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- 1. tec_estromberg (2007). technology-1. CC BY - SA Embracing the Revolution: Incorporating Technology
- 2. Wordle http://www.wordle.net/ By Thea Goldin Smith [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
- 3. By Rob (Flickr: Classic UVa Postcard) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons United States History to 1865 USI.6 The student will demonstrate knowledge of the causes and results of the American Revolution by b) Identifying how political ideas shaped the revolutionary movement in America and led to the Declaration of Independence; c) Describing key events and the roles of key individuals in the American Revolution, with emphasis on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry;
- 4. 1. What do the words below have in common? 2. What do you think about when you see all the different terms below? 3. Where do you think all of these words came from? 4. What words are you unfamiliar with?
- 5. Additional Curriculum Ideas Favorite Author Wordles • Choose an author • Find a publication about the author or their work • Create a Wordle Autobiographical Wordles • Students write about their life story • Use Wordle to identify key terms and themes
- 7. Grade 8 English 8.3 The student will analyze, develop, and produce creative or informational media messages. c) Use media and visual literacy skills to create products that express new understandings 8.5 The student will read and analyze a variety of fictional texts, narrative nonfiction, and poetry. b) Explain how authors use characters, conflict, point of view, voice, and tone to create meaning. h) Identify the main idea. i) Summarize text relating supporting details.
- 8. • Students chose a novel • Identify key characters • Summarize story • Find a critical review and choose a quote • Create a movie poster Arturo Donate. (2009.) Hoops. CC BY-SA Movie Poster Assignment
- 9. Additional Curriculum Ideas Properties of Operation Poster • Choose/assign a property • Create an example using expression or equation • Create a poster using templates Environmental Advertisement • Find a way people can improve environment in daily life • Create a billboard or poster that encourages people to act netalloy. Illustration of a tree with leaves. Public Domain
- 11. Public Domain Physical Science PS.3 The student will investigate and understand the modern and historical models of atomic structure. Key concepts include a) The contributions of Dalton, Thomson, Rutherford, and Bohr in understanding the atom
- 12. Blabberize a Scientist! • Students are assigned a scientist • Summarize scientific accomplishments and find interesting facts • Find a picture of scientist • Create a blabberize
- 13. Additional Curriculum Ideas Solving Equations Blabberize • Create a two-step equation • Solve the equation mathematically • Create a blabberize explaining the steps Famous Author Blabberize • Choose a famous author and a quote from them • Find a picture of the author • Create a blabberize using the picture and quote
- 14. www.weebly.com
- 15. World History and Geography to 1500 WHI.11 The student will demonstrate knowledge of major civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, including Mayan, Aztec, and Incan, by b) describing cultural patterns and political and economic structures. By ATSZ56 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
- 16. World History and Geography to 1500 WHI.11 The student will demonstrate knowledge of major civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, including Mayan, Aztec, and Incan, by b) describing cultural patterns and political and economic structures. By ATSZ56 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Mayan Website Assignment
- 17. Additional Curriculum Ideas Figurative Language Website • Create website with at least 4 pages of different types of figurative language • Create examples of each type • Include examples of each type from various novels Book Club Website • Create a team of book club members to build a website • Use site to generate discussion about books and to recruit new members Agenciainformativa. (2011). Students working on computers. CC BY - SA
Editor's Notes
- In today’s world it’s increasingly difficult to stay up to date with what technology students are using in their personal lives. As soon as we learn about and master one application, a newer, better one is available that makes everyone you just learned obsolete. This causes many teachers great frustration and some even begin to view technology as an obstacle rather than a tool that can be used to enhance student learning. With many schools now providing classrooms with laptops or ipads and with the proliferation of smart phones, most teachers have access to some type of technology that can be used to help engage their students and provide them with meaningful learning opportunities. The focus of this presentation is to make educators aware of some relatively simple, web-based applications that will allow the students to be creative with an instructional focus. All of these tools are free and I will provide some specific ideas for incorporating them into several different types of classrooms. (4 mins)
- Wordle is an online tool that allows you to create word clouds from text. Text can be written in by hand or it can be copied and pasted from a secondary source to accentuate the most prominent words and themes in the text. Wordle allows the user to tweak the layouts, fonts, and colors of the word cloud to create an aesthetically pleasing visual. I personally like these word clouds because they allow the viewer to individualize their focus. While the largest words stand out to everyone, different people are drawn to different words and the way the creator chooses to use the features on wordle can give it a very different thematic feel and tone. It’s very easy to copy and paste text to create a wordle or you can actually type whatever words you want to appear on the website. The only thing I found difficult about the functionality was the use of Java. If your version is out of date or you are trying to use an ipad, the java may not cooperate. (2 mins)
- This SOL for US History requires students to identify how political ideas shaped the revolution and led to the Declaration of Independence and also requires them to describe the role of important individuals like Thomas Jefferson. Putting the entire Declaration of Independence in front of a middle school students and having them read it, memorize portions of it, and answer questions about it is probably not going to engage the majority of the students. A wordle could be used here to pique student’s interest and help facilitate a discussion about why the Declaration of Independence happened and what it was about. (2 mins)
- This is a wordle I created using the actual text from the Declaration of Independence. The questions I created to accompany the wordle allow the students to think creatively and do not require one “correct” answer. Using an activity like this to introduce students to the Declaration of Independence would hopefully serve as a hook and create some excitement before leading into a more in-depth look at the causes that led to it’s writing. (2 mins)
- Here are a couple ways where an instructor could incorporate wordles while having the students be the ones who create them. The first is very simple but would hopefully lead to students doing research and also help spread awareness about various authors. Students would choose an author who they are familiar with and fond of and find some type of article or journal about either the author or one of the author’s books. They would then use the text from the article to create a wordle which could be displayed in a classroom, library, or hallway. The wordle I created used an article from The Lion and the Unicorn about Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. As you can see the article references the culture importance of the World Trade Center and would hopefully drum up interest in both the author and that particular book. The second idea is a little bit more involved but it will have students use wordles to represent their own words. Students would begin by writing about their life in the form of an essay. To accompany this essay, students will copy and paste their work into wordle to create a poster. I wrote a very brief summary of my life and created a wordle and I think this is something that a lot of students would be excited to do. Q&A about wordle. (5 mins)
- Big Huge Labs is a photo editing site with a lot of different templates for altering photos. All of the designs can be downloaded for free. It features some fairly prominent templates like the motivational posters, lolcats, and more basic mats. Big Huge Labs also allows you to create jigsaw puzzles, calendars, and movie posters that can be actually be ordered and shipped to you. This is a great introductory site for photo editing because it allows for quick and easy adjustments that students will easily figure out and provides many different options for creativity. All of the tools are very user friendly and the site offers clear directions for how to create the end product. One thing I was a little frustrated by was that the user-friendliness sometimes limited what you were able to do. Many of the tools do not offer the option of adjusting the location of the image you upload or allow you to crop the image. While this wasn’t ideal for someone who has some experience with photo editing, I can see why they made it as simple as possible. (2 mins)
- The 8th Grade Language Arts curriculum lends very well to using Big Huge Labs for creating media. Students are required to evaluate persuasive and informational techniques used by television, radio, video, and the internet. After analyzing various forms of persuasive writing and advertising, students could use the templates to create their own types of persuasive or informational magazine covers, posters, or billboards. Students also must analyze fictional texts in the 8th grade to identify key themes, summarize the story, and explain how the author created meaning. Rather than having students do this with a worksheet or having them write traditional short answers, the tools on Big Huge Labs could be used to have the students demonstrate their knowledge with a little more creativity. (2 mins)
- This is a movie poster I created for the 2015 Newberry Medal and Coretta Scott King Award Honor novel, The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. I found a photo of a basketball hoop that informs the viewer that the story is about basketball while also capturing the mood of the novel. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, but I believe the picture has a very somber tone and I think allowing students to create similar posters would allow them to come up with some very interesting visuals that reflect what they read. The movie poster template allows for a lot more text than what you see on this poster and students could even pick actors and actresses to play the characters if they wanted to. I know teachers can have a hard time getting students excited about reading but hopefully something like this would help with the motivation. (2 mins)
- Here are a couple additional ways Big Hug Labs could be used to enhance instruction and allow students some choice in how they demonstrate their learning. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade math students must know the properties of operation and be able to identify their use to solve equations and inequalities. Students could either choose their own property or the teacher could randomly assign the students properties and then they would be responsible for creating a poster to be displayed in class. This would help familiarize them with that one particular property but then the teacher could reference the posters when appropriate during the remainder of the year. Earth Science students must investigate and describe the advantages and disadvantages of using renewable and non-renewable resources. One way to get students thinking about their personal impact on this issue would be to have them research some of the ways we can improve our environment or decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. On the EPA’s website I found a list of suggested ways for helping the environment and I found that planting trees has a tremendous impact on air quality. This led me to the Arbor Day website where I found you can get 10 free trees if you become a member. Having students research this topic themselves would help them follow similar lines of thinking about how they can act and finding where they can get the resources to act. Big Huge Labs provides basic frameworks that can unlock lots of design potential in our students. Q & A. (4 mins)
- Blabberize is an online tool that allows you draw a mouth on a picture that will move along to the sound of whatever audio you upload to accompany the picture. This is a site I highly recommend spending a few minutes browsing because there are some excellent educational videos as well as some pretty funny ones. (View linked video). One of the best things about Blabberize is how easy it is to create the videos. Once you upload a picture, the tool for drawing a “mouth” is pretty straightforward and can be mastered after a short amount of time. The audio can be recorded using the site or uploaded as a file. The biggest drawback of using blabberize is the difficulty embedding the videos somewhere else. As you just saw, I was unable to embed that video into powerpoint because I didn’t create it. Students would need to be familiar with html if they wanted to include it on a web page online so after creating the video it can be a little tricky figuring out what to do with it. While this is a little frustrating, there are still plenty of ways to use blabberize to enhance instruction. (3 mins)
- As part of the 7th Grade Physical Science curriculum, students must learn about the atom along with the important contributions of scientists like Niels Bohr. Looking at his picture, I don’t think anyone here gets particularly excited. So you can imagine that middle school students would be even less enthused to learn about a scientist who predates color photography. This is a picture I found online with a creative commons license for reuse with modifications. Using blabberize, students could get really creative.
- So I created a blabberize using that picture and following the guidelines you see on the slide. (Show video) I was able to embed this video in the powerpoint because I was the creator of the video and that allowed me to download it. I always find these videos amusing and I think a lot of kids would too. Using them as a carrot to entice students to do the research could be very successful. In fact, I never knew about Bohr’s escape from Nazi occupied territory or his assistance with the Manhattan project. Getting the students interested by introducing technology would hopefully lead them into some unexpected learning just like I had with Bohr.
- Here are some additional ways blabberize could be used with some other content areas. One activity that I’ve actually shared with some middle school math teachers was on solving equations. Students had to create and solve their own two-step equation and show how to solve it algebraically. Then they recorded themselves explaining the steps they followed to solve the equation, and used blabberize to set their explanations to any type of picture of their choosing. The one you see on the slide was titled “The Equation Solving Bear.” The second activity involves finding an author and a famous quotation from that author. Mark Twain is of course known for his many witticisms so you could even have an entire class create various blabberizes using just him. Once again though the main feature of this tool is that it can be used to put a modern spin on many of the instructional activities that have existed for a long time. Brief Q & A. (3 mins)
- One of the more marketable skills a student can posses when going into the job market is web design. Web design is one of those things that I’d always had an interest in but I also feared that it was beyond my level of expertise. I had toyed around with creating something using Google Sites but I was never happy with any of the sites I designed. Just recently I was introduced to Weebly and I was shocked by how easy it was to use and by how professional the pages look. The tools are very user friendly and the site comes with many pre-build layouts you can choose from and then modify to fit your needs. You can upload photos, youtube videos, slideshows, and documents with very little trouble. It also allows for the creation of a unique URL for free. The only downside of Weebly is that some of the features require you to become a paying member. HD video and audio cannot be uploaded without membership. (3 mins)
- World History 1 requires students to demonstrate their knowledge of Mayan culture and their political and economic structures. With the availability of so many rich photographs of ruins and artifacts, students could create their own web pages displaying what they’ve learned about these civilizations. They can do their own research, choose their own images, and then begin designing their own web pages on weebly. (2 mins)
- This assignment would require students to create 4 web pages. A basic overview of Mayan civilization, and then pages on their culture, politics, and economics. Students would be required to use at least 2 different images on each page but would be free to arrange the objects in whatever manner they saw fitting. This assignment would allow them to demonstrate what they know about this specific SOL while also allowing them to familiarize themselves with a real-world skill. Giving students the opportunity to learn about web design would hopefully spur them on to creating pages on their own time. (2 mins)
- Another curriculum idea where students could create websites with Weebly is to have them create a site with descriptions and examples of figurative language. This is a topic that is taught in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade English so having a site where they could continue to add examples and reference for review could be a project that spans all 3 grade levels. Finally, web sites are a great way for school clubs to drum up interest and to encourage collaboration and discussion. Tasking members of a book club with creating the site themselves could get them more invested and allow them to take ownership of the club. By creating message boards or allowing comments they could even have conversations about the books they’re reading online. If students are given the opportunity to create any type of website, I believe they will quickly gain confidence and be capable to doing things that many adults in the school’s aren’t able to do. It’s never too early to start getting kids accustomed to building things online. Q & A (3 mins)