IDEAS applications have helped teachers integrate technology into their classrooms for the last five years.
All of our programs have been created at the suggestion of teachers, and are constantly modified according to teacher requests for new features and capabilities. The acronym I.D.E.A.S. stands for Instructional Development of Educational Applications Service and that is just what we do. We create applications for students and teachers to use in instructional settings.
Toolbox Pro, our latest and greatest product, is the culmination of all of our efforts combining the tools that teachers have asked for into a single integrated interface. With Toolbox Pro you can create a class website, create online quizzes, tests, and activities, upload files and documents you want your students to access, communicate with parents and other teachers, and even post podcasts. Visit http://www.toolboxpro.org
For more information about IDEAS or about any of our programs, email us at IDEAS@gstboces.org.
Today I came across a great piece of free software that makes it super easy to format video for mobile devices or for uploading to web sites like Youtube or TeacherTube. It is called Mobile Media Converter and is a product of MikSoft. You can visit their site and download the software at http://www.miksoft.net/mobileMediaConverter.htm.
The software is cross-platform. They provide pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Macintosh and several flavors of Linux. An image of their website is displayed below. The different text balloons on the page highlight some of the important features like the many converters it supports and formats that it will output.
The actual interface of the program is very simple to use. It displays a window in which you add the videos that you would like to convert, then choose the desired output format, and click the convert button. The window changes to display a progress bar, and then notifies you when the conversion is finished. It couldn't be easier than that.
The image above shows the main window of the Mobile Media Converter program. I tested it by loading an .AVI file that I copied from my FlipCam, and converting it to an .MP4 file that I could load to my iPod. I also tried converting to a few other format including Flash Video (.FLV) for an upload to Youtube. All of the conversions that I tested looked and sounded good.
If you are looking for an easy-to-use program for converting video from one portable format to another, I think this program is a great choice. And did I mention that it is FREE?
Note: Remember that we always like to hear your feedback about our IDEAS web site and our articles. Send us an email at IDEAS@gstboces.org to let us know what you think.
It is no secret that our classrooms are using more and more digital resources in instruction. Content providers of all types are rushing to get their materials online to make them accessible to teachers and students. Sales of E-book readers like the Kindle and Nook and other hand-held devices are soaring. Textbook publishers are releasing their content in PDF and other digital formats to keep up with the marketplace.
In the midst of all of this rush-to-meet-the-need madness, the state of California has created an initiative to create free and open source digital textbooks for all students.
California’s created its Free Digital Textbook Initiative (FDTI) to "provide students, teachers and parents access to free digital high school textbooks that meet California’s rigorous academic content standards." At the Governor’s request, the Department of Education and State Board of Education invited content developers to submit materials for review so that schools would have access to standards-aligned digital math and science textbooks in time for the start of classes in fall 2009. This initiative was coordinated by California Learning Resource Network (CLRN). Textbook reviews and links to each textbook download are available at CLRN’s web site at http://www.clrn.org/fdti/.
The current initiative only addresses the content areas of Mathematics and Science. Phase 2 will seek to add texts geared toward history and the social sciences. The illustration above shows two sample pages from the CK-12 Geometry textbook (freely downloadable as a PDF here).
While not all of the e-books are in this format, the PDF format makes it easy for people to download and view the textbooks using the free Adobe Reader or any other PDF-capable application. The scaling features of PDF viewers also make it easy to zoom in on any text or graphics that might be more difficult to view in a traditional textbook format. Being digital allows the content in a textbook to be updated regularly and allows it to be edited and re-arranged by other users. (While reading about digital textbooks, I came across the concept of a "flexbook", which is a digital textbook that can be customized on-the-fly to include only the chapters or topics that they need to present. How cool would that be?)
While the textbooks in the FDTI are aligned directly to the California Learning Standards, NYS teachers still may be able to use them to supplement and enhance the texts that they are already using. The State of Florida has also made some attempts to get free (and low cost) textbook materials into the hands of their students. They provide a digital repository called the Orange Grove which has eTexts on a wide-variety of topics. (I did a few simple searches and found many different types of resources. Visit the Orange Grove to give it a try. Choose Browse Resources, and then Orange Grove Resources to reach the search interface.)
It seems that California and Florida have jumped right in and are leading the movement toward providing free digital resources for teachers and classrooms. Will New York State jump on the band-wagon?
Whether or not NYS creates an initiative like California or provides a digital repository like Florida, the good news for teachers is that there are a lot of great, free textbook resources that can be used as texts or to supplement the texts already in their classrooms. A simple google search on 'free digital textbooks' brings up lot of links that can explored as needed.
IDEAS would like to hear your input about digital textbooks. Please add a comment below, and take part in our poll.
Pics4Learning is a neat site that I came across while I was looking for images to use in a project that I was working on with students. The "About" information on the site describes it well – "Pics4Learning is a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students". The images in the collection have been specifically donated by students and teachers with permission granted for use by teachers and students. http://www.pics4learning.com/
The home page lists a large directory of topics and indicates that many topics also contain subtopics. It is very easy to browse the site by topic or to do a quick keyword search. There is an advanced search link that allows you to add boolean operators to your search, and to search specific fields like location, caption, and photographer.
Here is one of the images that I found from a quick search for "frog". The table below the image gives you the basic information about the image. I like that it includes bibliographic information so that students can cite the source in their projects.
The site has lots of good images in a variety of different sizes. This image of Mount Rushmore is displayed at 500 pixels wide by 375 pixels high, but you can see that the source image is much larger (2272 by 1704 pixels).
One other nice feature of Pics4Learning is that it has a library of lesson plans on various topics that can be used in conjunction with the images found at Pics4Learning. The image below shows part of the lesson plan directory displaying some of Language Arts and Science lesson titles.
Pics4Learning is useful site for teachers who are looking for free images. It has thousands of images categorized by topic, and searchable by keyword. It also has lesson plan resources that can help teachers use the site as part of their instruction.
As I was doing some research recently I came across this blog and I must admit that I was amazed by all of the posts about great sites and resources for working with Smartboards in the classroom.
Teachers Love Smartboards is the blog of James Hollis, a certified secondary mathematics teacher and professional development specialist for SMART board users from Aurora, Illinois. In his blog, James writes short posts about and provides links to sites that can be used with SMARTboards. Recently, he wrote a series of posts promoting sites with great content for smart boards without distracting or inappropriate advertising placement, "SMART Boards and Ad-free Resources"Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. (Take a quick look at these posts and visit some of the sites to preview the content.)
Here is an image from the Science NetLinks site that James blogged about in one of his posts this past January. This is an interactive activity called "Power Play" that lets students figure out the tools necessary to build a machine to harness power.
Another terrific resource that I discovered while reading James' blog is the e-Learning for Kids site.
This site is run by a global, nonprofit foundation dedicated to fun and free learning on the Internet for children ages 5 – 12. they offer free, best-in-class courseware in math, science, reading and keyboarding, and are building a community for parents and educators to share innovations and insights in childhood education.
This image, from the home page of the E-Learning for Kids site, shows how you can easily select resources organized by grade level or subject. This site will give you hours of fun browsing through all of the resources it offers.
I strongly recommend adding Teachers Love Smartboards to your weekly blog reading. It is a tremendous resource chock full of great sites for teachers to use in instruction. Bookmark the site, or subscribe to it using your favorite blog aggregator, or RSS feed reader.
No? Well you should get to know it. It has many free resources that you can use to enhance lessons in your classroom.
Teachers' Domain (http://www.teachersdomain.org/) is a library of more than 1,000 free media resources from public television offerings such as NOVA, Frontline, Design Squad, and the American Experience, designed for classroom use and professional development. The resources include video and audio segments, Flash interactive movies and simulations, images, documents, lesson plans for teachers, and other student-oriented activities. For easy use, the library is organized into several customized "Editions". New York State teachers are automatically connected to VITAL New York, a special edition which organizes the resources by the New York State Core Curriculum, as well as by common subjects and skills for preschool, elementary, and secondary grades. You can view the different editons by clicking the 'Change Edition' link at the bottom of any page.
How do I sign up?
Creating an account for Teacher's Domain is very easy. Just follow these steps:
2. Use drop-down boxes or type your zip code to locate your school (institution).
3. Create a login name. The Check Availability button will let you know if it is already taken.
4. Create a password following the guidelines provided below the box.
5. Enter your first and last names. Select a user type, and check boxes for any grades you teach. Optionally you can supply an email address if you wish
6. Click the Start Using Teacher's Domain button, and you are all set.
What resources are available for my class or subject area?
The home page of the Teacher's Domain has a very simple-to-use menu structure presented in a tree format.
You can expand and contract different parts of the tree to reach the topics that are appropriate for your class and grade level. The VITAL Resources are organized by K-8 Core Curriculum and High School Core Curriculum. With just a few clicks you can find the resource you are looking for.
There also is a keyword search box provided toward the top of your home page which will let you do more advanced and targeted searches. The Advanced Search link lets you further filter your search to a specific grade range, media type, or permitted use. The Advanced Search page also lets you search for other resources available at the NSDL (National Science Digital Library).
Here is an image of a quick drill-down to a list of resources about Colonial Settlements. (To get there I clicked Social Studies, then U.S. History, then Colonial Settlement.)
Clicking on the resource name brings up a lot more information about it. From this screen, I can read a quick synopsis of this 2 minute 14 second movie, view a background essay, and see links to the New York State Learning Standards, as well as view and download the video.
Are there any other features of Teacher's Domain?
Teacher's Domain does allow you to save and organize resources to your own folders and to share them with other users. You can upload your own media files to your folders, which can be sharde as well. You can also do some simple networking by creating and joining groups of users who want to share online resources.
Summary
Teacher's Domain is a great, free resource for educators. It can provide you with hours of resources that will enhance your lessons and units. Visit the site. Browse around. Create an account, and let us know what you think about it. Send your comments and observations to IDEAS@gstboces.org or leave a comment here on this page.
Social Bookmarking is a Web 2.0 technology that allows users to create a central bookmark list that they can access from anywhere on the Internet using any browser, and to share that resource with other users. The IDEAS team has set up a social bookmarking site for the members of our IDEAS Learning Community.
We call the site IDEAS Educational Bookmarking and we invite any teachers or instructional staff who use IDEAS programs to create an account and begin working with social bookmarking. Even if you don't want to create an account or do the bookmarking yourself. You can benefit from viewing the sites that have been bookmarked by other teachers and educators. We hope you will enjoy using this site.
The folks at CommonCraft have created a video resource called "Social Bookmarking in Plain English" that visually explains the concepts behind social bookmarking. You can view the video below, or at the CommonCraft web site or by searching for it at Youtube.
(Our thanks to CommonCraft for this excellent video.
They have many other videos on technology topics at CommonCraft.
Take a few moments to check them out.)
One of the more useful concepts in Social Media is the ideas of "tagging". Tagging content lets you easily organize it into categories that make sense to you. Tags allow quick searches, and simple ways to locate the material you are looking. Our social bookmarking site has a "tag cloud" on the right hand side that lets you see the most popularly used tags at a glance. Clicking on a tag in cloud automatically filters the bookmarks list to show the items that are tagged with that keyword.
Using Social Bookmarking can be a great introduction into the world of Web 2.0. The "read and write" web as some call it is all about users creating useful content for themselves and sharing that content with other. We here at GST BOCES IDEAS hope that you will use our bookmarking site to enhance your classroom instruction and the online resources that you use with your students.
Additional Resources
You can learn more about Web 2.0 technologies at Wikipedia, and at O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0 site.
To create the IDEAS Educational Bookmarking site, we customized and modified a piece of open source software called Scuttle. Open Source software is software that is provided free of charge on the Internet. You may use it for its intended purpose according to the terms of its license. Here is an article about Open Source Software in Education, and a link to a site with lots of Educational Open Source Software called SchoolForge.
The IDEAS team has done it again! We created a new application for teachers, students, and parents.
This new application is designed especially for young students who are working on their penmanship skills. It allows you to create worksheets that can be printed for students to practice handwriting.
The easy to use program lets you choose whether to practice printing or cursive styles and a variety of different type sizes. Just type in the text that you want them to practice and then generate the worksheet.
You can view and download the worksheet in PDF format, save it to your hard drive, and print it for distributing to the students.
The image above shows an example of a worksheet displaying cursive handwriting. You can download it here, or download this example that show the basic print style.
To create your own worksheets, visit the Custom Handwriting Template Generator at
