Current Events

Flocabulary has awesome hip-hop videos and songs sorted by topics: Vocabulary, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Math!! One of my favorite video collections from Flocabulary is their Week in Rap videos: a short rap about the current events from the week, released every Friday. These Week in Rap videos could be amazing for middle and high school students. I had to preview these raps to make sure they were appropriate for my babies before sharing them with my third grade students. Some of the issues were above their heads. There are endless uses for these videos, hook students attention, introduce a new topic, summarize a unit, inspire projects. How cool would it be to have students create their own version of a Flocabulary rap?

Flocabulary Language Arts Rap: 5 Things (Elements of a Short Story)

DOGO News Current events for kids. Check out their Map tap to find current events around the world. 

CNN Student News Videos of weekly current events. 

Playing For Change

Playing For Change hopes to connect the world through music. The music videos created by this group are awesome and powerful: a great way to share with students the power of collaboration.

Stand By Me: Song Around the World 

One Day Without Shoes

TOMS is having it's annual One Day Without Shoes celebration on April 10th. This day is dedicated to promote awareness of the impact shoes has on our lives. So many children around the world do not have shoes to protect them from injury and disease. For every pair of TOMS shoes you buy, they will give a pair to a child in need. Visit their site onedaywithoutshoes.com to find out more information about how you can join the cause!

Video Resources

WatchKnow provides free educational videos for ages 3-18. You can search for a specific topic, or just browse the subject categories to find short clips to enhance your lessons!

DiscoveryEducation is not a free site, but if you can get your school to subscribe, this site has some great videos! Including Magic School Bus, and Bill Nye.

HippoCampus is for our high school teachers. This site has multimedia presentations that teach various math and science concepts. You can search for a specific skill or browse by subject. You can even create your own HippoCampus presentation.

More Tools

Our school's very talented Technology Facilitator has created a netvibe page with a wide collection of technology resources for teachers. Enjoy :) Digital Tools NetVibe

Symbaloo provides a board for you to post all of your bookmarks in an easy-to-use matrix. How many times have I had a student get lost when asked to find a bookmark or a page saved under favorites? Problem solved :) Thanks symbaloo!

Cool Tools for Schools wiki space houses a TON of links to great resources. This page categorizes the resources, and gives a quick description of each. I've used this site to find new tools to introduce to my students.

Orange County Symbaloos Check out this amazing website provided by Orange County. I was impressed with all of the wonderful resources, and then I scrolled down and saw that there were even more Symbaloos categorized for K-2 websites, Math Resources, Elementary Links, etc!

Web 20.12 Tools (Discovery Education) a huge collection of web tools sorted by category.

ABCya has great educational computer games for elementary grades.

Engaging Tools

edmodo allows teachers to set up student accounts and classroom pages to collaborate. Set up to reflect the popular Facebook, Edmodo provides an environment where teachers can utilize social media in a safe and education-centered way. Some teachers at my school have created a glog to introduce teachers to using edmodo: http://kbond.edu.glogster.com/edmodo

  

TodaysMeet creates a space for you to hear the backchannel that undoubtedly present in all our lectures and lessons. Using Todaysmeet you can create a room and invite students to ask questions, leave comments, give opinions, post resources, and collaborate in real time. Try it out!  

San Diego Zoo  has live cameras for Panda Bears, Polar Bears, Elephants, Apes, and Condors. 

Jog the Web creates a safe environment for you to build a guide for students to use different websites. You choose which sites you want your students to visit, and save them in your jog- students can then follow your guide and find all of the sites they need without getting lost on the web. You can also add messages and assignment details to each page. Lets try it out, click on the following link to see an example of how you could use Jogtheweb for a student project: A Day in the Life

SCAN Online tool to help build problem solving skills, using 4 steps: Stop and think things through, Clarify the key issues, Ask yourself what's most important, Now, what's your next steps? Users can vote on issues, compare ideas, and explain their understandings. 

Tricider is a brainstorming and voting tool. Sooo easy to set up, and very user friendly for younger students. Great way for students to share their ideas, and vote for their choices.




Penzu is an online journal. No more messy spiral notebooks cramming up student desks, and taking up too much space in our classrooms. Here students can take notes, brainstorm writing ideas, and reflect on their learning, all in one place! Below is an example of penzu in action.

Through our Lens: Education

100poeple: A World Portrait

This is the video I linked to in an earlier post (Gone Global)