Animals, Science Fairs, Numbers and Lingro!

1) http://explore.org Is a fun site that has live video streams of many animals or places. It might be fun for some background as students work on an animal assignment or for students to evaluate the behavior of animals. 

2) https://www.googlesciencefair.com/en/2013/ The Google Science Fair is accepting submissions for the next 90 days. So, if you are interested in checking this out, they have a lot of age divisions and also have some inspiration here for other projects. 

3) http://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile This link is a YouTube channel with "Videos about numbers and Stuff" as they say on their website. There are videos about everything from solving a Rubik's cube to Numbers and Brains. In the same place I found this, I also read an interested blog post about raising mathematicians: http://davidwees.com/content/raising-mathematicians Some of these questions sound very familiar to some of the morning Math I've heard in Elementary classrooms. Very cool! 

4) http://lingro.com is a web tool that will allow you to translate a website or, even more exciting, define every word on a site. Here is one that I did for a Rube Goldberg website: http://lingro.com/translate/http://rubegoldberg.com 

Steps: 

1) Copy URL

2) Paste into lingro.com's text field

3) Click blue arrow and wait... it takes awhile for text-teavy sites

4) Then, your site will have the blue lingro bar on the top of the page and when you click any part of the page, it will pop up with a blue box with the definition! 

5) http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com/2012/09/commoncoreunpackingacademicvocabulary.html The link prior is an Unpacking Academic Vocabulary for Common Core blogpost. It has a lot of good information about what "Tier" of words you are using in the classroom. It also talks about using the Find Tool that works in most browsers and web sites (control + F on windows or command + f on Mac). Check it out if you have time. 

6) http://www.thinglink.com Do you know all those cool graphics in the Washington Post online or Time Magazine that you can hover over and get more info in a pop up bubble? Well, Thinglink allows you to make a jpg interactive. You have to create an account and upload your image or use a public image to start creating. I am excited to use this in Geography class so that students can take an image of a country or region and make it an interactive image with labels "hovering" over the image. 

I am gone on Friday to a training, but if you have any questions or I can help with anything, please let me know. As a reminder, the iPad checkout is located at: http://tinyurl.com/deuelipad  and you can check out the archived emails at : http://teachertechweekly.blogspot.com 

Have a great day!