Tools for Educators

One of the easiest sites to use to create small games. Such as, Free word search Maker, The Dice Maker, printable board games... and many others.
Visit Site: http://www.toolsforeducators.com/?asid=cb452af1

Engaging Classroom Games for All Grades

Here are Nine student-favorite classroom Games:

Educational BingoThere are literally countless ways to use bingo. I created an award-winning bingo game based upon the people of American History. The boards have people’s faces on them and the clues are all standards-based facts. 

Around the World
This might be my favorite time filler, quick game. Around the World works best with a set of flashcards – can be math, vocab, sight words, or spelling. 

You have all your students stand up, the first student stands next to the student behind them. You show a flashcard and whoever is the fastest to say the correct answer moves on. The idea is to be the best in the whole class.

Memory
Memory can really be looked at as a simplified version of bingo. This works great with phonics, simple math expressions, for ESL students (think images and words), spelling, and states with capitals.

I don’t think there are as many educational memory games out there as are bingo games, so it might take some time on your part to do the construction. But once you make it and laminate – BAM, you have it forever.

Hangman
Hello spelling and vocabulary. I think that aside from flashcards, Hangman might just be the easiest game to play. And it’s a fantastic time filler.

I love to use Hangman when introducing new topics that we are going to study in class, or clues as to what the assembly is going to be about. I also like Hangman as a way to get to know students, or to tell everyone book titles of upcoming stories. So easy and so fast.

Get Out of Here
‘Get Out of Here’ is a fun game I like to play right before the end of the day, right before recess, or lunch. I stand in the doorway with either a set of Trivial Pursuit questions or flashcards.

In order to get out of my classroom you need to answer 3 questions correctly. If not, you head to the back of the line and start over.

For students who answer those questions correctly, they can get out of my room earlier than others. And who doesn’t love that?

JeopardyThis is such a fun game. There are already lots of middle and high school teachers who utilize Jeopardy type games. And why not? It’s great to use as a studying tool before a big test. It also works so well for when preparing for the end of a unit, midterms, or finals.

There are plenty of free Jeopardy templates for teachers available online. This helps make prep time for this game more manageable.

Fast Facts
This game consists primarily of giving students 100 simple math problems and a limited amount of time to use them. I use this daily with my elementary students and tutoring students.

The whole idea is to get your students to understand these math problems so well that it becomes rote. For 100 problems for a 3rd grader, give them 5 minutes; a 4th grader gets four minutes; a 5th grader gets three minutes; and a 6th grader gets one minute.

This same idea can be applied to pronunciation of words. With two students, give one a timer and the other has 100 words that they have to say correctly. The same time structure applies too. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to work on a skill.

Scavenger Hunts
Scavenger hunts are a lot of fun, but they definitely take some planning to get set up. The great thing is, they can be used for nearly every subject.

I like to set up a scavenger hunt for when starting new social studies, science, or reading units. I go through the material beforehand and I create questions, fill-in-the-blank, pictures, dates, people – anything that I want my students to really know before we get into the unit. And then I put them into small groups and they have to search the textbooks, encyclopedias, online, and around the classroom for the clues.

If I’m really on my game (meaning I’ve had enough coffee) I try to get other classrooms involved and have students go to visit there for clues. It’s so much fun. I’ve tried doing scavenger hunts when doing nature units – but that does present the logistics on keeping an eye on all students, so plan accordingly if you decide to go that route.

Student-made Games
Who doesn’t like to showcase their skills, knowledge, or talents? Everyone does. Which is why it is so much fun to see your students get to shine when they create the games that are used in class.

This is something I normally don’t start to do until after the winter break; mainly because I want the chance to utilize a variety of games in my class long enough that my students really understand how to implement their own versions.

But, literally every game listed here could become a student made game. And, if you are worried about time or having it not being educational enough – make having your students make the game count as a formal assessment.

This article was written by Rosshalde Pak. She is an Education Entrepreneur based in Portland, Oregon.

From: http://www.teachhub.com/engaging-classroom-games-all-grades

Taking a Museum Field Trip -- Without Leaving the Classroom.

Worldwide Museum
of Natural History (WMNH)*

*An online museum featuring photo galleries and quality educational products for homes, schools and museums.

The worldwide museum of natural history site allows you to virtually visit the museum and discover all of the worlds amusements. From Dinosaurs to simple rocks that are one of the oldest species know to humanity. It would be great if students who don't have the ability to go to a real life museum to see the Tyrannosauruses Rex, too see it virtually in this online musemum.  

The Galleries

• The life galleries(vertebrate and invertebrate) are home to some of the most interesting fossils ever found including dinosaurs, ammonites, crinoids, mammals, early life, insects and more
• The WMNH also features galleries of existing life such as Lepidoptera (butterflies/moths) and wildflowers of the American prairie.
• The Astronomy and Geology galleries include meteorites, comets and geology.

Visit the site from here: http://www.wmnh.com/

Technology in Education.

A glance at the Future Classroom.

Parody Songs help teach History

Moses Brown School humanities teacher Anne Landis uses parody songs to help teach some of her classes. She writes the lyrics and sings them using popular songs from past decades.

Music and Melody can turn any content from a dull lesson, and turn it into a spectacular melodious Song. And we all know children this day memorize songs faster then anything else.

History Display

A display that shares vocabulary, information and questions about different periods in history.

A highlight from the page Teaching Ideas, that shows how a pile of information can be displayed on a bulletin board, allowing the students to receive all the information from somewhere outside the book.

from: http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/history/history-display

Teaching Ideas Website: Giving away classroom activities.

Teaching Ideas is a website that has interesting activities that can help any teacher in making their students experience more merrier. This site produces fun games and activities for every field, but I would like to highlight it's History Section, Where we can find activities for different age groups.

Making this site one of your routine sites to visit, would surely make your classroom a more positive place for your students to engage in different activities.

TPACK: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

The intersection between technology pedagogy and content is the Core of TPACK. 

Here is a video introducing TPACK, and explaining how it applies in a practical Sense.

Maps of War

Maps-of-War presents a special list of the best multimedia war maps from the world wide web.




Teaching History is a lot easier when it is enforced visually. Maps are the best known companion to help students understand what happened during desperate times of war. And Maps-of-War is the best multimedia resource. Teachers who want to include concrete material and make use of the technological advancement, should check this site.

Spartacus Educational Website

The Spartacus Educational website provides a series of free history encyclopaedias. Entries usually include a narrative, illustrations and primary sources. The text within each entry is linked to other relevant pages in the encyclopaedia. In this way it is possible to research individual people and events in great detail. The sources are also hyper-linked so the student is able to find out about the writer, artist, newspaper and organization that produced the material.

A survey carried out by the Fischer Family Trust showed that the Spartacus Educational website was used by more history students in the UK than any other website, including that of the BBC. The Spartacus Educational website is recommended by a number of online educational resources, such as Manchester Metropolitan University, SchoolHistory.co.uk, Science and You, and St Mary's College, Hull.

21st Century Classroom

Infographic presenting how technologically advanced classrooms improve educating and learning.

From: http://elearninginfographics.com/tag/educational-technology-classroom-infographic/

Gaming in the Classroom

Kimball Union Academy's History department's chair, Lyn Lord discusses how she involves the 21st centuries technological cashier in the classroom to explore possible critical skills, problem solving and innovation. 

Using Civilization game in classroom to teach World History.

     

 
 From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXqtXpOXKU

Creating and Using the QR-CUBE.

What is a QR-CUBE

As it is clear from its name, it is a cube containing QR codes on each side. By scanning each of the codes with a simple app that can be downloaded on a phone, we could save simple texts, pictures, videos and links to other sites.

How to use it: 

My colleague Hagop Karamian and I used the QR-cube in a lesson plan, where we decided to encode multiple choice questions in each QR. 

We wanted our students to play the game of answering these multiple choices, but without the part where they expect what the questions can be. If we had used a plain text cube, the students would have  seen the questions when it was their friends turn to roll, and he would have had an advance in thinking about the answer. But with the QR-Cube, this isn't possible, making the activity more exciting.

How to Create a QR-CUBE:

The first step is to generate a QR coed. The best site to do that is the www.qrstuff.com.

Once in the site, follow these steps:

1. Select data type, (for multiple choice questions, we chose plain text.)
2. The write the content you want to encode. You have the option to choose if you want your code to be static or dynamic, the first meaning that the QR-code you generate remains the same forever, while the latter gives you the option to change the codes content afterwards.
3. Choose a colour you want your QR-code to be.
4. The QR will generate itself on the right, all left is to download it.

Now that you have your QR, you can find a template of a cube online. Click here for a Template.

using tools such as Photoshop, put each QR in a square of the  cube, you can even use simpler tools such as Paint. And then print the template.

This should be the result till now.

All is left is to cut and complete the Cube's form.

Have Fun Using It In Your Classroom. 


Follow my Colleague Hagop Karamian through his blog ELAP (English Language Arts Pedagogy). He is knowledgeable in English studies.

What is Historical Thinking?

Historical thinking is complex and multi-faceted; we focus on five key aspects particularly relevant to the K-12 classroom. These are:

1. Multiple Accounts & Perspectives
2. Analysis of Primary Sources
3. Sourcing
4. Context
5. Claim-evidence Connection

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSJLmWnxrPg

Timeglider: A Web 2.0 Tool

Timeglider is an online tool that is very useful to both students and instructors alike. It allows research to be organized, as well as grading and presentation. It boasts easy-to-use technology that allows information to be presented in a timeline format. For education, business, or history, Timeglider makes your timelines efficient and friendly. The best part is, all of this comes for free with the basic version!

Timeglider began as the brainchild of Michael Richardson, back in 2002, and launched as a Flash-based app in 2003, so by internet standards, we're a real dinosaur. In 2010, seeing the demise of Flash on the horizon, Richardson rewrote Timeglider to be an HTML5 app, so it's written in HTML and JavaScript today. In addition to the "software-as-a-service" app, Timeglider's timeline component can be used separately as a JavaScript "widget" and integrated into other apps. Companies like Geico, Nike, NASA, FINRA, and a bunch of military branches have used the Timeglider widget in their own app contexts.

Timeglider is a very small operation, consisting of one main operator, and customer service sometimes lags according to Richardson's internet connection and trips away from his computer in Boise.

How to use timeglider:

Visit this URL; http://timeglider.com/ to start working on it.

Create a free student account.

Step One: Sign up or log in to TimeGlider.
Step Two: Fill out the information to become a TimeGlider member and use the software.
Step Three: Click on new timeline to create one and fill out the information for it.
Step Four: Design your timeline by adding events, creating other timelines, or importing other timelines.
Step Five: Create events by filling out the information, adding images, and adding links.
Step Six: This is where you can insert images to correspond with your events using several different methods.
Step Seven: Make the length of your event more than just one day or one time if you choose to.

How to use timeglider in Classroom:

Timeglider is perfect for showing your students examples of time events in History...
Use in education
Timeglider is ideal for demonstrating the chronological order of an event in time
Catering for diversity
Timeglider can aid a teacher in catering for different abilities in the classroom...

When you sign up for timeglider
as a student you can create
three free timelines.

The public cannot simply browse to a "published" timeline: Having a highly  unique URL, your timeline can be shared with only the people you want to. It will benefit all learners in your classroom. The visual aids, the verbal explanation and the physical mapping will help all students to gain insight into a topic. Timeglider can be used in conjunction with many strategies used in the classroom such as group work, presentations or simply teacher talk. It can be used for a range of subjects: History, Geography, English, French, Science, CSPE, Home-economics are just a few examples. It can also help in catering for diversity in your classroom. As part of their homework or project work students can create timelines at home. You can share your timeline with family or friends or even with fellow students for a collaborative project. You can alter a timeline in relation to the lesson's learning outcomes....

Students can chose how important they think an event is - the more important the event, the bigger it appears. They can also add images that will help them in remembering the content.

Reading Primary Sources

Analysing primary sources is important to achieve accuracy, To make sure our students start to think like historians, and act like ones, we have to make sure that they can think like one.

Bayard Faithfull has done a great job in specifying the steps that students should follow to become readers like historians. And he has done even more, he has prepared the lesson itself to teach the students through a teacher-led process that depends on transparency and discussion,

Four Reads: Learning to Read Primary Documents

"When historians read primary documents, they read at many different levels. They simultaneously pay attention to argument, purpose, context, content and credibility. Too often students will read a primary document as if it is a textbook. Students need to learn that reading a primary document is a different reading process and involves understanding the main point, but also contextualizing and asking skeptical questions about that point. Breaking the “reading” process into different steps helps students learn this."

-Bayard Faithfull

Teacher preparation:

Choose a primary document that relates to the content you are teaching.
Read the primary document like a historian yourself. Make note of contextual clues (author, date, place, audience) and how those impact your understanding of the document. Underline the author’s main argument and supporting evidence.
Note characteristics of the document that will make it difficult for students to understand—for example, difficult vocabulary, obscure references, or confusing syntax. Consider using a vocabulary box at the bottom of the document or cutting sections of the document.

In the Classroom:

Give a copy of the primary document to each student. Explain that the class will learn how to read primary document like a historian.

1. First Reading: Reading for Origins and Context
   In this reading, ask students only to read the top of the document (where usually title, author, place, and date are provided) and the bottom of the document (where there may be additional information, in bibliographic notes, about the title, author, place, and date). For this read, students are not reading the main text of the document. The point here is to note and make some sense of the information about the document’s origins.
2. Second Reading: Reading for Meaning
   In this reading, ask students to read the body of the text. They should read though the text to understand the author’s main idea and to get a sense of the document as whole. Ask students to underline only the sentence or phrase that best captures the author’s main idea. In this reading, students should skip over difficult vocabulary or sections. Too often students get stuck on a difficult or confusing section and stop reading or miss the big idea. The point here is to get the big idea of the document in order to make sense of more difficult or subtle parts later on.
3. Third Reading: Reading for Argument
   In this third reading, ask students to read through the body of the text again. This time students are reading to examine how the argument is constructed. What assertions, evidence, or examples are used to support or give credibility to the author’s argument?
4. Fourth Reading: Reading like a Historian
   In this reading, ask students to go into the text one last time. This time students are bringing the earlier three readings together into a more complex final reading. Ask students to use the sourcing material (from their first read) to interrogate the argument and evidence (from the second and third reads). Students should write in the margins as they read to answer key questions. Given the author of the document, what bias or perspective might be expressed? How does that shape our understanding of the argument? Given the date of the document, what is the document responding to or in dialogue with? Given the place and audience of the document, how is the argument shaped to be effective?

Conclusion

Explain to students that they have now “read” a primary document like a historian. When historians read a primary document, they are constantly thinking about how their understanding of the argument or content is deepened by the sourcing information and historical context

Bayard Faithfull

Bayard Faithfull has taught history for 20 years in New York City at the Beacon School, an inquiry-based public high school. His website is http://www.beaconschool.org/~bfaithfu.

From: http://teachinghistory.org/teaching-materials/teaching-guides/25690