Meeting A Teacher.

All throughout your life someone is asking you what do you want to do once you grow up. Well.. Once you grow up and you decide what you want to be and start to go to school for it. Its a totally different story. College is supposed to be the best part of a person's life but after your first years are over and you start to get to the end and you realize that soon your going to be doing your dream job. Hopefully, You will get a chance to walk in someone shoes of your dream for a day or more. Like becoming a teacher, you get to do student teaching. BUT whats even better then that. Getting to sit down and talk to a teacher. Even better a new teacher that has not been working that long. There you will get the Push you need to finish. 

So if you get the chance to talk to a teacher.. or the person that does your "dream job" for a living. Do not pass that up. It just may be that push that you need.

Discovery Education VIdeo Streaming

Discovery Education has a website just for Video Streaming. It has over thousands and thousands of videos on it that Teachers can use for their lessons. One of the good things about its Video Streaming is that you do not have to watch the whole video to make your point, You can show however much of the video you wish to show. You can also save the videos to your account so that you can use them for later lesson plans or whatever you need it for. Plus the way you search for the videos is also really neat because you can pick from a subject and/or grade. Another great way to search is by going to your state, subject and grade level, That way your videos meet your SOL standards.
The One thing that the website has that is really cool was the Interactive Atlas. Which gives you unique video guide to our world. It shows the wonders of countries from all around the world. You can Zoom in to each country and learn about its culture, government, history and the natural world.
This is a great website for just about any teacher out there.

check it out for you self
Video Streaming

Smart Board part Two

Just a reminder about what Smart Board is an interaction white board, Your trigger is your mouse. Whatever you see on the computer is on the board. There are many different products that are a lot like Smart Board but Smart Board is the product that we are talking about.

On the last post, we learned that Smart Board has projects that you can just fill in the blanks and go but once you play around with Smart Board for awhile you realize that there is many different things that you can do by yourself. You just have to learn some things about Smart Board. Like Everything that is on the screen is known as an "Object". You can Move, Clone, Copy or Paste, Flip Objects.. plus many more. There is something called the "Magic Pen" with does a lot of stuff like making a square around font makes the font bigger, Circle force on lights, notes, underline and slowly disappears over time. You can lock objects on the screen so they can not be moved. Re size objects or let objects move as one or in groups. You can also move objects from front to behind. You can Clone pages to make things easier for you. There is a gallery with tons of pictures, sounds, and more that you can play around with for days. One tool that many people seem to like is the "Screen Shot" on the screen shot tool you can use the Internet or just about any other screen you would like to use.

Anyone that uses Smart Board would tell their other teachers that Smart Board is the product to use.

Teacher Tube

Many teachers out there now a days like to use visual things so their students can remember the subject better. At first you may think that it would be easier for you to get on YouTube and look up the subject that you are teaching your students but in most schools YouTube is blocked in just about every school. So Teachers got together and made a website just for them and their students. It is just like YouTube but you will NOT find inappropriate video on this website. You can feel free to let your students explore the site with there own freedom. TeacherTube main states "Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill. "

What can you do if you become a member of TeacherTube. You can upload and share your own videos, Assesments, lesson plans, notes and other files with our students and/or teachers. You can browse tons of videos, Subscribe to a members videos and many more things.

A part of TeacherTube that many people would like is that the staff of TeacherTube reviews all the videos and flags the ones that are inappropriate for students.

Here are some examples for videos you can use from the website:

50 States and Their Capitals
A Teacher could use this Video to help with the VA SOL of History. 
This is a fun video that has a fun song that the students would like and remember aka they would remember the 50 states and their capitals


Sum of a Triangle
A Teacher could use this video to help the students with the VA SOL of Geometry
This video is kinda boring and simple but it is right with all its information and would help some students understand Triangles better

TeacherTube is a good simple website. If your not a teacher you may not think that this is a good website. Its very simple to use and some of the videos are not very helpful but in many ways its as great website for those "Visual" teachers.

Try it out for yourself:

TeacherTube

Smart Board-Part One

http://msumusictech.wikispaces.com/file/view/smartboard1.gif

Smart Boards are seen all in schools now. From Elementary Schools to Colleges. What is so neat about them? There are many different ways you can use a smart board. You can use it as a blackboard, write right on the screen or play games on it to help the students learn. Smart Boards can be descired as a power point slide but more hand on. There are many actives that the smart board program comes with from matching, ordering, muiltply choose, key words, word guess and many more. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and the games are yours. You can add pictures, sounds and many more stuff.

Word Guess for example is alot like hangman. You can add the words and give hints. The students then would come up to the board and guess letters till they get the answer right. Behind the scences, the teacher would fill in the blanks on the Word Guess Tempele and can select different cartoons to play during the game.

Smart board is a great hands on way for the students and the teachers. There are many more things that can be done on a Smart board. Like teachers can make there own games and other things on the smart board. Which we will talk about later on in the month.

Smart Boards for Education

Here is the website for Smart Boards!

Google Custom Search

Google has a website that many teachers use for there students. Its called Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) On this website, Teachers can create a customized search engine that searches only across sites that the teacher has set up. This is a good way for a teacher to be sure that the websites that the students are looking at are appropriate for their ages. Another great reason to use Google Custom Search Engine is that when you are teaching the students about one subject and would like for them to use the internet to look up more information or see what they can find themselves. Google Custom Search Engine can let you do that with your students feeling freedom but you know that they are under control.

Art

Here is an Example of Google Custom Search.

Its topic is on Art for elementary Students.

Try it out for yourself.

and why not try to make your own.

Google Custom Search Engine

Flickr

Kids this days!
Originally uploaded by abaggett10

Flickr is a way to store, sort, search and share your photos online. Flickr helps you organize photos you have and share the photos with your friends and family. Once you sign up with Flickr you can take a tour and learn everything there is to know about the website. The tour teaches you that you can share you pictures by email, name or by inviting friends. You can also set up who gets to see the pictures, meaning that you can make it public or private depending on who you want to see the pictures. You can use Flickr on your social networking website or even on your blog website :). You can upload your pictures from your phone right to Flickr or email the pictures to Flickr or upload the pictures right to the website.

Flickr makes organizing your pictures really easy. You can organize your pictures by labeling them or putting them in to groups. If you label them and put them in to groups you can later go back and search for the picture very easily. You can also upload videos.

Its a very easy picture to store your pictures, even if its just for yourself so when you get a new laptop or computer or something happens and you happen to loss all your pictures at lease you still have all your pictures online somewhere for you to still have them.

Try it out for yourself:

Flickr

Delicious and NetVibes

Delicious is a website that is used to bookmark any sit on the internet and get to it from anywhere. You can show your bookmarks and get bookmarks in return. Delicious is also a way to check out other popular website that other Delicious users marked. For Teachers... Delicious is a great way to keep all your teaching websites in the same place. Many teachers could find a website and not need to use it but every once in a while. So Delicious is the right place to store your websites because it makes it easy to find them. Delicious makes it easy to share things by making it so you can "tag" a site and maybe even write a note about the site so other users now just what they would find on that site.

Another website that is a lot like Delicious is NetVibes. On NetVibes you can take everything that matters to you while your online and bring them together in one single page (like pictures, email, videos..etc.) Like its your own personal dashboard. Netvibes puts all the websites in to things called "widgets" that you can move around on your dashboard. You can search for the websites you want to add to your dashboard in the categories they give you to pick from.

Netvibe is a good way to keep your EVERYDAY websites in one place, unlike Delicious where you can store websites that you do not use everyday and the ones that you do use everyday.
Also.. You could share your Delicious and Netvibe website with an furture employer so that way they can see that you have been working in the past online and that you have some teaching ideas already down.

Here are the websites:

Delicious and NetVibes

Check them out for yourself!

Kids and Computers!

Seen computers have first been in schools, Children have always in interested in them. The children can play games, watch movies, download songs and now do just about anything on a computer. Many people think that if children play on computers that they will have a short attention span for anything else. But the truth is that most children just want to teach us teaches that if we can improve are teaching ways to something on the computer or some kind of technogly that maybe they would pay attention better and learn things faster and it would stick in there brains longer if we taught them something and they learned it from a computer game. They will remember everything about the game. So Maybe if teachers would not stick to there old ways and learn how to use computers programs, the kids would learn faster.