LOST IN THE WOODS

Since schools is out I thought I would share some neat sites about all kinds of stuff with you for the summer.

The first is a site called LOST IN THE WOODS, THE 9 RULES FOR SURVIVAL.

It explains what to do if you get: lost in the woods. It's written for children and adults. The nine rules are clear and easy to understand.

Being a city boy I learned a lot.

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DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY?

I just finished reading a great book that I want to share with you.

Now if you are not an American history buff you can stop reading this blog and click on the "Next Blog" tag at the top of this page.


It's called America's Hidden History. The cover says it is the Untold Tales of The First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped A Nation. It's author is Ken Davis. I've read lots of history books on this subject before but every page of this book had something new on it I hadn't read about before.


I throughly enjoyed it. As a matter of fact when I got done reading it the second time I got out my 5th grade history teaching text and scribbled notes all over it of some of the interesting things I found in the book so I can share them with the kids in the fall.


Mr. Davis shares some great stories about who the first real Pilgrims in America were, an expanded version of Queen Isabella (and her pigs), the amazing story of George Washington's rise to power, how America not only came to war but how she won and several other awesome stories.


Once you pick it up you will not want to put it down. I think I enjoyed the book so much because he takes all these famous and infamous people and share there reasons for why they did what they did.



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Lunar Eclipse Wednesday

Sorry for not getting this out sooner. There is a Lunar Eclipse tomorrow(Wednesday). Space.com has some pretty good information. I like the page but they have a bit too much advertising on it.

The NASA site is way to complicated for me but you might like it.

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SiEMENS

If I was 18 again and looking for a career I think I would like to be on the team that makes these amazing commercials.

BOY COULD i USE A DRINK

QUIKMAPS

This one is fun. It is called Quikmaps and oddly enough you can check it out at quikmaps.com. I made a map that shows you how to get to the local McDonalds from our school. The directions are a little lacking but if you play around with it for a few minutes you and your kids will figured it out. I can see using this to map the route Columbus took to get to the Americas, mapping the Triangular Trade, Civil War battles and much more.

Give it a try and let us know how you might use it in your classroom.

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day

You are going to love this site. Larry does a great job of finding all kinds of sites for us to use in our classroom. It's easy to read and well organized. I liked it so much I added it to my Blogger list. Start with his home page and scroll down to check out the last ten posts.

Check out his February 9th post. It is called "The Best Way for Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly, and Painlessly" He's got a bunch of great ideas that I am going to try with my 5th graders. Check out his suggestions to make a movie, write a song, make a map, or create a piece of art.



Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

Subscribe to Time Magazine at an 86% discount!

That's me. One the cover of TIME. Here is me on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

Subscribe to Rolling Stone Magazine at an 86% discount!

And finally me on the cover of, go figure, Seventeen.

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

Subscribe to Seventeen Magazine at a 67% discount!

It's called MagMyPic. See what you can do with it.

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TWO NEW SITES

As I was cruising around the web searching for something to try with my students I came across two sites you might want to check out.

The first is called the Carrot Clustering Engine. According to it's blurb it:

... will search the Web with www.etools.ch and automatically organize the results into thematic categories

I typed in "vikings" and it did a pretty good job of sorting things out.


Another site I checked out is called Awesome Stories. According to it's blurb:

Enjoy an interactive learning experience as you see thousands of hand-selected and relevant links to pictures, artifacts, manuscripts, documents and other primary sources, IN CONTEXT, within each story. The first eight chapters of every story are available to all.

I was kind of impressed. I clicked on a link called Beowulf-The Story Behind The Movie and read all about the early history of Britain and the events that led to that fateful meeting between two foes. Then I discovered a button to click on and listen as someone with a beautiful voices read it to me.

They have dozens of awesome stories from the past for you to check out.

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LEARNING IS MESSY

I have to share with you one of my favorite blogs. It is called Learning is Messy and is written by Brian Crosby a fifth grade teacher at Agnes Risley School in Sparks, Nevada. I love the title. It's perfect.

He a man after my own heart. I think we think a lot alike. The only difference is he's doing things I have only thought about doing. He does all kinds of cool things with his class. They don't always work and lately some interesting things have been happening in wonderful world of education in Nevada in general and his classroom specially ( You will have to read his post to find out what I am alluding to.) but he keeps on truckin.

You need to check his blog out. I think its one of the best. The post I am linking to here is about an idea he had that's both hi-tech and low tech. He has his kids using reading tubes to proofread their online stories. Check out the details. I tried it with my class and it is working great.

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DINOUSAURS ANYONE?

This is the third time I've written this post. I found a fun site about dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in the UK. I was going to share this game I found and tell you more about the site in general but the more time I spent on site the more cool stuff I found and the more I had to rewrite this post.

I found a lot of information, pictures, videos, and games here. I started with a game called WHAT KIND OF DINOSAUR ARE YOU? and ended up using the DINO DIRECTORY to scope out T-Rex.


The site is a great resource for teachers and students alike. Check it out.

A LOOK BACK

Well, I think its time for me to take a look back and see where this blog has been and what its future might be.

When I first started blogging here I had no real goal in mind. I was looking for a place to share videos and sites I can't share on my classroom blog because they are blocked out. Sometimes I understood why they were blocked and sometimes I had no clue. But there is a lot of cool stuff out there and I wanted a place to put it until I could use it. I think thats why I started blogging here.

And I pretty much have been using it for that. I've shared all kinds of ideas and tools to try in the classroom. Most of them I have used myself. I also added a few fun sites and videos of things I have found.

I stayed away from turning this blog into a discussion type site. There are lots of others who do it far better than me. You can check them out in one of my sidebars.

I am somewhat disappointed in the lack of comments from people reading my blog. I have had only three comments since I started. One from someone not happy with the blog, one from my wife defending me, and one from me to me.

So after mulling it over a bit I have decided not only to keep writing but to try to get something up at least twice a week. We will see how it goes.

:)

Picture Trail

Here is the latest new tool you can put in your learning tool bag. It's just one of about 35 effects you can do with you classroom photo's. I have just started using this on my class bog and already the kids want more.

It's from Picture Trail. Picture Trail is one of the many online picture album places you can join nowadays to store, view, and print your pictures. It's the only one I found so far that has a bunch of different ways to share your pictures. You can put them on a rotating cube, a fancy sideshow, or any one of a dozen or two different presentation models.

I am going to start putting up some pictures of my class on my blog every couple days using Picture Trail. I am already thinking of all the different ways to integrate it with reading, writing, and social studies.

EXTREME DINOSAURS

This month's National Geographic is all about extreme dinosaurs. It's a great article and you and your students will enjoy it. They also feature a great photo gallery, most bizarre dinos, wallpapers, and dino puzzles.

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JC PENNY

Enjoy. This is from JC Penny.

The Tech Savvy Educator

I found another great blog you show take a look at. Its called THE TECH SAVVY EDUCATOR. It is written by a guy named Ben Rimes. Ben has a neat perspective on intergrating teaching and technology. I think what I like the best is his Friday posts. On most Fridays he posts a question for us to ponder and discuss. He also finds some pretty good sites to share which brings us around to today topic.

He found a great site that talks about copyright, teachers, and the classroom. It's an easy read. I learned a lot from it and I think you will too. It's called COPYRIGHT AND YOU.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

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DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

I thought this was pretty clever and funny. Enjoy.

China not fighting off e-waste nightmare

When I saw this headline in the Yahoo Story Box it kinda caught my eye. When I clicked on it and read the whole article it definately had my attention. This is an amazing story about what happens to all those computers, moniters, cellphones, washers, and dryers we throw away every year. They don't all disappear into some deep hole or tall mountain or garage... they end up in China.

Here are a couple of intertesting quotes from the article itself.

GUIYU, China - The air smells acrid from the squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothes smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust.

and then there's this...

"China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year", said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. "That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million fridges, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers..."

The article goes on to explain the problem and what little is being done to stop it or to help the workers involved. It is a fascinating look at an hidden problem.

If you read the article please hit the comment button and tell me what you think.

jim

Providing a Lifeline

I was just reading an article in POPULAR MECHANICS that I think you should know about before you toss out your old cellphone.

There is a group called THE WIRELESS FOUNDATION'S CALL TO PROTECT and they have a program where they take your old cellphoes, batteries, chargers and other phone stuff and refurbish them and give them to others to use as "emergency lifeslines for survivors of domestic violence."

So don't toss those old phones, donate it. They will even send you the postage to send it to them.

Give it a try and let me know how it works.

Google Maps

I know its been around for a while but I am just discovering how cool Google Maps.com is. Google Maps not only allows you and your students to map all kinds of places but lets you add pictures and all kinds of content to a map. It combines maps and satellite imagery to show your students connections they might not see from reading about something in a book. You can even link your places to articles in Wikipedia.

One of the best things about the program is its simplicity. I had it up and running after a few minutes.

I've spent the last couple of hours putting together some project ideas for my kids to try next week. We just finished up a neat project called Coming to America. I had my students do some research to figure out who was the first person in their family to come to America. You can listen to some of their podcasts here. Victoria's is one of the best. My friend, Jim Wenzloff suggested I have my students use Google Maps to create a world wide map of where they all came from. What a great idea. As soon as I have it put together I will edit this post and add a link to it here.


I started two more maps. One I called Places I've Been. It's title is self explanatory. After I show it to the kids I am going to have them make their own. Remember when you take a look at it that its just in its draft stage.

The last one I have created is called Native American Culture Regions. It is a unit in our social studies text. Google Maps allows me to have the kids think about all these different regions in a new way. I also think that it will give them a better idea of the big picture of how these people spread across the Americas. This too is in the draft stage so keep checking back as it grows in detail and content.

My goal is to have the kids quickly become the authors of these journeys around the world.

It is pretty exciting stuff. In the next few days I will share with you all the neat add on programs people have written that enhance an already neat tool.

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