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This is fun stuff.

National Geographic has a neat little utility, Wildlife Filmmaker, that lets students create their own wildlife movie using video, sound, and music clips built right into the site. Students can add their own captions and save (though not download) their movie.

No registration is required, no fee, just easy movie editing fun using basically educational content.

It probably best suits primary grades students and some intermediate situations, but the interface is fitting for all ages.

[via Digital Inspiration]

[via History Tech (via David Warlick)]

Good options for primary source documents are always a plus. Primary sources presented well are even better. Take a look at the National Archives’ Digital Vaults Collection.

“Digital Vaults gives you and your kids a place to find raw materials that are arranged in ways that may make more sense to them. The site is set up a bit like a social network. Data is organized by tags and linked to both the tags as well as other resources. Like a social network, you can make your favorites documents / materials your “friends,” search for new “friends” by using tags and create “mashups” using primary sources.” (History Tech blog)

If you’re looking for support materials for students and teachers, including lessons plans for use with primary source documents, visit the Vault’s Educators and Students page.

If you’ve ever considered authoring a blog, take a look at these two free blogging tools. If you’ve never considered authoring a blog, look at yesterday’s post on the topic for some good reasons to consider it.

I’ve been revisiting blogging tools lately with some of the afterschool classes we’ve held. My go-to blog for classrooms has always been Landmark Project’s BlogMeister (classblogmeister.com). I like it well for it’s ability to tightly regulate student publishing and comments and limit the audience, particularly for elementary users. The interface is a little clunky, but it works very well. It’s easy to set up students in your class with their own blog and I feel generally comfortable using it with even young students because of the moderation options.

Lately, I’m also becoming more impressed with Edublogs (edublogs.org), particularly based on the improvements they’ve made. Sporting a clean interface using powerful blogging software, WordPress - the same software I use to author this blog - they’ve created a professional blogging environment that’s education-oriented and still plays well with our filters. Furthermore, you can directly upload photos, audio, and video to your Edublogs space which is a really helpful option not present in BlogMeister.

Choosing:

I like BlogMeister for it’s management of student blogs as part of the teacher blog interface. That would be my first choice if I decided to allow students to have their own blogs for school-related publishing. Edublogs supports student blogs, but they have to be individually managed.

Still I like Edublogs for its numerous feature options and polished look - these feature make EduBlogs my preference for the other three publishing scenarios I mentioned yesterday.

Both of these tools have been filter-friendly in most cases, an important aspect for schools.

Remember:

Don’t forget, before you do any public publishing, it’s always a great idea to keep your administration in the loop.

American Museum of Natural History’s “OLogy” is a good source of information on science and social studies topics, such as biology, archeology, and even mythology. Each area of the site has information, illustrations, and interactive modules for exploring the topic.

“With age-appropriate content in archaeology, astronomy, biodiversity, genetics, marine biology, paleontology, and physical science, OLogy makes science learning rich and engaging. Educators can find suggestions and tips on how to use the OLogy Web site in the Educator’s Guides. They can also use the index provided below to sort by grade, title, type, and topic; while kids can explore the Web site itself at http://www.ology.amnh.org.”

This resource is targeted toward ages 7 to 12. I recommend checking out the Site Map for a quick survey of the site’s activities.

There are more resources on the web than any one person can possibly keep up with - that’s why we need organized collections like those at www.ohiotreasurechest.org and www.d3a2.org to help sort it out. The great part is that there’s that much material, the bad part is that it’s easy to overlook great stuff.

One such resource is the Library of Congress (LOC) website - www.loc.gov. It’s really not possible to write an exhaustive post on the breadth of the resources on the LOC site. The “Selected Resources for School Librarians and Teachers” guide alone lists 37 specific collections.

The scope of resources includes such items as:

• historical collections
• veterans history
• an international section
• prints and photographs
• children’s literature
• poetry for American high schools
  
• terrorism studies
• copyright information
• a map collection of “Places in the News!“
• and LOC webcasts.

This is to name only a small handful.

As a starting point, let me point you to three items from the site:

1. LOC Teachers’ Page: www.loc.gov/teachers
2. Selected Resources for School Librarians and Teachers (PDF): memory.loc.gov/learn/educators/handouts/school_lbn.pdf
3. Handouts: memory.loc.gov/learn/educators/handouts

With Google Docs’ presentation tool (docs.google.com) you now have the ability to publish presentation slides online within your webpage. This means that your students could view slide sets without the need to download them and launch them in PowerPoint, a tool which they may or may not have. This could be great for sharing student work, archiving lecture notes, or even publishing daliy announcements.

If you’re not familiar with Google Docs, an online suite of tools similar to Office, check out this quick video from CommonCraft. Basically it’s free, go-anywhere word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In the following embedded presentation, I’ve outlined the steps to uploading existing PowerPoint slides to your site, including examples for SchoolPointe CMS, WebEdit, POW-PAK, and Moodle (sorry, but it doesn’t appear to work with Progress Book at this point). Email readers may need to visit this post online to see the slides.

While these examples discuss how to load your existing files, you can also use Google Docs to build original presentations from scratch.

I’ve had a handful of links hanging around in my reader that I’ve wanted to pass along, so I’m doing a little housekeeping here and getting those posted.

• TechLEARNING.com > Making Book Trailers with PhotoStory3 (If you haven’t checked out PhotoStory before, you should at least take a look at the sample movies and screen shots in this article)
• David Warlick > Some Sample Blog Assignments Links to the New ISTE NETS-S (”NETS-S” is the National Educational Technology Standards for Students)
• Codswallop> The Excel Magician: 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to help you make Excel Magic
• TechLEARNING.com > 25th Annual Awards of Excellence A great showcase of top-notch tech tools
• The Savvy Technologist > Policies 2.0: Rules for the Social Web
• TechLEARNING.com > Play That Tune: Music Sites for the Classroom
• TechLEARNING.com > Assessment with Video and PowerPoint
• TechLEARNING.com > Digital Storytelling: It’s More Than Just Software

Are there times when you already know the definition of something but lack the word to describe it? Merriam-Webster’s visual dictionary is a resource for just that situation. 6,000 color images illustrating and defining over 20,000 items make this a great way to find the names of various things that you might otherwise have struggled to define. Everything from plants and animals to heavy machinery to sports to the kitchen sink is found in this collection.

The labeled illustrations could be helpful for teaching content area subject matter, such as cells or the parts of a plant. I can also see great potential for ESL students just looking to learn the names of common items (take a look at the Society section for illustrations of cities, health, and public safety items). Links to recorded pronunciations make this tool even more useful.

[via Lifehacker]

A great collection of multimedia resources on the web is at Teachers’ Domain. Developed by PBS affiliate, WGBH, the collection includes a number of free videos, interactive modules, and articles. Age appropriate content is available for essentially all grade levels.

Free registration is required, but worth your time. The primary content areas include: Earth and Space Science, Engineering, Life Science, and Physical Science. A dozen or so Special Collections touch upon Civil Rights and Literacy (e.g., “Between the Lions Early Literacy”).

Good stuff. Good price.

[Side Note: Teachers' Domain also offers a handful of online courses. More information on these at PBS Teacherline]

www.free.ed.gov

There is a wealth on information available on the websites for government agencies. However, given that there are so many of them (agencies, that is), hunting down good stuff can be hard to do, especially for students who have less experience with search skills, or even a limited ability to scan through materials.

This site brings the resources of well over 60 different organizations together in one place. As described on the site’s “About FREE” page:

“FREE makes it easier to find teaching and learning resources from the federal government.

“More than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources are included from dozens of federal agencies. New sites are added regularly.

“FREE is among the most popular K-12 websites maintained by the U.S. Department of Education because of the many great resources being offered by participating federal agencies.”

The major subject groupings include:

• Arts & Music
• Health & Phys Ed
• Language Arts
• Math
• Science
• World Studies
• U.S. History, including
  • Business & Work
  • Ethnic Groups
  • Famous People
  • Government
  • Movements
  • States and Regions
  • Wars
  • Other History & Social Studies
• U.S. Time Periods

Receive free.ed.gov resource updates via their RSS feed at: http://www.ed.gov/free/free-rss.xml