Thing #19

You have to love Google Earth. I enjoy site seeing and virtual travel with this program. What is really fun is to have your students find specific places and it helps them to better understand locations, how to get there and distances. You can have them plan their dream vacations, find historic sites, and visit places where discoveries happened. This program really gets the students engaged in an activity.

Thing #18

Slideshare provides a huge selection of different presentations you can use in the classroom or have your students watch independently. Some really neat stuff out there. Nanotechnology is one of my favorite science topics. This slideshare presentation has real nice pictures and explanations of nanotechnology.

Nano-Science

View more presentations from Walkiria Eyre.

Thing #17

Podcasts, I have been downloading podcasts to my Ipod for awhile now. I really like being able to find topics that I enjoy to listen to. It is not always easy to find things that I think my students would be interested in, but there are some out there. What I really like is that when you add them to you wiki or blog the students can listen to them as many times as they would like. I often will put a worksheet out there for them to complete while listening to the podcast.

Here is one I really like:

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml

I was unsuccessful at RSS previously so I may need to review and come back to this later to properly put the feed into my blog.

Thing #16

Youtube is one of those sites I think that everyone has been to at least once. You can find some really neat videos on Youtube, but you also need to be very careful. Not all videos or video titles are rated "G" or "PG". I would be concerned about content for younger students (and even some older students).

I did find a video that is really a good example of the neat things you can do with science. I like to use it to get kids excited about science.

Thing #15

Flip cameras and videos. This is a lot of fun and would be super engaging for students. Because of the boundaries you can set around producing a video it is a great way to have kids think about what message they want to convey, how to determine what is important to include and pre-plan the project using story boards. So many high quality skills can be taught and used when using this technology.

Challenges I had were determining how to deliver a message in a set amount of time without including too much or too little. Check out the Elephant Tooth Paste video.