random thing

Thanks again to Mr Byrne at www.freetech4teachers.com! I have found yet another fun tool at dumpr.net

This site allows you to take a photo and change it in a variety of ways. You can see below how I played with a picture from several years ago of a student who was dressed up as the pope for our medieval banquet. It looks like his image is now hanging in a famous museum.

There are a lot of other options, like turning a photo into a sketch. I thought Travis and I might be able to use this for our wedding. We could take some fun photos of us and our families and turn them into a sketch. These sketches could then be printed off and turned into a coloring book for my young nieces and nephews. How fun would it be for a kid to color their own family?!

There's a lot of fun potential at this site.

dumpr.net

Art Museum by dumpr.net

Powerpoint Help

I know many of us have had to sit through painful powerpoint presentations, delivered both my adults and by students. The ones where someone just reads the slides to the audience....you know what I mean.

Mr. Byrne at free technology for teachers refers to a great website on his blog. Slidemagnet.com gives suggestions on how to do better presentations. I found the Deck of the Day to be a helpful slide presentation on how to create effective slide presentations. I would certainly share ideas from this site with my students before a powerpoint project. It's also tempting to send this to some "higher ups" that I've seen present...but that might not go over to well :)

Thing 10: Digital Storytelling

Shawn's post inspired me to look at Thing 10! Shows the power of an RSS feed and reading other people's blogs!

I would say that history day is a time when many of my students engage in digital storytelling. The documentaries that they create show in-depth analysis of their topic. I've always wanted to assign a documentary project at the beginning of the year so that ALL kids are exposed to this medium. However, it is way beyond my comfort zone and so I have not yet taken the plunge. I know that my wonderful media specialist and my tech coordinator would be willing to help. I just haven't taken that step yet.

I thought that a couple of the sites mentioned in the directions for thing 10 sounded very promising. Awesomestories.com is a really interesting site for primary documents. They have different categories of stories including biographies, disasters, and history. I took a brief look at the story of Joan of Arc. These digital stories includes primary sources, so when it says that "Joan of Arc was put on trial" a person can click on "trial" and read the court transcripts. I put a tag on this site in my delicious account. Very promising for a history teacher!

I also could see myself using ourstory.com in the future. I would love for each of my advisees to create a story about themselves in the form of a timeline. they could include what they have already experienced as well as what they hope for the future in regards to their education and career. This will be a nice compliment to the new advisory curriculum that we will have next year. These timelines would be a great thing to share at student-led conferences.

Helpful History Website

Today I was looking at some websites during conferences. I came across the landmark project and discovered they had some good resources for History. I was reminded of the power of the British Museum and I also discovered a great source of biographies. I wish I had remembered these sources for History Day!

The landmark website is nice because it has selected websites with descriptions and suggested uses in the classroom.

Some of the sites were dead links, but overall I thought it was a good site. It went beyond History, but I just focused on that part.

Thing 11: online notetaking

I could see Awesome Highlighter having some real uses in my classroom during various research projects. It's another option for those kids who like to print off stuff from the internet and highlight it. A way to go paperless...and they won't be able to lose what they printed and hightlighted in their locker, back pack, house, bus, etc...

Earlier this school year, Travis shared a notetaking template with me that he has used . I modified it for several projects, including history day, and it worked quite well. It doesn't end plagarism, but it does force students to interact more with their sources. They need to decide WHY they are writing something down. In the case of history day, kids needed to decide if that piece of information is background information, important events, or impact that their individual made on society. I have found in the past that kids will write down anything and everything they see. These cards helped them focus on key areas.
--------------------------------------------------------------
History Day Notes

Title of Source: _______________________________

Circle one: background actions legacies

Note(s):











Page Number:
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I still struggle with kids who plagarize. As I reflect on why this is an issue, I am worried that I haven't taught them enough about it. I certainly tell them "don't plagarize" but I haven't given them the tools.

Thing 12: Online Publishing

This afternoon finds me at school with students during a History Day work session. When not answering student questions, I have been playing around with slideshare.net

While I did not find a powerpoint presentation to use with my middle schoolers, I did find some examples of poorly executed presentations and others that were well-designed. I could see myself showing these examples before assigning the students a PPT project.

I would have liked to find some presentations directly tied to my world history content. However, what I did find was very dry and not well-suited to middle school students.

I did find an interesting presentation about web 3.0...and I'm still trying to figure out web 2.0!