Saturday, October 29, 2005

Interactive Whiteboards

With more classrooms getting LCD projectors and interactive whiteboards, I decided to look around and add some links to some successful practices for using them in the classroom.

My district podcast last week was with a teacher who is just beginning to use this type of set-up in her "21st century classroom" and I will be following up with her later in the year to find out what things she has discovered.
http://nausetschools.org/podcasts/nausettechnews3.mp3

Here are some links to interactive whiteboard ideas, lessons, tips, and tricks.

SMART Board Lesson Ideas
http://www.wacona.com/smartboard/smartboard.html

SMART Board Resources
http://www.center.k12.mo.us/edtech/SB/SB.html

SMART Board Ideas
http://www.d131.kane.k12.il.us/Bardwell/smartboard.html

Interactive Web Sites to use with an interactive white board
http://www.center.k12.mo.us/edtech/resources/SBsites.htm

Art Lesson Plans for an Interactive Whiteboard
http://www.virtualartroom.com/IWBlessons.htm

Speaking of Electronic Whiteboards
http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/tech/tech206.shtml

Primary Resources for Interactive Whiteboards
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/interactive.aspx

SMART Lesson Ideas
http://education.smarttech.com/ste/en-US/Ed+Resource/Lesson+Activities/default.htm

ICT Advice: How to Use Your Interactive Whiteboard Effectively
http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?section=tl&rid=4938&wn=1

If you have experience with the SMART or Promethean whiteboards at any level, please share with the rest of us!

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Three Cool Online Tools

Sometimes, when you are creating Web pages, it is hard to figure out the palette to use to make it easy on the eyes and colorful. These two tools can help you make decisions, and give you the information to input the correct color into your HTML code, too!

Color Schemer Online
http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Color Scheme Generator
http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

In addition, simply upload a picture and then enter its URL on this page, and you are presented with a palette of colors to use that enhance the picture's colors!

Color Palette Generator
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

Saturday, October 08, 2005

My First Podcast!

I decided to take the plunge and create and syndicate a podcast. Making the podcast, convincing teachers to be interviewed, and mounting the MP3 file up on the server were easy.

I then created a Blogger page to house the podcasts, and used Feedburner to syndicate the podcast using an RSS 2.0 feed. (There are directions on Feedburner to follow to complete this part, if you are interested in making your own podcast.)

I then submitted the podcast to the iTunes music store, and it is now listed under Podcasts-Education-K12 (or search for Nauset). If you have another aggregator, such as iPodder, you can subscribe, too.

The Feedburner feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nausetpodcasts
This can be typed into your aggregator or even used in this new tool I discovered, NetVibes.

The blog is here if you simply want to listen to the MP3: http://nausetschools.org/podcasts.htm


Let me know what you think!

______________________________________________________

Two blogs in which I have appeared as a guest:
Snacks 4 the Brain
Paradigm Shift

Monday, October 03, 2005

Podcast Directory K-12

I WAS mulling over the idea of creating a PreK-12 podcast directory which would provide links to the informational pages offered by K-12 schools dealing with their podcasts and how to listen to them, or links to the podcasts themselves. I feel this is going to be an important and well-used technology in the schools. However, after a little research, I see that David Warlick has already created a well-done structure here (www.epnweg.org) and I encourage you to take a listen and see what schools are doing in this area!

I hope this entices more educators to create podcasts to share with the rest of us in the areas of professional development, curriculum issues, etc. Archived football games and student concerts are enjoyable (and important!) for your school community, but, as educators, we hold many conversations and meetings on topics of interest to all of us. I hope this leads to some of us creating recordings of sessions we give and posting a link to them on David's site, so we can learn from one another. (Perhaps using the word "educasting" might work!) Thoughts?

Kathy