Data- a Magical Solution

In education, we deal with a ton of data.  I can’t begin to count the number of hours I have used excel spreadsheets.  When I was in the classroom, my whole gradebook was in excel- everything calculated for each standard that I taught.  My first year I spent countless hours editting cells to show first [...]

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Spelling City

Two times in the last week I have had parents talk to me about nightly homework.  Kids aren’t wanting to practice spelling and sight words.  I used to have that problem too!  In fact, last year my now 4th grader HATED practicing for spelling, and did not do well enough on the test to just [...]

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What are we here for?

This morning I read a great post by Vicki Davis AKA Cool Cat Teacher. The post titled Mainstream Media vs. Blogosphere: Mainstream Ed vs. Edublogosphere? In the post, she talks about how the media is dealing with the change that everday people now have the ability to give “breaking news” to the world. [...]

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Wordle

CoolCatTeacher posted this week about a neat site I hadn’t seen before,called Wordle. It will allow you to take either your delicious tags or any other text that you type or copy-paste in, and it will create a word cloud from the text. With the most frequently used words larger and lesser used [...]

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Generators

There are all sorts of generators around the web.  I am going to highlight a few of the ones I find valuable and give some ideas of how to use them.
Coat of Arms
I have done these with students when we studied Don Quixote, medieval times, and other aspects of history or genealogy.  There are numerous [...]

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Math Moves U

This is a great site for the 5th-8th grade crowd. Math Moves U has a fun and interactive interface that takes users through worlds of music, sports, fashion and more, all using math concepts. The site is geared at the 6-8 crowd, but advanced 5th grade could work most of the problems on the [...]

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The Problem with Schools

I was stumbling along and found a blog post titled
Sucky Schools – How To Repair Our Education System
I read through the post and could not help but pass along a link to it. There are a ton of reasons why people THINK that schools aren’t what they should be, tons of reasons people KNOW [...]

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Twitter and Skype

I have been hearing about twitter and skype for quite some time and finally decided to take the plunge today and join both.
If you are not familiar with twitter, it is a microblogging application.  You can send short messages out and others can follow what you are saying.  It is almost like a cross between [...]

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United Streaming

I sure hope that this post is not something new for anyone, but just in case someone hasn’t heard of UnitedStreaming, I had to pass it along. UnitedStreaming is a project by Discovery. They have put together thousands of videos into a searchable database. I use this on a weekly basis. [...]

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StarChild and Imagine the Universe

Starchild and Imagine the Universe are both kids site put out by a division of NASA.
Starchild.com offers students in the 1st-6th grade crowd a great resource for learning more about our solar system and universe. It comes complete with activities and a glossary of space terms. It also offers a text reader [...]

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