Digital Citizenship and 'Choose Your Own Adventure'

With YouTube's video annotation options, you can create 'Choose Your Own Adventure' type videos.  In the video below, a girl receives a text message from her boyfriend asking for pictures. The viewer then has to decide whether to  "send it" or not send it. The choice that the viewer makes takes him or her to a video that explains the "results" of the choice.


(from my limited testing, the selection of the options 'Yes' or 'No' does not seem to work on a mobile device)

How to use in Education

• Having your age-appropriate students or children watch this video is an excellent way to remind them about making good choices about what they do with images.  This would be a great video to embed into any digital citizenship curriculum.
• Using YouTube Video Annotations, you or your students can easily create a 'choose your own adventure' type series for use in your classroom.  

The Voice of the Active Learner

Are we doing all we can to support the Active Learners and Digital Natives in Medfield?

Check out this 2 minute video below:

Free E-DaVinci Code

Doubleday announced Monday that a free e-book edition of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel ‘‘The DaVinci Code" will be available at online retailers through March 24.  You can also access the e-book from the Dan Brown Website.

If you ask me, it seems like Angels and Demons would be the better choice with all the recent news about the selection of the new Pope.  Anyway, if you have not read 'The DaVinci Code", go get it for your e-reader.

Free Travel for Teachers

Hilton Worldwide has launched the Teacher Treks Travel Grant Competition which will fund 15 teachers to travel and experience firsthand what they teach (seems ideal to me for World Languages, Social Studies and English).

Winners will get a trip valued at $6,000 to go where they want and their schools will get a $2,500 grant for their school.  A few more details:

• Deadline to apply is March 15th
• Applicants must send in a photo, 2 essays detailing their global adventure plan and how they'll share it with students and colleagues, a 140 character entry summary, and a letter of recommendation from their principal
• Winners will be picked by a panel and public voting

 Teachers can enter the competition by visiting www.hhonors.com/teachertreks or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hiltonhhonors

enter by visiting www.hhonors.com/teachertreks or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hiltonhhonors, - See more at: http://www.boston.com/travel/blog/2013/02/free_travel_for.html#sthash.duOEFVpp.dpuf

enter by visiting www.hhonors.com/teachertreks or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hiltonhhonors, - See more at: http://www.boston.com/travel/blog/2013/02/free_travel_for.html#sthash.duOEFVpp.dpuf

enter by visiting www.hhonors.com/teachertreks or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hiltonhhonors, - See more at: http://www.boston.com/travel/blog/2013/02/free_travel_for.html#sthash.duOEFVpp.dpuf

Teacher Treks Travel Grant Competition

Teacher Treks Travel Grant Competition

Teacher Treks Travel Grant Competition

Problem-Attic - More than 80,000 questions available

You may remember that I introduced Problem-Attic at a faculty meeting earlier in October and also wrote a blog post about it.  Well, great news!  This past weekend Problem-Attic added more questions to their database.  Now it includes about 80,000 questions, grouped as follows:

•  22,000 released test questions from state assessments and curriculum documents. These cover Math, Science and Social Studies for grades 3–12.
• 3,200 questions from released NAEP/TIMSS tests.  These are for grades 3–12, mostly math and science and some ELA.
•  9,000 high school math contest questions.  These come from two prominent North Carolina state competitions.
• 45,000 NY Regents questions covering 11 core subjects.   These are mostly for grades 9–12, though middle school teachers will find many uses for them.

By late April, Problem-Attic expects to have questions from at least 25 states.

How to Use in Education:

I found it really easy to create worksheets based on the bank of questions in Problem-Attic.  This is a great tool to create review questions, challenge questions, or to differentiate instruction in your class.

Google Science Fair 2103

The Google Science Fair is an online science competition open to students age 13 - 18 from around the globe.  Google is looking for ideas that will change the world.  For more information, watch the video below and go to Google Science Fair 2013.

Hockey in the Classroom

While watching the Bruins game the other night (what work stoppage?) the ticker on the bottom of the screen mentioned hockey lesson plans created by the Bruins for use in the K-8 classroom.  All the lessons are aligned to the Common Core and the few I looked at seemed to be quite complete and engaging (and more importantly had to do with hockey).  The following subjects have lessons available - ELA, Math, Science, PhysEd, and French.

 

To check out the lesson plans, you just need to sign up at the ICE School page.  Let me know what you think by posting a comment below.

How to use in Education:

Clearly students are more engaged when they are learning about a topic they can relate to; since the Patriots collapsed in the playoffs again, its time to focus on hockey and this seems like the perfect opportunity.