Poll Students With Cell Phones or Twitter - Results in Your PowerPoint!

Poll Everywhere

That’s right!  With Poll Everywhere, you can now collect data from students such as poll questions, test review questions, etc.  Students can submit responses as text messages or through Twitter and the live results appear in your PowerPoint!  Poll Everywhere provides free accounts for K-12 Teachers that can track up to 32 poll responses.

Check it out at http://www.polleverywhere.com/twitter-powerpoint-slides.

If you decide to use this in  your classroom, let me know!  I want to see it in action.

-Lucas

A Little Inspiration at the Close of the Year…

40 Inspirational Speeches in Two Minutes…

-Lucas

What’s Next: Google Wave

This news has bombarded the Twitter stream today in Education/Technology. Google unveiled Google Wave and this could potentially change everything we know about Email, Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, or any online collaboration. It’s a fairly lengthy demo, but a fascinating tool:

-Lucas

Another Example of How Mobile Technology Will Change the Classroom

I came across this video clip this morning over breakfast. This is just another example of how mobile technology (especially phones like the Google Android-based phones and the Apple iPhone) will one day change the classroom. Imagine taking your science classes out for a night of star gazing with one of these:

Exciting, huh?

-Lucas

Education Videos Available Online!

In case you weren’t aware, NCLive.org has a sizeable collection of PBS videos available for online streaming from their website.  You can sort the videos by content area or by series.  This is a good alternative to United Streaming if you can’t find what you’re looking for there.  These should now be accessible from any school in the district.  To see what they have, visit:  http://media.nclive.org/.

Happy viewing!

-Lucas

Another Grant Opportunity!

Teachers!

Finances are tight, but so many of you are doing amazing things with your students and have some great projects and ideas!  Well, here’s another simple opportunity for you to get funding for a special project with your students.  ING is offering money to teachers for education projects through their Unsung Heroes program.   Over $3 million dollars will be awarded. They will be giving away 100 $2000 awards, with at least one $2000 award per state.  In addition the top three projects will be awarded larger sums of money with a top award of $25,000.  The application process is pretty straightforward and can the form can be downloaded at:  http://www.ing-usa.com/us/stellent2/groups/dc/documents/companylobinformation/001143.pdf.

A couple of hours of your time could net you a substantial sum of money for your school project!

-Lucas

Pender County Students Participating in Video Game Study

Back in the Fall or 2008, three classes of students at Cape Fear Middle School participated in a course called Virtual Math.  In this course, we used an immersive, 3-D video game,  Tabula Digita’s Dimension-M, to see if it enhanced students’ learning of pre-Algebra concepts.  The course was a great success.  We have since expanded the course to West Pender Middle and Topsail High.

Starting in January, UNCW has launched a study at both West Pender Middle and Cape Fear Middle to take a closer, more scientific look at the impact this game is having on students’ performance in mathematics.

This story has now been picked up, not only by our local Fox/NBC affiliate (which has a great video of the students), but has now been reported by a number of online websites as well:

• Researchers Study Effects of Educational Games on Math Achievement (THE Journal)
• The Serious Games Source has an article.
• Game Career Guide is reporting it.
• And, of course, UNCW has a press release.

Look for more news in the future as the results are published!

-Lucas

US Cellular is giving $1 Million for teachers to DonorsChoose

US Cellular is giving away $1 million to teachers through DonorsChoose.
Please make sure you list resources you need for your classroom at
DonorsChoose (http://www.donorschoose.org).

http://www.uscellular.com/callingallteachers

-Landon Scism

Goomoodleikiog? What? Harnessing the Collaborative Web for Instruction.

Want to transform classroom instruction with the free tools that are available online? You can. Enter Goomoodleikiog, a word created by Leigh Murray and Heidi Beezley to encompass many of the collaborative tools that teachers can use with students. Their website has their presentation and several examples.  And, they’ve created a great video, in the tradition of CommonCraft, that explains the idea:

So, are your students using Goomoodleikiog?

-Lucas

Free One-Week Course for Teachers at Duke for Virtual Worlds Programming in Alice

This just came across my “desk.”  Sounds like a great opportunity!

Free one-week Adventures in Alice Programming workshops for K-12
teachers
at Duke University in June. You will receive 30 credit hours for
attending.

Alice is a 3D virtual worlds environment in which one can program an
animation on almost any topic. Middle school and High School teachers
of all disciplines (language arts, history, math, science, art,
technology)
came to Duke last summer to learn how they and their students can use
Alice
to create interactive animations for projects.

This summer we are running free one-week workshops to teach teachers how
they and their students can use Alice. Alice is a 3D virtual worlds
environment with a huge library of 3D objects that already exist. One
selects which objects they want, places them in the virtual world and
then
programs the objects to move around and communicate.

For example, a science teacher created an animation of how a hot spot
volcano is formed by having a mad scientist go underground and talk
about
how the volcano is formed and pushes up through the earth, while you
watch
the volcano being formed and pushing up. A math teacher created an
animation of a coordinate plane with objects that randomly move around.
Students then click on the object and are prompted to enter in the x-y
coordinates of the object. In history, students can animate a story
about
culture, for example a story about Egypt with objects such as a pyramid,
mummy, and Pharaoh. In language arts, students can animate a story they
have read or they wrote.

You can only attend one of the two weeks:

June 22 - June 26 (9am-4pm)
OR
June 28 (1-6pm), June 29-July 2 (9am-4pm)

I am holding spots for NC teachers. I already have a wait list for
teachers outside NC for the first week.

For more information and to register (register soon):

http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice/aliceInSchools/workshop09/

There may be some funding for lodging for NC teachers, but this is not
guaranteed.

Questions to:

Prof. Susan Rodger
rodger@cs.duke.edu
919-660-6595

If you decide to apply, let me know!

-Lucas