Book Wink

Today I would like to share the resource Book Wink. It's a great site that showcases many different types of books for students from 3rd through 8th grade. The host and book reviewer, Sonja Cole has a warm and inviting voice that makes you want to run to the book shelf and pick up the book she just reviewed.

You can search the site in several ways, by subject, grade level, author or title. I would suggest showing your students this site before they head to the library or share it with your librarian and have him or her share it periodically. I also think this site could be an interesting way for your students to create book reports using a FlipVideo to record their 2 minute book review. Who knows Sonja might even use it on the site one day!

There is also an option to subscribe to their podcast as well, that way the book reviews can come to you instead of you going to them.

How would you use this site?

TGIF tip Going Green

This week's tip is a green one, I was catching up on some reading and in the magazine Converge, there was an article about a classroom that collaborated with the Lutron Electronics Company. This classroom paired up with Lutron to help them gather data about their energy efficient light bulbs. The students monitored the light bulbs and compared data between their classroom and the one next door. This sparked the class to continue to try and find ways to be more energy efficient.

This partnership helped create a site dedicated to the greening of America's Schools through innovation, education and awareness. The Greenovation site helps to provide teachers with curriculum that is correlated to state standards as well as a social network. This network is a resources where teachers can share how their classrooms are changing our planet for the better.

Mahatma Gandhi's famous quote says "You must be the change you want to see in the world." so go out, be that change and help to inspire your students to be that change as well.

Blooms On My Mind

OK, so I have been planning for some professional development with my TRC (Technology Rich Classroom) grant teachers and one of the first things we are going to talk about is Bloom's and higher order questioning strategies. I have been racking my brain trying to find a cool way to review the Old Bloom's and introduce the New Bloom's and then there's Visual Bloom's, which brings in different Web2.0 tools to teach the different levels. I love how the creator took the tools that many of us are using and broke them into the levels, he prefaces that this visual is just a conversation starter and will probably change and morph as time goes on. I like that, it will be interesting to see how my TRC teachers react to it.

I think my plan of attack for this task will be to create a TrackStar (this is a tool provided by ALTEC that creates a very visual hotlist for the participants) for the teachers to go through and have them fill out their own mind map using whatever site they feel most comfortable with and just go from there. I hope they find it useful and walk away with several ideas for how to integrate Bloom's into their curriculum. I also hope that you've found some good resources for yourself and that you've had a chance to get reacquainted with a great way to teach.

Which resource do you find most helpful? Why?

TGIF Tip- Change the World

photo provided by Will Lion's Flickr site

Today's TGIF Tip is similar to last Friday, guess I am feeling green. So at Siemens, We Can Change the World you can with your students do just that. The site challenges you and your students to create solutions to environmental problems in the area and share the results nationwide.

There is also an opportunity to win awesome prices and the possibility of being on TV, oh and changing the world. Go and check it out, register your class and change the world!

The Flip Video

One piece of equipment that I couldn't live without is the Flip Video by Pure Digital Technologies, Inc. The Flip Video is a hand held camera that fits in the palm of your hand and connects to your computer via USB port. The best part is that the USB cable is attached on the side. Totally easy, right? It comes in many different varieties but for classroom use I would suggest purchasing the Flip Ultra, it's $149.00. Can't be that price and if you hunt around you can even find it for $100. Click here to see the specs.

Here is a helpful video



I think this piece of equipment is excellent for the beginning of the school year. There are tons of activities you can do with this device, I wanted to share a couple of resource that will help you use this tool in your classroom. I will continue to update this list as I find more resources.

Enjoy!

http://delicious.com/jgridley/flipvideo