Fall 2002 EdTech News

Fall Real World Projects

The Monarch Migration: Visit one of these two websites to participate in scientific research investigating the migratory path of the Monarch Butterfly. Students can even help "tag" butterflies for the team. While the Monarchs spend winter in Mexico, students can write to classes in Mexico who are monitoring the behaviors of the butterflies and sharing the information. The University of Kansas sponsors the Monarch Watch. (Sign up for their newsletter!) Another site that monitors Monarch Migrations is Journey South. Journey South also monitors other species your class may find interesting. Riverdeep added an excellent article to their site about the Monarch Migration. It includes an excellent bibliography and even has a print-friendly version.

Web Page News

If you are anxious to have a web page to build better school to home communication, post homework, or provide extended learning opportunities for your students, did you know you now have three options? Scholastic.com offers free web pages to teachers who register on their site. You can build a website in 45 minutes to one hour. It is easy to maintain and requires minimal technology skills to get started. It also makes it easy for you to link to outstanding learning projects that match your student's needs. Check out some at Garden Road (Bonnie Bridger, Adele Sabourin, or Debbie Tait) or Rolling Hills (Betsy Pon, Teri Thomas, or Eunice Cupples.) You also have the option to use Learning Point which gives you access to a discussion board, provides a password protected site, and allows you to post assignments online. To view some outstanding sites, click on the Learning Point link at Sundance elementary and follow the directions to view Christine Overson and David Hatch's pages. It takes more time to learn to create a Learning Point site, but it's unique advantages are worth it. You also have the option to create a FrontPage Web. (You may use another web editor if you prefer, but the district provides support for FrontPage.) The learning curve is steeper, but this site allows you the most flexibility and greater opportunities to exercise your creativity. Check out Anne Gillespie's, Christie Weidetz's, Amy Calder's, Lynne Harvey's and Bernardo Campos's page. To schedule a training for your site or for yourself contact Linda Foote who will coordinate the scheduling. She and Stacey Campo provide these trainings.

Software Previews

Graph Club: Visit the Tom Snyder Productions site to download a free trial of this program. It can help your students (PreK-3rd grade) learn to interpret tables, and picture, bar, line, and circle graphs. It can also help them gather, sort, and classify information. They can construct colorful graphs with kid-friendly icons and then analyze the data. Talking and writing about their graphs will help them solve problems, make decisions, and learn to communicate effectively. (Picture from Tom Snyder Productions)

Graph Master: Visit the Tom Snyder Productions site to download a free trial of this program too. It is a more sophisticated graphing program than Graph Club, making it suitable for students in grades four through eight. Students can learn how to interpret data using 9 different graph types. They will explore statistics using mean, median, mode, and range. Solving problems and making decisions based on information gained by analyzing graphs will build excellent problem solving skills. This program even allows students to write their conclusions in an on-screen notebook. You can create the following types of graphs: bar graphs, line graphs, line plot, pictograph, scatterplot, box plot, circle graph, histogram, and frequency chart. For a tutorial click here and go to the view tutorial button. (Picture from Tom Snyder Productions)

Site Previews

Riverdeep:We currently have a license to use Riverdeep's online curriculum in many subject areas. Destination Math is a great resource to differentiate math instruction. You will want to go to the teacher tab after logging in to the site. You may have to do two login screens. The login name is pusdstudent1 and the password is pusdstudent1. When you're in the teacher pages, click on lesson plans under Teacher Support on the sidebar. Then click on Destination Math under the Math heading on the main screen. Choose the level you need by clicking on it. Then you can print out pages for students to complete while doing lessons online. You can also print out reviews and assessments. (Picture of Digit, the main character in Riverdeep's Destination Math series from Riverdeep.)

AIMS Multimedia: This site has 1200 videos and 4000 multimedia clips that are organized topically for you to use by streaming them on your computer. The free trial will last from now through the month of November. To sign up, go to AIMS Multimedia and click on create new accounts. Click on Create Teacher Account. Your teacher keycode is: pusdteacher3. You will then be asked to create your own login and password. Be sure to email me with your analysis of the effectiveness of this site for student learning.

The Integrated Classroom: This site has photos, videos, web links, and more all categorized by standards. We have a free trial for the month of November. Your login is powayusd and your password is bigchalk. Notice you can browse by text, subject, or standards. I've found this site to be most helpful in providing specific resources for whole class instruction as well as providing unique solutions for differentiating. The parent site Big Chalk Multimedia also is offering a free trial to us this month. They have video, audio, pictures, maps, and TV/Radio transcripts available in a searchable database. The login is SDCOE and the password is bigchalk. They are case sensitive. You can click on a tab at the top of the page to search reference works also.

E-mail Newsletters

If you don't have time to search the web nightly for all those wonderful online resources for learning in your classroom, consider subscribing to an online newsletter that will bring the best of the best sites to you!

Scholastic Read 2003 News

The World's Largest Classroom Reading Event!

Join Scholastic's community of readers—kids, teachers, parents, and friends—in the 4th annual event! Read for 2003 seconds (that's about 33 1/3 minutes) at 12 noon on December 6, 2002! This is a great support for our district reading standard of becoming lifelong readers. Invite parents, community leaders, school board members, and district administrators and personnel to read alongside students at your site. Be sure to visit Scholastic's site to print out posters and quotes about reading by famous athletes, entertainers, and heroes.

Too Good To Miss

Gay Su Pinnell and Guided Reading Lessons: Scholastic.com's teacher resource pages have a link to information on best practices, including guided reading instruction and sample lessons and books for grades K-6.

Visual Thesaurus This is the most fascinating thesaurus you'll find. It is great for students who need visual representations to learn best. One benefit that is greater than your typical thesaurus is that it also gives a definition for each word found. This helps solve the most common problem students encounter when using a thesaurus, not understanding the connotations of the synonyms provided.

An updated Kumeyaay Resource page is now available. Jenn Burg's third graders at Pomerado Elementary helped create the amazing ethnobotany cards for you to use on field trips to Mission Trails.

Remember our Poway technology help sites for elementary teachers: EdTech Central and An EdTech Sampler.

The Mystery of the Mission Museum is a virtual reality project developed by SDSU's Department of Educational Technology. There are two parts, a web page to explore and learn about the Chumash Indians and life at the Mission. A CD Rom can be ordered with actual Virtual Reality photos showing the mission and its inhabitants (actors in character for the time period.)

Future Meetings:

January 14th-Digital Storytelling
March 11th-Curriculum Writing (Webquests)

Last updated: 09/03/2008

Linda Foote
Instructional Technology Specialist
Poway Unified School District
13626 Twin Peaks Road
Poway, CA 92064

Falling Leaves effect by Dynamic Drive