Space Race: Make Learning about the Solar System fun!

Video | Space Race

Space Race is a site dedicated to teaching about the solar system. There are 8 characters that speak about the planets, space stations and asteroid belts.

The site is also interactive with several games, interactive flash cards, puzzles, worksheets, trivia and more. 

Thing Link

I recently stumbled across Thing Link, a free site that allows you to upload images or grab images from the internet and then assign tags. The neat thing about this is that you can take an image, like a picture of an animal for example, and then add "tags" which provide a description and can have links to other sites, YouTube videos and more!

This site is FREE (although there are additional features if you upgrade to Pro of course) and it has such potential for the classroom! Diagrams, infographics, explanations to anything you can think of!

GoSoapBox.com Overview

It's starting to look like clickers (student response systems), might become a thing of the past. While I totally understand their practical use, they are definitely more to manage and time-consuming to use (assigning remotes to students, batteries, connecting to the receiver, etc.). Just makes you wonder...

Mind blowing! Scale of the Universe

This was shared with the tech contacts for our county, and it is a really neat tool/learning object. It is awesome for math and science! Make sure to use the scroll bar to zoom in and out!

Scale of the Universe

Quiz Buzzer

At the beginning of this year we started an informal interactive white board (Smartboard in our case) group where we meet monthly to share tools, lessons and ask each other questions. At our last meeting, one of my colleagues mentioned the Quiz Buzzer on an interactive whiteboard resource site. 

The quiz buzzer is divided into red and blue (2 sides). When a student goes up to the board and knows the answer to a question, they push the button for their team color. The student who hits the buzzer first will have their color side light up. Once the student hits the buzzer, a series of dots will light up which indicate how long the student has to answer the question. 

This tool has multiple uses potentially despite the fact that relay races are the most obvious! Enjoy!

Deeper uses of Starfall.com

Many early elementary teachers are aware of, and frequently use, Starfall.com. It's a free emergent reading resource. I had been using it just for the brief videos with my kindergarten classes, but didn't realize there was more to it until one of my teacher friends pointed it out.

If you go to the bottom of the main screen and click on EDUCATORS. On the left hand side there is a small box called "tools".

Click on "Scope & Sequence" and you will see all of the online books broken down by unit.

It gets even better! From the Unit description you can view the online book, download the book, view the story words, there is a link to additional interactive practice ("Make a word with  -ig" in the example above), and additional concept, and writing practice!

If you have some type of interactive board, this can be used for a lesson, then you can print out the additional resources and have students follow up at center time.

PBS Teachers

PBS Teachers looks a lot like PBS Learning Media, but I'm guessing that they are going to merge the two sites a some point soon. In any case, it's a great site to look at. It too is very similar to Discovery Education, and offers many of the same features as PBS Learning Media.

One thing that is different is that it shows: What is new on PBS teachers, Discussions that teachers are having, professional development and my favorite, PBS Kids in the Classroom.

PBS Kids in the Classroom shows the appropriate age range for each of the tv shows, provides lesson plans, and gives episode descriptions. Not all of the episodes are available online, but you can go to YouTube and type in the episode title and it's there!

PBS Learning Media

Someone told me about PBS Learning Media and it is fantastic. It is essentially the free version of Discovery Education. You can search for content by:

• Grade level (Pre-K - 12)
• Subject Area
• Media type (document, video, interactive activity)
• Resource type (lesson plan, video sequence)
• Language
• Accessibility (closed captioning)

Once you find materials that you like, you can save them to "My Favorites" and organize them with tags!