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.

Doodle 4 Google

While most people visit Google to search for information, some people visit just to see the Google Doodle of the day (simply go to www.google.com to see today's doodle).  Here is a list of the 2012 Google Doodles.  (One of my alltime favorites is this one - make sure to hit play and have the sound up).  What is your favorite Doodle?  Please let us know in the comment area.

Anyway, Google has announced their 6th Annual U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition, inviting K-12 students around the country to create their own doodles.  This years theme is 'My Best Day Ever ... ".  The winning student will see their work on the Google Homepage for a day, win a $30,000 college scholarship and win a $50,000 technology grant for Medfield (I mean, for the winning school).  More information can be found at the Google Blog and at the Doodle4Google page.  Also check out the video below:

How to use in Education

Please share this information with your students and their parents in case they are interested in submitting their Doodle4Google.  The deadline is March 22nd.

Quick way to share bunches of links with students

Like me, I bet you find it annoying when teaching and you ask your students to go to one website, and then to another and then another.  Inherently there are issues with typos and backslashes, etc.  How about if you have a teacher website or blog post and you have to list 5 links for people to visit?  This takes up a lot of real estate and usually people get tired of clicking on all your links.  

Well, there is a solution to both these problems as there is a new service out there that allows you to bundle links together.

Bundlenut is a simple service for organizing links and sharing them with others.  Here is the bundled link I created for Medfield Technology Support.  Creating your own bundle is simple and takes seconds.

How to use in Education:

• Anytime you have the laptop cart and are going to send students to multiple websites during a class, it would make sense to bundle your links.  
• If you were having students do a research paper and you want to allow them to only use specific resources, you could provide that list to them in a bundle.  
• Students could use this to create a works cited page (with all their research links) and could provide that to you with one url, rather than a laundry list of urls.  
• If you ever present at a conference, you could post all the links you talk about in one bundle and then participants would only need to know the one bundled link.

Make sure to let me know how you end up using this in your class!