Great Teaching Technology Sites

Start the week off right 

by learning something new!  

Let's face it, technology will outstrip us in the great race if we don't stay in touch with new developments each week.  In my never ending search for excellent sites for students and teachers, I have found few that I would like to highlight each Monday.

I'll start with some free stuff:

Free Tech for Teachers delivers excellent news on the latest in technology and how to download some freebies.

Free Scratch Download works on practically any computer and any computer operating system.  Scratch is the best critical thinking activity for ages 7-97 that I have found on the Internet.  Created by students at MIT (that's Massachusetts Institute of Technology- one of the most prestigious universities in the world), SCRATCH makes computer programming as easy as stacking Legos.  Use your stacks to program custom animations to tell a joke or teach a class about your Interest Project.  I love this program so much that I included it in my Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects resource book.  Click to see a sample Scratch Interest Project.

Student Documentary - Interest: Guitars

Here's an excellent example of a fifth grade student using his interest to motivate learning.  

• See how he researched his topic using the Internet and books.  
• Watch as he synthesizes his newfound knowledge into a documentary movie - with planned preproduction of shots and written narration script.  
• Finally, he demonstrates his understanding of technology through the application of iMovie to produce his video.  

Excellent work, Wyatt!

Interesting Choices

Zulu Children in Africa- An Interesting Choice of Topics

For the past two weeks, I had the pleasure of working with a terrific group of fourth grade gifted children at Bascomb Elementary School in Georgia.  They were enthusiastic to learn about interest projects and downright thrilled when they discovered each would get to choose his or her own topic.  I am always amazed by students' choices because of their varied subjects and how much their interests reveal about them.  To understand my point, here is a sampling of some recent interest project topics:

Neil Peart - A nine-year-old girl really chose the drummer for the rock band Rush as her topic.  Very interesting!

MIT - A boy thinking ahead to college chose the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

African Americans Living in Africa - One confused boy actually chose this and I had no idea what he meant.  After our one-on-one meeting, I discovered he wanted to research an African tribe, but didn't know the name of any and so wrote down African Americans living in Africa.  I tactfully explained that if they are from Africa and live in Africa, they are just Africans- not Americans.  I suggested several tribes and he chose the Zulu.

As I continue to share my curriculum with more schools, I will share more INTERESTING CHOICES.

Sample Projects

This interest project on D-Day is a documentary film by a fifth grade student.  He used information and pictures from the internet to create the documentary with Photo Story 3 for Windows.