our students. Try it out at: http://wordle.net
Marcia

Friday, October 10, 2008

Compount Interest Simulator for Personal Finance Class

Here is a great new tool in the Illuminations site from NCTM that provides a good learning experience related to economics. The Compound Interest Simulator applet will allow you to investigate savings account earnings, credit card debt, and a stock market simulation. How well this can relate to the real world and the economic situation we are in now. Group your students into these 3 areas, have them experience the tool, then have discussions about what would be the best alternative for them as they see what is happening today in our economy.
http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=172

Marcia

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

CogDogRoo for Storytelling on the Web

Have you been thinking about having students create their stories on the web, but aren't quite sure where to start? Well, here is an excellent site to help you use the web tools that work best for you. http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools has 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story!!
The advice given at the site: "the mission is not to review or try every single one (that would be madness, I know), but pick one that sounds interesting and see if you can produce something."

Thanks to Alan Levine for his hard work in bringing all the best tools for web-based storytelling to one location.

Marcia Torgrude

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

PB Wiki offers free upgrade for one year

PB Wiki has plenty of great tutorials for getting started and working with wikis, plus a few TeacherTube videos featuring testimonial from teachers using their service. To learn more about their free upgraded wiki for teachers (for one year), click the link below.