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)

Image Editing

While designing this blog I came across the most adorable blog button resources (shabby blogs) which introduced me to FotoFlexer. Foto Flexer will provide you with the necessary tools to edit your own photos, add text, pictures, and animations.
For example:

BigHugeLabs allows you to create amazing things with your photos. You can even create motivational posters, which could be an awesome way to define vocabulary. 

Gone Global

Global awareness is not just a standard on our evaluation rubric, but rather it is an essential part of our students' learning to become successful adults in our world-wide community. I have never stepped foot on foreign soil, but with my students, I travel around the global visiting communities I would never be able to see without the help of the following resources.


ePals is the best place that I've found to really connect with other cultures. As a teacher, you can set up your own profile, posting a request to connect with a specific country. Or you can collaborate with other classrooms around the world on projects sponsored by National Geographic. My class, just this week, received our first email from a private school in Greece that is interested in connecting with us via email and Skype.

National Geographic Kids is a site that we use almost everyday with my third graders. We view the photo of the day, study facts and photos of different countries, and learn about National Geographic projects that are going on around the world. One recent project called Let's Jump was encouraging kids to join together one day to try to break the world record for the most people doing jumping jacks on the same day!

World Portrait put together by 100people.org is a collection of biographies that schools from around the world put together. These schools were assigned to choose one person in their community to nominate as a good representative of their culture, and share their biography on 100people.org. I've used this site to teach students about biographies, and encourage them to "meet a new friend" to write a biography about.
Through Our Lens: Education
There are so many more great resources available that take our students so much further than we could ever on our own.

Time for Kids: Around the World invites our kids to travel the world by allowing them to research other countries through a number of different links, including: Sightseeing Guides, History Timelines, Native Lingo, Challenge questions, and most interestingly Day in the Life, where the user follows a child through his/her daily routines to learn how life would be like in that country! An amazing way to enlighten our students understandings of other cultures.

UNC Global Initiatives UNC will send you a Culture Kit from countries around the world. They also have video presentations, or student visitors that will come present to your students about their global experiences.

Cool Tools for Language Arts Teachers

I couldn't leave these awesome resources off the list!

Little Bird Tales captures the voice of our children by making an environment where they become not only the author, but the narrator, illustrator, and publisher of their very own stories! Students can then email their final products to share with teachers, family members, and friends.

Story Bird is a collaborative story telling site where users pick from a library of artwork, and write their own short stories.

ICDL (International Children's Digital Library) this resource is pretty self-explanatory. There are thousands of children's books from all over the world available at our children's fingertips! They can search for books by genre, age level, or region of the world. A great way to liven up our own classroom libraries. When your over reading the same stories year after year, pull up one of these great stories. Also teaching our kids that literature is something that connects all of us, regardless of our culture or location in the world.

Chart Makers

Thinking Maps and graphic organizers work wonders for helping students learn to brainstorm, organize, and plan successfully. Why not use a web-based tool, where their text actually fits into the bubble they draw! Magic :) Some of these tools students can even create maps collaboratively!

Lino It create a on-line canvas where students, and you, can post sticky notes, photos, links, or videos. Great for brainstorming, or to get instant feedback. Students can choose to post anonymously.
   let's try it! click on the following link and answer the question: "What are some tech tools presented so far that you want to know more about?" TechToolsforTeachers Linoit

Wall Wisher is very similar to Lino It, another on-line bulletin board, and sooo easy to use. Try it out:PQ Teacher Talk WallWisher

Spicy Nodes are animated graphic organizers. This is a great resource to teach students how to develop an outline, that will transform into a bubble map automatically for them!

Wordle will create a really cool visual for your brainstormed ideas. Students could create a wordle that illustrates their description of a story they read by taking a list of words they write and putting them together in a eye-catching visual.

Tagxedo allows you to take the same concept of Wordle to a whole new level! 

nota Land is a cool site for collaborating with teammates. Users can click anywhere on the notebook page and add their comments. Very easy to use!

bubbl.us will create a bubble map using your ideas. You can organize your bubbles on your map by using colors, connecting arrows, and arrangement on the workspace. My students used bubbl.us to brainstorm project ideas for when our Danish visitors were coming to our school last year.

Gliffy is a great site because it will allow you to create almost any kind of map, graph, or diagram you can imagine.

Create a Graph is a very kid-friendly software program that helps students input data and will export that information in a graph of their choice: bar, line, circle, area, x-y graph and more.

Researching Tools

Research used to be a scary word for me as a teacher: How do I know my students will find what they need? What sites will they end up on? Is this site kid-friendly? How will they know what to look for? These are the questions that kept me from allowing my students to explore their own interests through research. I was discouraged by the big, scary, world-wide-web because I knew that there was so much my students were missing out on by relying on little ol' me as their main source of information. I decided that this might be even scarier ;) and was forced to let go, and let kids research using the internet!

Here are some "safe" tools to use with kids for researching information

askKids is a kid version of ask.com where they can search for movies, images, games, and answers.

Wolfram Alpha will calculate any math problem by giving the answer in standard form, word form, number line, visual representation, and more!

FindHow is a search engine for find out "how to" do a specific task.

Animation Software

Encouraging students to create media presentations will not only challenge their creativity, but it will also support their critical thinking skills.

KerPoof was introduced to me by another 3rd grade teacher on my team. It would be nearly impossible for kids not to be engaged while working with a tool like this one! I love their slogan "learning through creativity" so true with this resource!

ToonDoo is a tool where users can create their own comic strips! My students loved applying their skills that they learning in class by making their own comics. It was a great tool to help my kids understand cause and effect also.

Voki allows you to create a speaking avatar. I've used Voki in a number of different ways in my classroom, students used Voki to create an avatar that was from a country that they studied, I've also used Voki to hook students at the beginning of a lesson, and even in transitions between lessons.

Presentation Tools

Powerpoint is a great tool, but by the time I was a senior in high school I was about sick of using it, simply because I was asked to use powerpoint in all of my presentations, if only I knew what I know now :)

Prezi is one of my all time favorites, and my students' too! It is free, web-based, and personality I think it is easier to use than ppt. You can use anytime you would normally use powerpoint. 

Glogster is a great site where students can create online posters, embed links to other glogs, websites, even videos! My students used glogster in place of the traditional paper posters to share what they learned in a unit to review before an assessment. 

VuVox is a unique site that allows you to create media presentations, including animated timelines, photo stories, and more!

Museum Box is a resource where students can create their own virtual museum box to explain, argue, or describe an event, person, or period in history.

Animoto is a great tool to create free 30 second video slideshows with music. Free accounts include the 30 second videos, if you want a longer video you need a subscription, they have a few different options, with the least expensive $5/month. You can also sign up for a free Educator's account. I used animoto for my Award's Day presentations, End of the Year video, in place of a thank you card for a classroom visitor, and even for my little brother's high school graduation.

VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that connects images, documents, and videos. Users can communicate using VoiceThread by recording their voice to share comments.

Don't forget about iMovie and Window's Movie Maker! 

Teacher Talk- Technology Tools

We know that students in our classrooms are being raised by a society that depends on technology for daily tasks. When they leave our rooms, and step into the world, they will be expected to be able to not only use technology, but choose which tool is most appropriate to complete the task before them. It's our job, as their teachers, to give them a learning environment where they can develop these necessary skills!

This blog will serve as a place to share free tools you can use with your students to begin fostering that technology literacy our students will need to be fluent in to order to be successful in their futures.

Blooms Tools