Posts filed under 'Online Tools'
21st Century Geography Lessons
Learning Geography is so much fun with Google Earth — it’s almost like playing a video game. We found some really fun Google-Earth Geography lessons posted around the web and though we would share our favorites with everyone. Some are more advanced than others, but modify any of the lessons to meet your needs. Google Earth has some great tutorials, too, if you are new to the application. By the way, you must install a program on your computer to run Google Earth, and you can download it free at the Google Earth website.
Here are some really cool Google Earth lessons
- Ask a Teacher – Beginner level lesson
- Google Earth Lessons – All kinds of tips and tricks here
- Google for Educators – From Google itself
- Plaidcircuitry – Lessons to help familiarize students with Google Earth
- Juicy Geography – Cool ideas
1 comment Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Free Online Educational Video and Lesson Website Round-Up
DeWayne from Austin is looking for some ideas on free, online educational video and lesson websites. I have posted about some really good ones over the past few years and am sharing some of my past posts here. Please add your favorite resources via a comment. I can’t possibly know them all!
- Academic Earth
- TED.com
- The British Library
- Books, Etc.
- YouTube EDU & MITOpenCourseWare
- ZuiTube
- Connexions
- Wolfram|Alpha
- HippoCampus
- PBS.ORG – Nova
- ZuiTube
- MAKE: Science Room
- SciToys.com
- Collection of things I posted recently
- University of Utah Genetics
- Math Night
- Free Language Arts Lesson – Treasure Island
1 comment Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Make: Science Room – A Homeschool Science Fan’s Wish Come True
Homeschoolers that are interested in science, particularly chemistry, will love the Make: Science Room website. The Make: Science Room website provides free chemistry lab experiments, offers advice on setting up a home lab, provides tips for maintaining a lab notebook properly, and offers professional quality glassware kits so that kids can learn to use real labware instead of the plastic junk sold in department store ‘chemistry experiment sets’. Of course, kids should have adult supervision when working with chemicals, glass and fire. However, learning about labware and its proper use brings homeschoolers even closer to the real chemistry lab experience.
1 comment Monday, December 14, 2009
University of Utah Hosts Cool Genetics Learning Website
Thanks to the Homeschool Math Blog for finding this cool genetics website. We checked it out and highly recommend it. The site is really interactive, beautifully designed, and easy to read and navigate. The short animations provide a nice, basic overview so that younger learners aren’t overwhelmed. I bet even older kids will enjoy the site, especially if it is their first introduction to genetics. Check it out!
Add comment Saturday, October 31, 2009
Get Ready for Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day Oct.21
Wolfram|Alpha, the online worldwide computation engine is hosting Homework Day on October 21, 2009. There promises to be a lesson plan showcase for all levels (K-12 and beyond), a chance to interact with the Wolfram|Alpha experts, and an amazing line up of thought leaders. The event kicks off online at noon and doesn’t end until 2:00 am, so be sure to check homeworkday.wolframalpha.com sometime on Oct. 21!
Add comment Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Recession-Minded Homeschooling: Low-Cost Online College Courses
Is your homeschooler ready for college but not ready to go into debt for basic undergraduate college courses? With technology innovations converging rapidly (e-books, e-readers, ubiquitous high speed internet, video education websites, etc.), its time for a new business model for online education. As homeschoolers, we are already familiar with alternative learning strategies, and StraigherLine course delivery offers some very impressive benefits over traditional colleges. The two differentiators are price and convenience. At $399 per course or $99 per month, students can take ‘cut and dried’ courses like College Algebra, Economics and Accounting completely online and take up to six months to complete course work. Online tutoring is packaged with each course and provides (in some cases) 24/7 access to live tutoring sessions. The best thing about this option is that a few colleges are already accepting StraighterLine courses as transfer credits, making StraighterLine a viable alternative to expensive traditional college tuition fees for run of the mill foundation courses. Although there have been questions on course quality and professor qualifications, many traditional U.S. college undergraduate courses are taught in auditoriums containing hundreds of students and the ‘professor’ is often a teaching assistant. Hopefully, StraighterLine and U.S colleges will continue to create partnerships that add value to each other, so that students get affordable, convenient, and quality education.
Read more about StraighterLine in Washington Monthly
Add comment Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Innovation: ZuiTube – YouTube for Kids!
We recently discovered ZuiTube, an innovative website that simply houses a subset of parent-approved YouTube videos appropriate for children. While not all of the content is educational, none of it is inappropriate, either. Furthermore, it has kid-friendly navigation and fun colors. Although not affiliated with YouTube, content is organized by channels just like on YouTube. Of course, the channels are kid-centric with fun topics like Halloween, Transformers and Funniest Videos. There are also educational topics like National Geographic, History, and Earth. ZuiTube even has the Little Genius category for preschoolers. ZuiTube has tons of other categories, too, so it might be easier to find something specific by using the handy search. Yet another winning feature is the lack of display ads – ZuiTube displays no ads on the site. Download the FireFox extension that turns FireFox into a ZuiTube browser, complete with ZuiKid avatar customization. Many of the customizations within the browser require a paid subscription, but we found the free offerings adequate. Give ZuiTube a try and let us know what you think! We think it’s a winner!
Add comment Thursday, September 24, 2009
Twitter Tool is Useful for Finding Education News, Tools, Ideas, etc.
Social network sites can be real time-wasters if you aren’t careful. It’s easy to write and read drivel about what someone had for breakfast, but it is pointless. Don’t discount these tools, though. Used carefully, these very time-wasters can become powerful information-gathering dynamos. Here is a quick example. A third party Twitter application called TweepML allows you to ‘follow’ specific users or types of users on Twitter. I put together a hand-picked TweepML group consisting of engaging education, technology and homeschool-related twitterers. As a result, I can easily share quality content just about education. It is one of the very best ways to get lots of ideas, tips, information, etc. quickly!
Here is my Education, Technology and Homeschooling TweepML List: http://tweepml.org/Cool-Education-Tweets/
1 comment Thursday, September 17, 2009
Five TED Videos Homeschoolers Will Enjoy
TED is an inspirational movement of great thinkers from around the globe who gather to share unique insights and ideas about humanity. There are TED videos on all sorts of topics, and there are many creative ways to weave them into your lessons. Use these videos to ‘kick-off’ unit studies, to inspire creativity with a writing assignment, or as a start to a deep philosophical conversation! There are thousands of TED videos to choose from, but I have selected a few of our favorites to get you started, so go ahead and share some of these TED videos with your homeschoolers!
Willard Wigan – Micro Sculpture
Willard’s personal journey that led to his ingenious sculptures inspires adult and child alike. View his TED video
Amazing detail in tiny art
Brian Greene’s Super String Theory
Physicist Brian Greene uses amazing visualizations to explain a complex concept View his TED video
Super String Theory
Sirena Hwang’s Inspired Violin Performance
Sirena’s passion for playing the violin contributes to her mastery of the instrument. View her TED video
Sirena Hwang, Young Violin Virtuoso Inspires
The Sixth Sense
Patty Maes demos Pranav Mistry’s amazing ’sixth sense’ device that rethinks how we interact with technology View the TED video
Patty Maes presents new ways of intereacting with information
Siegfried Woldhek: Looking at the Face of Leonardo da Vinci
Interesting insight into discovering Leonardo da Vinci’s face. View the TED video
An artist uses detective work to uncover Leonardo's face in his own artwork
2 comments Thursday, September 3, 2009
Beautiful Statistics – Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org
Sometimes children assume that the way things are in the world today are the way things have always been and the way things will always be. Gapminder empowers the user to visually manipulate graphs to focus on elements of interest, but definitely shows that things don’t always stay the same in the world, even within relatively short periods of time! When it comes to studying about world health, population, education and wealth, Gapminder.org offers a wonderfully interactive, dynamic graphing experience that is visually beautiful and insightful.
Hans Rosling offers inspiring videos full of fresh perspectives and provides free downloads of some of the graphs for use in presentations. Use these graphs to get students interested in learning more about a topic or use them to introduce an idea. If you have compelling data to share, consider exploring Google’s Motion Chart gadget!
Add comment Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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