DEN Texas

You Tube  that is.  Discovery Education (and the Discovery Channel and more) have a presence on this video sharing site.   To see what is available, go to:  http://www.youtube.com/user/DiscoveryEducation 

Or Teacher Tube perhaps.  For some Discovery Education related videos there, go to: http://www.teachertube.com/videoList.php?pg=videonew&tags=discovery&cid=16 

Also on Teacher Tube, check for the just created Texas DEN group at: http://www.teachertube.com/members/groupHome.php?group_id=TexasDEN

What does it all mean!?  

You’ve heard the terms, perhaps from other teachers or students, perhaps from crossword puzzles or comic strips.  Now you want to know for sure about what all those Web 2.0 terms mean and get a handle on what’s out there.   Here are some helpful sites for learning the lingo ……

 http://www.webopedia.com/Web_2_0/ – an online computer technology dictionary

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/social-networking – going a bit deeper into the terms

and taking in the tools:

http://webtools4u2use.wikispaces.com/ – a helpful wiki about web tools

http://www.go2web20.net/ – browse the directory, check the blog also

That’s a few to get you started.  Now for the Web 2.0 advanced users out there, a question:  What are your favorite definition or tool find sites?  

Share the knowledge………..

One educator I follow on Twitter is Riptide Furse. (Okay, his real name is Fred Delventhal, but we know him as Riptide via his Second Life associations.) Riptide shares a lot of great stuff on Twitter. But for the annual Banned Books Week, he shared a Google Map. Interesting!

Google Map on Banned Books in America

It’s not that I’m a banned book fan, but I spent time with this map. Did you know that Round Rock, TX has banned a book from it’s libraries? That Huckleberry Finn was banned by North Richland Hills in 2007?

This map is a great visual depiction of collected data and there is room for explanations to be given for each map pin. This map was well done, but it isn’t a difficult thing to do. Middle school and high school students should have no problem gathering data, creating an informative map, and publishing it online.

Over a year ago, I started sharing a Google Map made by a Discovery Educator about the travels of Laura Ingles Wilder. (Always thought it’d be cool to have one for Gene Wilder or even the character Joan Wilder from Romancing the Stone.) It’s a nice resource, but it never got much traction with my teachers. So, what are other strong curriculum connections to mapping data could one have in Literature, Math, Science, etc? What sites do you frequent online that list some other Google Maps?

Tom Barrett is an educator in Nottingham, England. (..and yes, I read his Tweets with a terrible English accent.) He had a five-part blog called,  Google Earth is Our Paper , and used it to show how his students used Google Earth (Maps) for digital storytelling.

Google UK Schools has a great set of lesson plans for using Google Earth in primary schools. It’s a wonderful curricular cross-cut of real lessons we already do and some how to’s for integrating the technology into them.

I didn’t want to hand someone a list of 400 lessons and say, “Look in here for something you like”, but GELessons.com not only has lessons, but tutorials for the self-teacher who wants to learn more about using Google Earth.

Please comment below about other lesson connections you would use. Map the birthplace of the top 10 rappers from the 90’s? Show the locations that Cameron Diaz filmed for her MTV travel show “Trippin” this year? Share your ideas!

Thanks for the nudge this morning Rip!

Have you spent hours creating your PowerPoint presentation just the way you wanted to only have to use it on a different PC that did not have the same version or different fonts?

If you have Adobe Pro or a different PDF converter you can save your PowerPoint as a PDF. However, if you do not have either of those you can still save as a PDF. Go to the Save As option and select Find Add-ins for other file formats. Click on the Install and use the Save as PDF or XPS add-in from Microsoft option. You will have a link where you can install the add-in. Once the add-in you will have the option to Save-As PDF or XPS.

Once you have your PowerPoint saved as a PDF you can open it on any PC that has Adobe Reader. Select View, Full Screen (Ctrl + L) and you can view just like a Power Point slide show. Granted you will not have animation or slide transitions, but you will have the correct fonts, colors, and themes.

Yes, Discovery Educators have made themselves know on Web 2.0 tools.   After all, call them social networking tools, so certainly the Discovery Educator Network folks ought to be using, connecting, and learning on these tools.   A few web 2.0 places to find DEN and the Texas DEN are:

http://twitter.com/TXDENLC   http://twitter.com/DEN

On FaceBook:
Name: Discovery Educator Network
Category: Organizations - Academic Organizations

http://discoveryeducation.ning.com/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/den

http://www.shelfari.com/groups/24939/about

http://groups.diigo.com/groups/discovery-educator-network

http://den.wikispaces.com/   http://texasden.wikispaces.com/

So, come on!  Explore the World (Wide Web 2.0)!

I am curious (also developing some presentations):  what Web 2.0 or other tech tools do you think educators should know about, at least be familiar with term and look of item?

How about it gang?  Please comment with your list!

So sorry it’s been so long since I posted an article here - it seems as though this semester is flying by and I’m sure that all of you are feeling the same way! I have been using a cool tool for awhile that I realized might be of interest to others, so I thought I’d share. This one is called Batch Geocode. The website doesn’t have the prettiest layout, but it is extremely functional and I can think of several uses for it in a classroom.

What this website does is convert a spreadsheet with location data into a visual representation of the places in the spreadsheet. I’ve used this several ways, but here are some ideas:

Have students map:

• the location of earthquakes over the last 3 months
• the locations they’ve traveled in their lifetime
• the journeys of famous people
• the locations of classrooms from around the world that they have connected with

As a connected teacher, map:

• locations of the individuals in your PLN
• hometowns of the people who attend a workshop you are presenting at a national conference, such as NECC

The graphic is cool - you can either have it look like a satellite photo, a map, or a hybrid of the two. The one in this post is a hybrid. After you’ve created the graphic, each point will have the additional information that was included in the spreadsheet. You can save the map to a webpage (see mine by clicking HERE) or you can download it as a Google Earth KML file.

Try it out and post a comment - how do you like it? what uses can you think of for your classroom? Do you know of other, similar websites? Share!

Texas Leadership Council member, Ann Jablonski, sent me a note today about a great idea for this holiday season. Here’s what she had to say:

“Something cool that Xerox is doing

If you go to this web site, http://www.letssaythanks.com/Home1280.html you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq . You can’t pick out who gets it, but it will go to some member of the armed services.

How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!!! This is a great site. Please send a card. It is FREE and it only takes a few minutes.(Plus your students get to practice their letter writing skills in a purposeful way.)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the soldiers received a bunch of these? Our guys and gals over there need to know we are behind them…”

How hard would it be to run over to the site now and send a soldier a card? How about having all your students send one?

I sat in on David Warlick’s session this morning at the Region XI virtual conference on “21st Century Literacy” and learned about a useful tool called TagCrowd.

TagCrowd will take text, whether it be from a website or a file, and create a visual depiction of the most commonly used words in that text. What uses could this possibly have in the classroom? Well, David showed us TagCrowds he made from presidential inaugural speeches - students can compare what was important to the country through the years. He also showed TagCrowds from various speeches made by different people about a single event - students can see what was important about an event from the perspective of different cultures or countries. Another thought I had was to have students create TagCrowds for their essays or papers - they can see what words they may have used too frequently, or they may see that their focus is different than what they intended. What a valuable and visual way to teach students the importance of the words they choose! Another participant at the session this morning suggested that students create TagCrowds on text that is written in casual language versus formal or academic language.

I used TagCrowd to evaluate an essay I wrote about leadership for a graduate school application and here was the result:

Try it out and post a comment here with ideas you see for uses in the classroom.

Hasn’t the last few days been exciting? No matter what your politics, it has actually been nice to see so many people get so excited about something. Those of us who use Twitter and Plurk know just how easy it was to get wrapped up in following what everyone had to say about the things going on in our country.

One thing that came out of the election coverage for me has a classroom application, so I thought I’d post it here. On one of her twitter posts, Jennifer Dorman (cliotech) said she was following the news the day after the election from all over the country using News Map. I went to check it out and found a great, free web tool!

What News Map does is aggregate news from all over the world in one place. It displays the headlines in a visually stimulating way — those headlines that are getting the most reads are larger than others. There are tabs to specify specific countries across the top and specific categories along the bottom. All you have to do to read a news story is click on the headline and you’ll be taken to the source.

I see this as a great tool for students who are doing current events projects and also an easy way to keep up with the news. Visit the site then come back here and add a comment to share what uses you see for this free tool.