November Technology in the Classroom - A Bountiful Harvest of Technology Ideas!

Happy Thanksgiving!

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, November is the month when the harvest is in, the heavy work of summer’s growing season is over, and there’s a little more time for reflection.  For Americans, it’s the season of Thanksgiving.  And for almost all of us there is much to be thankful for!

This month’s newsletter features a spectacular website that takes your students right into Plimoth Plantation as detectives to discover the truth about the first Thanksgiving.  It also introduces three new search tools to give them a whole new look at searching the Internet, plus a poster-making tool that will add a different scope and dimension to your visual aids. 

You are the Historian – Investigating the First Thanksgiving invites students in grades 3 - 8 to dig deeply into primary resources to separate myth from reality.  The Teachers’ Guide  at http://www.plimoth.org/education/olc/hpteachg.html provides excellent background information and materials so you can prepare and support your students to get maximum benefit from the highly-interactive pages and discoveries.  The investigations go beyond simply introducing new information about Thanksgiving at the Plimoth Plantation – they invite students (and teachers) to take the role of historian and explore the differences between history and the past.  The material is simple enough that third graders can manage it with support – but the concepts are complex enough to challenge and intrigue high school students and adults.
http://www.plimoth.org/education/olc

Students often start their web searches with Google, type the general term they are looking for, and then are utterly overwhelmed when the search returns literally millions of responses.  Boolify.org helps even young students actually see how refining their search changes the search results and gives them a more manageable return on their searches.

Students begin by dragging a green keyword piece to the Board and type in their keyword – their search returns appear below the puzzle area, along with their search string and the number of responses in blue.  As they drag and add modifying pieces to the puzzle, the numbers below change, as do the responses.  They can see that the returns are much more targeted.  Boolify.org works well for elementary students as their actual search engine, and helps them understand exactly how the responses relate to their search terms.

With older students, this is also an excellent, very visual, tool to demonstrate how the Boolean process works to narrow a search. 
http://www.boolify.org/

How often do your students find a webpage that looks promising, only to discover that the reading level is WAY over their heads?  Twurdy.com (a play on words – “Too Wordy?”) is a search engine that includes a readability code.  The goal is “that elementary students don’t have to click through difficult material to find something they can use.”  And “PhD students don’t have to click through websites designed for kids...”  Simple to use, students can use the color code to quickly scan for articles that are appropriate to their reading level, rather than having to open them to make that discovery.

http://www.twurdy.com/

Being able to SEE the webpages your search has yielded is, in itself, enough to make this an appealing search tool.  However, middlespot.com does much more than simply give a preview of the webpages – it allows the user to select and save the pages that best suit their needs, drag to organize and prioritize, name and save the entire search, and add items from another search.  The saved search gives the user a record of the sites they used in their research so they can compile their bibliography citations.  Let’s take it for a test drive.

To use this search tool, type your search string in the top line and click Search. 

• You can choose to organize your previews into 3 (or more) columns.
• As you pan your mouse over a preview, it enlarges, and it is highlighted in the list in the left menu. 
• If it is a page that looks useful, click save to mashtab either under the page or in the left menu.  This copies it to the mashtab (row of previews you’ve selected) at the bottom of the page. 
• Click one and drag to change the order of the pages. 
• Click the speech bubble in the lower left corner of a page and add a comment.  In the lower right corner, you can click the red X to delete pages that aren’t as good as they first appeared. 
• Once you have the search as you want it, email it to yourself (or someone else) by clicking the email link above the mashtab.  The search is sent as a link, and when you click the link, it opens as an interactive webpage with only the items you selected from your search. 

What a fantastic tool for guiding student research to pages you preselect!  You can even embed a search into your webpage or blog by clicking on the embed link and copying the code into your web or blog page.  To save and archive your searches, you will need to create an account – however, this requires only that you enter your email and a password.  This is a tool with far-reaching possibilities both for student research and for teacher-guided internet searches.
http://middlespot.com

How often have you wished you could enlarge your visual aids so that students could actually see what you’re talking about, enlarge them to fill a bulletin board?  An LCD, opaque projector, or document camera will give you a temporary picture – but frequently teachers need a more permanent display for students to interact with.  

Blockposters.com solves the problem.  At this very simple free website, you upload your image, decide how many “pieces of paper” wide and tall you want the finished poster to be, and the program converts your image into “.pdf” pages (portable document format that opens on most computers with Adobe Reader) You simply print – either in color or black and white.  Each page has an unprinted border that can be trimmed as needed to glue the

poster together, or it can make an interesting artistic effect to leave the borders as sashing between the sections, depending on your purpose. 

http://www.blockposters.com

That's it for November - get busy and try some searches with your students.  You won't have to wait until Christmas to open the bag of goodies in the December newsletter.  See you then - and in the meantime, have fun in the classroom!

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