Typeracer for Schools

A wonderful typing game that will keep your students coming back for more day after day - Typeracer for Schools. Although this program is not free for schools, it's cost is quite minimal and do-able for many schools - especially if you can't afford to squeeze in typing/keyboarding classes into your school day.

Teachers set up their students with accounts and log-ins. Students sign in and "Enter Race" - it's as simple as that to get started! Each student is designated a race-car with their name. At the green light, a passage shows up that the students are to type. If they make an error, their passage will turn red to alert them to go back and correct it. The cars race forward as the students type the passages (most are just a sentence or two, sometimes 4-5 sentences at the most). A fun and unique feature is most of the passages are from books that students might be familiar with in their classwork, whether it be Literature/Reading classes or Science and Social Studies. Some students start to smile that even some of their favorite Justin Beiber or Katy Perry tunes are offered up as passages! It makes the game even more fun for them!

The competition within the room gets electric as students realize that they are racing against each other. The Typeracer program does track students' timing and accuracy levels, so eventually those students who perform at a faster and more accurate rate, will be grouped to similar level students. Teachers are able to follow along on a Master List and can see how often a student is participating, how accurate and speed levels.

In this day and age where it is difficult to fit in actual keyboarding classes into a school day, Typeracer for Schools fits the bill in an exciting and fun way for your students.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

This is Sand

When students have completed a project and there just isn't enough time to start a new one, I often give in to their request to go to the site - This is Sand

If you remember ever creating sandart with colored sand, This is Sand is the same concept. Instead of using actual sand, students go to a color page and "grab" a color with their cursor, then return to their art page and click on the mouse to see that color start to fall on the page. To change colors, go back to the color page, click on another choice of color, then return again to your art page.

It may seem like a mindless waste of time, but two things in particular stand out to me -
*This is Sand is very non-threatening and user friendly. You don't have to be an "artist" to use this program. Students' designs improve over time. They start adding some thought and care into their design and realize if they want something besides a triangle, they need to think of some spatial relations of their page and how to create what they have in mind.
*It's a very CALMING. If you have a student who is agitated, upset, or is just antsy and needs to calm down This is Sand is an amazing tool that can help with just that. Because at first it doesn't require any deep thought, anyone can sit down and start with it. Once focused on their project, students will start to breathe slower and calm down. No, I don't believe any studies have been done with this app, but I've seen   it work its magic time and again!

Once they learn the wonder of working in This is Sand, students come from home and share that they've figured out that it's a free app that they can download onto their phones and then they can happily, calmly create all kinds of colorful wonders!

San Francisco Symphony site - SFS Kids

  

The San Francisco Symphony has developed an interactive site for young-middle school students on music, instruments, and composing. On SFS Kids students can learn to compose and play music. It is a free site and does not require any log-in for your students.

 

There are lots of sections to click on and just dive into -

 

 

To start it's probably a good idea to start with the "Discover" section and see how the site works.

Most computer-savvy kids will follow along quite easily. In this section they listen to samples of different styles of music performed by the symphony orchestra. Dialog boxes pop up giving information about the style of the piece that they are hearing. After listening to recordings, students can then go to a game section where they are to recognize and match rhythms.

When students click on the "Perform" section they can choose from about 15 orchestral instruments to listen to and even hear and play a scale on them - clarinets, timpani drums, tubs, pianos, etc. In the "Compose" section students are first presented with the basics of how to drag musical notes onto a scale and then can create their own musical compositions based on what they've learned from the other sections of the website.

I've played around with it for a short time and was impressed with how much information is contained in the site as well as how students can compose a variety of pieces within a short time.

 

SFSKids Definitely worth checking into!!

 

 

For some further info click HERE.

 and HERE.

SFS Kids

From a Teacher - Letter Home....

When it comes to being a teacher and what education is really about to us all, you know that we all feel this.....
worth a share...

Coursekicker

A wonderful FREE site for teachers to collect and store all sorts of curriculum work is a new start-up called - Coursekicker.

Quickly and easily find the best lesson plans for any topic

Find great videos and other materials to enhance your lessons

Organize materials in your personal library, and create lesson playlists

Share with other teachers your favorite links, your own lessons, and your ideas for creating great classroom experiences

The teaching resources are created by teachers. Member teachers then rate the resources with a star system. Teachers can collect materials that they like into their own Library and then use them with their classes. Teachers are also encouraged to post their own lessons in whatever format they choose. Class resources can be PowerPoint presentations, videos, labs, curriculum presentations, quizzes, surveys, worksheets, etc. Coursekicker provides a clear format to use with dropdown menus for Lessons, Subjects, Grade Levels, All Types (of lessons), and Standards.

There's much more to Coursekicker. It will take some time to look through it and see what parts apply to you. For example, there is a Community page for educators to share together by posting questions, challenges, discussion topics, etc..

It looks like Coursekicker has the potential to be a wonderful resource for all teachers on all levels.
Let me know if you check it out!

HSTRY.org

Another very interesting platform presented at the recent LearnLaunch session that I attended was called HSTRY. 

In their words, Hstry.org "is a digital learning tool where teachers and students alike can create their own interactive timelines. Embedded social features promote collaboration and engagement between students."

Hstry.org appears to be a very easy to use timeline creating site with professional looking results. Your students work will shine with both how their information is presented and how they can incorporate images into the finished product. It appears to be quite easy to start right in with - you can search on-line for images that correspond with your research topic and include links to your sources.
This is a very new start-up, but I was impressed with the final looks of their timelines and their interest in teacher/student participation and feedback, including social media / Facebook participation.

Paul Revere's Ride Timeline

Chalkup

I recently attended a Learn Launch session for teachers to get introduced to some new start-up educational sites that are being created for educators and students. My first reaction was delight to learn how many of these entrepreneurs are coming through with more and more "teacher friendly" sites for us to work with. They are taking care of some of the time consuming things like no further need to write in student names and individual email accounts for each class list that you need to work with. Most seem to just have a code that you could post on a gmail "share" to your individual classes and once the students click on that, they create their own log-in, using their school gmail account.
Nice help!

One of the very promising start-ups that I spoke with was called Chalkup. My first impression is it's a lot like Edmodo, but a bit easier to navigate around and seems to offer more depth and breadth for teachers. This platform was built to work with Google Drive and teachers will find it easy to import documents, create surveys, post assignments, videos, comments, etc.
And, good news....it is free!
They have scheduled some up-coming webinars this summer that you might want to participate in to help you gain some more insight as to how Chalkup might be of help to you in your classroom.
Also check out their blog, you can learn lots more info about Chalkup there and their overall mission statement here.

https://www.chalkup.co/tour

Chalkup even has a Flashcard making section to their platform so students can study some key terms, dates, etc. that you assign for them to study. They are collecting these and will have them available for teachers to draw from without needing to make them up (a work in progress!)

Discussion pages - students all contribute to a topic, question, assignment, etc.

If other teachers in school are using Chalkup students will see a page like this with their assignments from all classes (color-coded per class): 

Chalkup on Facebook

Let me know if you check it out!