April 21

Going paperless

As students were printing articles this morning, in a not-so-printer-friendly fashion, I asked them whether it couldn’t be done digitally. One student said they needed a hard copy because they needed to annotate the article before turning it in. In my curiosity, I wondered how they might do that digitally.

Here’s one possible way (would someone be willing to try it out with a student?):

  • Have students open the OneNote App on their laptop
  • They may need to log in; use their login for Office 365 (s____@stu.fwisd.org)
  • Find their article online
  • Highlight the text of the article
  • Copy
  • Paste into a OneNote Notebook
  • Copy and paste the URL, as well.
  • Within OneNote, you can edit the text pretty much as you would in Word. You could establish norms for annotating, such as using particular highlight colors, what to underline, etc.
  • If they have already logged into the Outlook app at some point, they can then email their annotated article to you from within OneNote; you’ll receive the full text of the article with all their annotations. If it tries to open the regular Mail app, that won’t work.  They’ll need to set up their Outlook app.

If you try it out, let me know what you run into and I can update these instructions.

October 21

Article: Do Your Students Know How To Search?

Do Your Students Know How To Search?

From the article:

There is a new digital divide on the horizon. It is not based around who has devices and who does not, but instead the new digital divide will be based around students who know how to effectively find and curate information and those who do not.  Helene Blowers has come up with seven ideas about the new digital divide – four of them, the ones I felt related to searching, are listed below.

The New Digital Divide:

January 18

Sting 21: trying new resources- easier than that exercising resoution!

A New Year, New Resources!

from Free Technology for Teachers:
11 Social Studies resources to try in 2011
11 Language Arts resources to try in 2011
11 Science resources to try in 2011

11 Mathematics resources to try in 2011
11 Health & Phys Ed resources to try in 2011
Architect Studio 3D

Webcams.travel webcams from around the world- make foreign locations real to students by letting them see real-time video.

Top 25 financial infographics from Mint.com

America asks what’s next in 2011– “a six minute video that looks back over the history of the United States, the current challenges facing the US, and then has some experts make predictions about the future of the United States.” (pause it, let it buffer, then play it)

ShopWell – personalized nutritional shopping information based on you.

Mapping America! census data in an interactive map

History for Music Lovers– a youtube group, song parody/remix on historical topics

Using Super Bowl Ads in the Classroom

SnagLearning educational videos and films

FreeOCR– web-based scan-to-text converter (convert your pdfs to editable text) that’s a bit rough, but perhaps useable.

Green Home Guide from the U.S. Green Building Council

MixBook– create photo books, cards, calendars online. Mixbooks also allows group collaboration; students could create a photo book together on a particular topic.  Great alternative product.

Council on Foreign Relations- interactive guides to contemporary issues

50+ sites with free stock photography

Book Trailers for All  Book trailers are a great way to get students interested in a book.  They’re also a great option for student products and could be applied to a variety of content areas and topics.

December 1

Sting 20 “Let’s Get Digital, Dig- it- al”

Digital Magazines

Many magazines are creating digital editions, exact copies of the print magazine that you can view online using a one of several different viewers/players, such as  Zinio (you can get a free trial subscription there).

Digital magazines are a great resource in conjunction with the interactive whiteboards.  See if there’s one that might provide supplementary material for your content.

Sign up for 1 free digital subscription at http://goreadgreen.com/ If you’re savvy, you can figure out a way to sign up for more than one subscription.

yudu– Read digital magazines for free AND create your own.  Decatur High School in Georgia has created one titled “Carpe Diem”.  Categories range from Animals & Pets to Film & Animation to Travel & Events.

coverleaf – Looks like you can preview digital editions of magazines and subscribe to them.  There are some free magazines in there, and subscribers to the print editions seem to be able to subscribe to the digital for free. (Maybe here’s where the promethean board comes in if theres a curriculum-related magazine you use)

Here are some magazines with digital editions available for free to read online:

hospitality design

hospitality upgrade

Architect

landscape architecture digital preview of the April 2010 edition; digital subscription available)

arts and architecture not a digital edition, but I thought it worthwhile- you can view pages (in pdf) of issues from January 1945- to 1969.  The covers are totally mod cool! You can buy a tshirt with selected cover designs.

conduit not really a ”digital magazine’ but kinda cool. Let me know when you figure out what it is.

wend outdoorsy stuff.

popsci Popsci makes its archives searchable via Google Books.

Which leads us to Google Books, offering some magazines in their entirety.  I’m not sure what exactly you call this format that google is using; it is “digital” in a sense, but they’re also scanned in, not produced to be digital(?)
Go to http://books.google.com/. To search only magazines with full view, click on advanced search. In advanced search, click on Full view only and Magazines (highlighted below) and put in your search terms. For a short intro from Google, click here.

google books search box

google book advanced search

Have an online or digital magazine you like? Add it to the comments!

If you’re wondering, the title of this post is a shout-out to all you Olivia Newton-John fans 🙂

May 13

New Google Features

Google has added some new features that will help you refine your results page:

Options
Here I did a search for coffee.  Above the results list you’ll see “Show Options”

Related Searches
In the options list, Related Searches provides optional search terms

Wonder Wheel
Wonder Wheel provides a visual of related or alternate searches

Clicking on a term expands on that term, narrowing your search as you go

Timeline
Timeline takes your results and places them in chronological order, either by the date the information refers to or the date of the information’s publication. (at least that’s how I’m seeing it)

You can click along the visual timeline to look at results from that time frame

Or, click on “Search other dates” to specify a time frame


January 26

Weekly Sting #4

Fort Worth Star Telegram
We do not receive the newspaper in the library. I have,however, subscribed to the electronic version via the N.I.E. program (they no longer send hard copies through the NIE program). You, too, can register and have access to the electronic version. It is a duplicate of the print version and you can print individual articles from the paper. Go to http://nie.star-telegram.com
For a copy of Reviewing Inaugural History go to http://nie.star-telegram.com/UserFiles/File/Inaugural_History.pdf

Smithsonian Free Online Conference on Abraham Lincoln
http://smithsonianeducation.org/educators/professional_development/conference/2009/lincoln/index.html
I have more info my office if you’d like to see it.

Discovery Education
http://discoveryeducation.com/
Discovery Education has some free resources students can access at home, primarily videos and web resources. There’s Homework Help pages for the 4 main content areas. The World Languages Homework Help page includes links to sites for Latin and Spanish resources. Puzzlemaker lets you “Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more using your own word lists.”

Nature comic book
You can request up to 200 copies of the current Nature comic for free. See http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/comics.html where you can also download it.

Danteworlds
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/
Explore the worlds Dante created

7 Habits of Highly Effective People- Free audiobook download
http://www.audible.com/adbl/entry/offers/productPromo2.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1242957466.1232733612@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccgadegfijdjjecefecekjdffidfmf.0&productID=FR_COVE_000032