This week so far I have discovered quite a few new tools that I had not known about before. Some are Inspiration, GIS, globe.gov and using podcasts in the classroom.
Inspiration, www.inspiration.com was intriguing. I did not download it but did the quick tour, which didn’t work too well, and reviewed some of the examples for math. It reminded me of when I created process flows showing step by step activities for placing customer orders. They were painful but boy did you learn the process when you had to create them! This tool seemed much easier than the one I used. There was a flow for adding fractions, which I liked. I am not sure if it would be confusing to them but I am thinking that some would learn if they had to actually create the process using this tool. It seemed like it would be a fun way to reinforce for those struggling.
The GIS site, www.gis.com was interesting. I put in my zip code and it gave demographics of my area including average income, race, cost of homes, family information, etc. This would be good to use when I get to interpreting and creating graphs. We can graph some of this information for different areas.
The www.globe.gov site had information about some global projects that have been done by students. There was a lot of information on this site. I zeroed in on classroom tools, maps and graphs, then classroom activities. There were puzzles and quizzes. The globe maps and puzzles was really cool. It gives you bright colored maps of the globe or continents, which are broken into pieces; you scramble them and then put them back together. It was fun. From here, I clicked on google earth and downloaded it. One of my students had showed me but I was not able to take the time to really look at it. It was awesome! I found my house and my mom’s. I also took a sight seeing tour which showed places like Disney, the RMS Queen Mary, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas !! The Eiffel Tower was really amazing! I loved it.
Lastly, I went to google and looked for information on using podcasts in the classroom. Since I was familiar with it, I checked out Education World’s information page http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites074.shtml . It was great. It had a few simple ways to get started and gave some brief but informative information on how to use podcasts in the classroom and linked to some examples. I listened to a few. This would be great use to have students create a step by step processes (maybe on Inspiration) for a math concept and add the voice podcast to it. Again learning by creating it and it can be used for other students to view and hear.
These links are all be available on my website resource page.
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