Discovery Education (formerly United Streaming) has tons of really wonderful resources for teachers and students! One of the participants in last week’s training said that it was the best training she’d ever had (Thanks, Angela J.!)!

With that in mind, for those of you having trouble accessing this great resource, here are the steps:

1. Go to http://tech.hylton.groupfusion.net and log in.
2. Under Links, click Discovery Education/United Streaming. If this is your first time using Discovery Education Streaming, be sure to write down the access code located just below the link.
3. To sign up, use the access code and complete the registration form. If you already have a username and password for Discovery Education, log in.
4. Once you are logged in, click “Streaming” in the upper left corner and have fun searching!

Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips is a site is sent in by our very own Jennifer H. According to Jen, “This website is a fantastic way for students and/or teachers to brush up on grammar.  It is styled after Gossip Girl – a tv and book series.  The quick and dirty tips are amazing.”

The first week of school is behind us now and, unless there are some hidden casualties I don’t know about, we all survived! We may feel battered, beaten, bruised, and definitely exhausted, but we have successfully kicked off another school year!

This week’s Feel Good Friday is short and sweet. Now….go get some rest so we can do it all again starting Monday!

Since last week’s Technology Kickoff presentation, a number of you have asked about the tool I used to create the opening slide, http://wordle.net. Wordle is a completely free tool that allows you to create a word cloud out of any text, including poetry, literature, speeches, etc. All you have to do is copy/paste the text into the create field and viola – a personalized word cloud. Wordles can be used to introduce a lesson and spark discussion, or in our Language Arts classes to convey the main ideas in a piece of literature. This site created Wordles for every presidential inaugural address since Washington!

To get started, I recommend copying/pasting your favorite poem or a couple of paragraphs from your favorite book to see what kind of Wordle is created!

From the folks who bring us the Nobel Prize — here is a fun site with great Educational games!

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/

Click All Productions in the top left to see a complete list of everything they have. Most of the games are for Science, but there are also some that might be good for Language Arts and Social Studies.

This site looks very promising.

http://www.shmoop.com/teachers/

The mission of the site is “To make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age”. While the focus is on literature and poetry, there are also nice resources for social studies, too. Check it out and let me know what you think!

This week’s featured website comes from our very own special Librarian, Connie M. If you haven’t checked out Thinkfinity, there are a ton of really nice resources there, including lesson plans, assessments, enrichment activities, and more. Teaching is by far the hardest job on the planet, and anything that might make that job a little easier gets 5 stars from me. This is one of those tools!

SOLs are approaching very quickly! I remember when I returned to education in 2004 I was a bit taken aback by the World Geography pacing guide which had me finishing instruction by April 21. It did not make much sense to me since the last day of school was not until June. And then I remembered – SOL End of Course exams are actually given in May, many weeks before the end of the school year. (I still have issues with this, but that’s a topic for another day)

With that in mind, I know many of you are getting ready to delve into SOL preparation and review for your students. There are several resources available to help with SOL test preparation. First of all, the Department of Information Technology Services has placed an icon in our Novell desktop for the SOL practice tests, or ePats. If you have not already checked them out, they are a great place to start your SOL review. Secondly, we have many wonderful online resources bookmarked on Hylton’s Delicious site. The Jefferson Labs links are there as well as links to many other resources for each of our four core areas.

This site has been around for a very long time – http://webquest.org/index.php. A webquest is “an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web” and this site is chocked full of over 2500 of them that you can use for your classes! Be sure to click the link on the left that says Find Webquests. There are webquests here on virtually every topic!

This wonderful piece was dropped off on my desk while I was out last week by Holly J.!

Computer Error Haiku

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Welcome to the first Website Wednesday of the 2008-2009 school year!

PBS Teachers is a wonderful resource from our friends over at PBS for just about every subject we teach. You might also want to check out the accompanying blog, Learning.now by Andy Carvin.

SOLs are approaching very quickly! I remember when I returned to education in 2004 I was a bit taken aback by the World Geography pacing guide which had me finishing instruction by April 21. It did not make much sense to me since the last day of school was not until June. And then I remembered — SOL End of Course exams are actually given in May, many weeks before the end of the school year. (I still have issues with this, but that’s a topic for another day)

With that in mind, I know many of you are getting ready to delve into SOL preparation and review for your students and you may not know where to find our SOL online resources. At the start of the school year, I moved them all to our web portal. You can find them under the category “SOL Preparation”.

If anyone is aware of any resources that are not included in the portal, please post a comment with the link so that they can be shared with your peers. Then, I will add them to the portal ASAP.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project which keeps track of online trends and usage, almost 90% of all teens are online. Of them, 64% are creating their own online content.

That means that about half of the students in your classes are posting pictures and videos as well as writing for fun on the Internet.

Given our district’s initiative to raise our SAT scores, I can’t help but wonder how we could use Web 2.0 tools to help us in that endeavor. If kids are already online writing on their own, and writing helps improve literacy, what can we do to harness this for school?

There are lots of Web 2.0 tools that incorporate writing and blogging is one such tool. Blogs are very easy to set up and use. Here is a video from Commoncraft that explains blogging “in plain English”.

If you are interested in setting up a class blog, contact your friendly ITRT!

Download Video: Posted by cputnam809 at TeacherTube.com.

As we are in the midst of SOL remediation and testing, I found Alfie Kohn’s post, Do Kids Read Less for Fun? Blame Standardized Tests from The Pulse, particularly poignant. One quote, in particular, stood out:

“We haven’t been doing any reading since we started preparing the kids for the reading test.”

I’m not sure if I would share this resource with students, unless you want them using the resources available here to ”read-up” on the classics rather than reading them first hand. Having said (written?) that, however, this is a really cool site–MyRocketbook.com. If either you or your students want to review classics like The Scarlet Letter, 1984, The Great Gatsby, or more, everything you need can be found here! I was especially intrigued by the video study guides, but downloading the MP3s sounds like a great alternative, too.