Have fun and explore some incredible tools for learning!
Learning with Slideshare
Another powerful tool for teaching and learning is Slideshare. Whether you are looking for information on a topic of interest for yourself, or an engaging presentation to introduce a topic to your students, this site will have something for you. Slideshare is to presentations as Flickr is to photos and YouTube is to videos. You can upload and store your own presentations -up to 100 MB. Decide if you want to share under a Creative Commons license. Combine your slideshow and a podcast to upload a slidecast! Several hundred slidecasts are now posted. By now you should be seeing a pattern in sites that host content. You can tag, embed in a website, blog or wiki, subscribe through RSS, save to favorites, and leave comments for others.Thing #18
Discovery Exercises
- Explore Slideshare. Search for topics of interest for you or your students.
- In your blog, write about an engaging presentation that you found. Provide the URL so others can view it. Tell how you might use this tool in the classroom.
- OPTIONAL CHALLENGE: Embed the presentation you write about in your blog. HINT: You will need to switch to the HTML editing box to paste in the embed code. Make sure that you have copyright permission to do so (by the creator using Creative Commons licensing).
IDEA #1: Create a series of instructions for a student learning unit using PowerPoint and upload it to Slideshare. Embed this in your classroom website, blog or wiki for students to refer to as they begin a project. For those seeking a greater challenge, use Audacity to create a narration for the slides. Upload the MP3 narration file to the Internet Archive , and post as a Slidecast.
Teacher Librarian Network
IDEA #2: With parent permission, have students upload their presentations to Slideshare. Once presentations are uploaded, have students peer evaluate each other leaving constructive comments. Invite parents to view the presentations in Slideshare as well. Embed some of these student presentations on your classroom website, blog or wiki.
Explore with Google Earth
Google Earth is an incredible way to make geography and astronomy come alive for your students. This is a free application from Google, but does require a software download. D20 teachers, please consult your BTC for assistance. If you've looked at Google Earth before, you'll want to familiarize yourself with some of the incredible new features of the program, including the ability to view the night sky.Not only can you and your students view content, but all users have the ability to add content, in the form of Placemarks. While this is a more complex task, with practice, you'll be adding multiple placemarks in no time!
Thing #19
Discovery Exercises
- Ok - everyone does it. "Fly" over houses you used to live in, your old high school, perhaps the location of a favorite vacation. Click Fly To. Enter the address in the input box and click the Search button. Experiment with displaying different layers.
- In your "Places" folder, select "Sightseeing" and "Grand Canyon." Click on Play.
- Create a blog posting about your explorations of Google Earth.
Classroom Connections
These ideas come directly from Google:
- Biology: Track routes of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe Forest. See the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee blog here.
- Ecology: Create a short quiz like this one.
- Environmental Science: Have students check Alaska's global warming problems. See how the Sierra Club used Google Earth to depict this problem here.
- Geology: Find images, links, and descriptions, with information about thousands of volcanoes around the globe, thanks to organizations like the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.
- Global Awareness: Study the Crisis in Darfur with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's unprecedented project.
- History: Explore Tutankhamun's Tomb.
- Humanities: Have your students scout film shoot locations like this teacher did with The Golden Compass.
- Literature: Bring class or contemporary tales to life with Google LitTrips.
- Math: Explore distance, velocity, and wave properties of tsunamis.
Explore Web 2.0 award-winning
applications and Ning
Throughout the course of the Academy 20/20 Things program we've explored just a small sampling of the new internet technologies and websites that are empowering users with the ability to create and share content. But given time there are so many more we could explore! A recent estimate placed the number of Web 2.0 tools at somewhere between 300 & 500 with only a handful emerging as market dominators. And although time will only tell which of these new collaborative, social networking and information tools will remain on top, one thing is for sure, they're not going to go away anytime soon.
For this discovery exercise, participants are asked to select any site from one of these amazing lists:
Web 2.0 Award Winners
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008
GotoWeb2.0
Explore it! Play! With so many to choose from, it might be handy to first select a category that interests you (like Books or Personal Organization) and then select a tool/site to explore. For this exercise, try to select a tool that is Free and that doesn't require a plug-in or download. The majority of these are free, so this shouldn't be a problem.
Another site that is gaining in popularity is the social networking site called Ning. With Ning, you can set up your own social network such as an after school or book club. To learn more about Ning, join one of the Ning Social Networking groups or search for an area of interest:
Classroom 2. 0
Thing #20
Discovery Exercises:
- Select any site/tool from the above lists
- Explore the site you selected.
- Join a Ning network
- Play -- check your Travel IQ (Great for students too!)
- Create a post about your discovery. What did you like or dislike about the tool that you selected? What were the site's useful features? Could you see any applications for its use in a classroom? Web 2.0 - with so much to explore, just start with ONE. :)
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