SketchUp will entertain and teach your students about urban design, historic landmarks, and 3D objects. Teachers can use this exciting tool to demonstrate geometry concepts (e.g., 3D), show examples of styles of architecture, or have students design their dream home, like Mrs. Foellmer did with her junior high students in Computer Education. You can even have your students build models for Google Earth and share them with their peers! These tools will undoubtedly help some students [read more…]
FUN WITH STICKMAN
Be prepared to lose hours of your life to doodling once you click over to Draw a Stickman. How could you use this in the classroom? To teach and reinforce vocabulary for ELL students, to assess the following of written directions for children with disabilities, to inspire a reluctant writer, to teach young students how to use a mouse, to practice the drawing of [read more…]
American Revolution video games
Be careful! Mission US can take up a lot of your time if you don’t watch the clock. These games focused on the American Revolution and slavery are both engaging and information-packed.
These games will not only be fun in the classroom but will work well as a fun homework option (imagine having students who won’t stop doing their assignments). Your tech-minded students will love [read more…]
Inspire your artists and your writers
Today’s pick works well for any age and has great potential for differentiation. Storybird is a unique website bringing artists and writers together. Artists submit collections of their art and authors can use it to create storybooks for themselves or to share with others.
My own children love to create stories using clip art but the images are mismatched and often detract from the story rather than enhance it. You won’t have this problem with Storybird. In fact, you will find that you end up with a product that looks ready for publication!
Small children will love creating stories on the site; the images are varied and include monsters, animals, and fairy tale characters. Storybird is also a great [read more…]
Do you Prezi?
If you don’t Prezi, you might want to check out this fun web-based presentation tool for teachers and their students. Prezi serves the same function as PowerPoint but it uses a single “canvas” instead of slides. Text, images, videos and other presentation objects are are placed on this canvas and then grouped together in frames. The canvas lets users create presentations that are less linear and more visually interesting than traditional [read more…]
Get Poppin’
My theme is March is going to be technology. Specifically, I am going to be featuring websites that can help teachers engage and support a wide range of students.
I’m starting with one of my favorite sites for teachers in K-12 classrooms, BrainPOP. This site contains over 1,000 [read more…]
An iPad learning menu
Welcome to February! We have a new month and new theme. I will be focusing on the process or the “how” of differentiation for the next four weeks so expect to see posts on a wide range of topics including use of multi-media, classroom games, modeling and more.
This week, I am going to feature several different type of classroom menus. Menus not only allow choice in the classroom, but allow teachers to offer a range of learning experiences to their diverse learners. The first choice menu I am featuring this month is from a blog I have not [read more…]
Crack the QR code
I found another new blog with great ideas for the differentiated classroom. iTeach 1:1 is filled with great tech-related resources including this post on using QR codes in the classroom. What makes this post unique is that the teacher is provides ideas for both using them in the classroom and for teaching students how to integrate the codes into their work products. So learners are not just [read more…]
Death by PowerPoint?
This last week of October, I am still featuring differentiated products that can be used by both teachers and students. I have been searching for a comprehensive post on PowerPoint alternatives for the last few weeks and I finally found one at The Whiteboard Blog. This is not only a recent post but one [read more…]
Students as virtual teachers
As this detailed post on Flipping with Kirch illustrates, e-tutorials are becoming really popular in K-12 classrooms. I am a big fan of using them as assessments and as teaching tools as they allow students to address a host of different skills and let learners showcase abilities that may not be otherwise seen or recognized in a [read more…]
