World Language Resource

LangMedia offers some interesting resources for a multitude of languages. This site offers videos of common everyday interactions in the language and even breaks it down by countries. For instance, Spanish in Argentina, French in France, and many, many more. Foreign lanugage and English language transcripts are provided for each video. There are also photos of signs that would be seen in a number of public situations, restroom signs, emergency signs, banking, post offices, and many more.
Would be a great resource for world language students and teachers to view short interactions in whatever language they might be studying.
Great Resource!

Spanish Resource- Lingus.tv
Lingus.tv provides a selection of videos about everyday interactions spoken in Spanish. Videos are embeddable for use on a webpage, wiki or blog.

Teaching and Learning Spanish
This blog posts a variety of resources for Spanish teachers. Seems like a great resource for up to date online Spanish resources. Provides links to Children Websites, other Spanish blogs to follow, foregin language advocacy group links, and teacher resource links.

Shmoop-Awesome Resource

I know I have shared this before but after seeing it again I had to share it, again! Shmoop is an awesome resource for a variety of currriculums; LIterature, Poetry, Shakespeare, Bestsellers, US History, Civics, Biography, and Music. These are all free resources. They also offer AP Exam Review resources for a small fee. Shmoop includes Summaries, Themes, Quotes, Characters, Analysis, Questions, Photos, Relevant Websites, and Opinions on a variety of topics and books. Some sample content/books; Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, World War II, the War of 1812, Biographies of famous people and so much more.
If you usually pass up the sites I offer on this blog please don't pass this one by.

Learn Vocabulary for 9 Different Languages

WordSteps - Learn Vocabulary for Nine Languages

WordSteps is a resource for learning the vocabulary of your choice of nine languages. To start learning vocabulary with WordSteps select the language you are trying to learn then choose a set of vocabulary words in that language. WordSteps provides six types of practice activities for each set of vocabulary words. The sets of vocabulary words are called dictionaries by WordSteps. You can use the dictionaries made by other WordSteps users or create your own dictionary. WordSteps can be used without creating an account, but in order to create your own dictionary you must create an account.

The languages supported by WordSteps are English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, German, Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese. The vocabulary practice activities are Flash Cards, Translation Variations, Words Variants, Alphabet Soup, Write Translation by Word, and Write Word by Translation.

Applications for Education
WordSteps could be useful as an independent study tool for foreign language students. If students have a set of words that they must learn for a class they can enter that list into WordSteps and have six types of practice activities ready for them to use. If students are trying to learn a language on their own then the public gallery of vocabulary lists provides a ready-made learning opportunity

Multimedia Timelines

Here are 5 tools for creating multimedia timelines. Great resources for students to add images and videos to timelines and great for teachers to eliminate the older poster timelines.

XTimeline
Allows students to collaborate, just as they would when creating a wiki, to build a multimedia timeline. XTimelines can include text, images, and video.

TimeGlider
Offers nicer layouts than XTimeline such as, staggering or indenting events below each other in sequence. TimeGlider also makes it easy to display the relative importance of an event by increasing its size compared to other events on the timeline.

Time Toast
Very easy to learn and use. To add events simply click on the "add event" button and a simple event box pops up where you can enter text, place a link, or add a picture. Lacks advanced editing feature that are present in XTimeline and TimeGlider. This is a more suitable choice for elementary or middle school students.

Time Rime
Allows users to create timelines that include text, images, audio and video. One of the better features is that you can have more than one type of media for each event on your timeline. You can also select which media type you want as the feature piece of each event. You can also embed the timeline in a blog or email it.

Dipity
This is a great tool that allows users to incorporate text, images and videos into each entry on their timeline. Also incorporates a mapping feature that allows users to place a related Google Maps bookmark for the timeline. Built in collaboration option for sharing projects. Able to add multiple types of media which allows users to add more detail and information than in a traditional timeline.

How are you using technology? Part Deux

Here a few ideas, 130 to be exact, for how to use social media in the classroom. I thought I should follow my previous post with some resources.

100 Inspiring Ways to Use Social Media in the Classroom


30 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom

Enjoy and as always please let me know if I can be of any help.

How are you using technology?

I was talking with a teacher who is doing Socratic seminars in class. Students select a book that they read and then run a Socratic seminar with their class. Here are a few of the student comments in their Socratic, interesting what our students see...

"Teachers here think that just because they have us use a computer, they are using technology. It is so much more than that. It is using technology to develop real-world skills and solve problems that we might face in the future.”

"Yeah my teacher projects notes on the promethean board and thinks he uses technology. He isn’t. How about letting me get out of my seat and discover something on my own. Isn’t that teaching."

I just found this to be interesting commentary. thanks and have a great week!

Photo Story 3 Tutorial

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:It is a basic intro to the PhotoStory 3 software. We will be covering how to use these tools in the Tuesday May 25th session. I have attached a tutorial below that walks through the process of creating a Photostory. If you would like to see written steps on creating a Photostory click here. Enjoy!

Photo Story 3 Tutorial

View more presentations from Karen Brooks.

Google TV-A Change in Paradigm or Fad?

Google TV was unveiled on Thursday. This will allow you to not only watch television but surf the web to gather show related resources too.
Check out the PC Magazine article here.

Can we eat to starve cancer?

Here is an interesting video from TED. William Li, an expert in antiangiogenesis, gives a talk on how we can eat to prevent cancer. Interesting and useful for you and your students. I thought this would be especially useful in health, science, or foods classes.
If you have never heard of TED it is a great site that posts videos of 20 minute talks from leading experts in every field; science, medicine, technology, education, etc. The talks are excellent and these are the people on the cutting edge of their respective areas. James Cameron, Steve Jobs, Ken Robinson, Dan Pink, Bono and more experts give great talks. Check it out!

Here is the William Li video.

A Man's Search For Meaning

Here is a 1972 Viktor Frankl talk about the human nature to search for meaning in life and how we should look at people (I was thinking students) and see the what they can become and maybe help them get there. Good stuff!

FR Technology Article

Here is a link to the Post Gazette article about technology in our high school. The journalist attended the board meeting last week and then interviewed me about technology use here at the high school. I hope I represented FR well.

Technology brings Moodle, wiki pages to class in Franklin Regional

A little more reading for you. I found this last night, rather Twitter found it for me and sent it to my Crackberry. Preparing to Teach Digitally

Weekly Byte 4.6.10

We have almost made it! 4.5 weeks left and it cannot come too soon for me. I am looking forward to spending the summer outside with the boys.

Site of the Week
This week I have a really cool site for everyone. If you check out any of the resources I share here at the Revolution please take 5 minutes and check this one out. This site is called Mashpedia. This is a great research tool. Once you get to the site you can type a topic into the search block or you can choose one of the topics they have on the page. I typed in gulf oil spill. It takes you to a page of links. I clicked on the first link and Mashpedia provided a mashup of several sources and their reports on the gulf oil spill. It return you tube videos of the oil spill, some general information about the spill with links to other sources (like wikipedia), Digg resources shared by other people, Twitter posts about the oil spill, Flickr photos shared about the spill, related news articles, images, blog posts about the spill, and even books written about oil spills.
I know this may sound confusing to some of you but you have to check it out. It makes your search easier by giving you all the different types of resources about a topic on one page. It basically builds you a webpage about the oil spill or any topic you enter. Unlike a Google search which gives you a ton of links that may or may not have to do with your query.

Thought of the Day
The 44 cent Solution, check out this story on Dan Pink's May 4th blog post. Something to think about in how you do your job.

Thanks for your support and have a great weekend!