My BrainShark to the Rescue!

We've all heard it before.  There are students who do well by reading directions, while some need to hear directions, and still others need to both see and hear them.  Adults, undoubtedly, are no different.  Have you ever taken the time to send a detailed email only to find out that the recipient didn't read every word as carefully as you wrote them?  It can certainly be frustrating when your thoughtfully composed message just doesn't do the trick, but what can you do?  . . .  Enlist the aid of a brainshark, that's what!

Mybrainshark.com is a wonderful website that allows you to upload written content to your free account, add narration, background music, even survey questions, and share with your contacts.  You can add your voice to documents, PowerPoint presentations, videos and photos by using your computer's microphone, or your cell phone.  Share your file by distributing a link, embedding it in a blog, wiki or web page, or via QR code.  Twitter and Facebook users can also share their work through their favorite social networking site, or (and this is my favorite) email contacts directly through the mybrainshark website.  Then, with the simple click of a checkbox, you'll receive an email notification each time your work is viewed.  Invest in a Pro account, and get access to even more features.  Never again will your colleagues, or your students, miss the important details of your message.

Take a look at the sample presentation below.  I know you'll want to give mybrainshark a try, and once you do, I'm confident you'll be a fan.  My Brain Shark truly is the easy, free way to make online video.

Now Presenting . . . Prezi!

Yes, everyone admires a well put together slide presentation.  And for the most part, we're getting pretty good at using PowerPoint and/or Keynote to do it.  But PowerPoint presentations are getting a little predictable, don't you think? A picture, bullet points, maybe an animation or two, and on to the next slide, where you'll see a picture, bullet points and an animation or two. It's easy to lose the interest of your audience, especially if that audience is comprised of students who live in a fast moving video-game world.

Introducing . . . Prezi:  an online presentation program that will allow you to create "visually captivating presentations that lead your audience down a path of discovery."  Instead of creating a linear series of slides, you will begin creating your presentation on a virtually limitless canvas of sorts.  You can easily insert text, images, shapes, documents, links or videos anywhere on the canvas.  Once inserted, clicking on your text or image, etc. will reveal what some refer to as the "zebra tool" that will allow you to move, resize and angle your object with a simple manipulation of the tool.


Here's what makes it fun.  You can put your text upside down, and reduce the size of your image so that it fits inside of one of the letters of your text.  When it's time to show your presentation, Prezi will automatically turn your text right-side up, and zoom in on your graphic until it's full-screen.  While it's in progress, you're presentation could look like a hot mess, but by outlining the order in which you want each element shown, Prezi turns your haphazard collection of bits and pieces into a well-organized whole.  Take a look at the example below and see for yourself.  It contains unedited comments from my 5th graders after completing their first project at prezi.com.  You can read additional reviews written by my 8th grade class by visiting their blogs at http://kidblog.org/sgscomputers.  









Your students will really enjoy creating and viewing Prezi presentations, and I'm sure you will too.  Be sure to check out the Meeting option.  By sharing a link to your Prezi, you can invite a colleague or two (or ten) to work on creating the presentation with you, each from the comfort of your own classroom, or home, or town.  (We used Meeting to have an entire class of students create the Prezi above, all at once.)  Just one word of caution.  Be judicious about creating too many inverted objects in your presentation.  The non-stop spinning effects will not be appreciated by anyone in your audience who is prone to motion sickness.

Cast Your Vote on Zoomerang

There's no doubt about it.  U.S. Presidential Primaries and the upcoming elections are finding their way into every major newspaper and daily newscast.  Chances are good that political banter is finding its way into conversations with your colleagues, and if you teach Social Studies, will undoubtedly soon be finding its way into your curriculum too.  Why not make your lessons in democracy come to life by letting your students participate and cast their own votes?

Zoomerang.com is an easy to use website that will allow you to create surveys/polls that you can embed in your class website or blog.  Your students can vote for presidential candidates,  oscar-worthy movies, the basketball team's most valuable player or a name for you new class pet.  Need to include a picture so that your students will more easily recognize those presidential candidates?  Zoomerang makes it easy to select and upload your images for inclusion in the survey.  You can even get parents involved in your project by sending the survey directly from the Zoomerang site to their emails, which you can manually add or import into your Zoomerang address book. Do your students have their own school email addresses? With a little imagination, Zoomerang becomes a versatile online quiz tool.

With the ability to add multiple choice, rating, ranking or open-ended questions, Zoomerang allows you to easily collect a lot of information, from a lot of people, for a lot of different purposes. That's a lot of reasons to give Zoomerang a try!

There are, of course, many other options for online polling. If you're a fan of a particular site, share your endorsement by completing the sample Zoomerang survey below. I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Wolfram|Alpha: The Answer Engine

For a myriad of reasons, I've had an exceptionally busy week.  It's during weeks like this that I come to truly appreciate the time-savers that I sometimes take for granted, and Wolfram|Alpha is just one of those time-savers.

Mouse over the bottom left
corner to reveal options
for saving.

More than a search engine, Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," providing answers to your queries, and not just a list of places to search for answers.  What kinds of information can you find at Wolfram|Alpha?  Check out the page of examples and prepare to be impressed (but be sure to start exploring when you have time to spare because you will become engrossed).  If you look at the math examples, you'll find that not only will the site be able to add fractions or factor polynomials, it will outline the steps involved in deriving the answer.  Want to find out what the weather was like on the day you were born?  Or how long president McKinley was in office?  Or the number of flights departing from Chicago's O'Hare Airport today?  Wolfram|Alpha will give you the answers, and usually much more.  The neatly organized, uncluttered results page is easy to navigate, and allows you to save the information as an image or copyable text (mouse-over the lower-left corner of each chart to reveal the options).  If you're so inclined, you can use the buttons on the right side of the page to share your information via email, Facebook, Twitter, or a number of other sites, and even create a widget based on the information you found, to embed in a blog or wiki.

Clicking on the Products link at the top of every page will direct you to some valuable goodies, such as widgets (like the one below) and toolbars.  Click on the link in the lower right corner labeled For Educators and find lesson plans and other resources for your classroom. And finally, consider following @WolframFunFacts on Twitter for your daily dose of mostly useless, but nonetheless interesting, trivia.

Give Wolfram|Alpha a try below.  Type in your birthdate followed by the word weather to see what it was like on the day you were born, and if you find out that it was 80º and humid, like I just did, be sure to give your mom a hug.

Resolve to "Log It"

Have you done it yet?  Made your New Year's resolution, I mean.  If your resolution has anything to do with fitness or simply being more active, I have a suggestion for you that is inexpensive and easy to do; wear a pedometer.  I guarantee that you will be surprised at how much walking you actually do during a normal school day.  I find that the recommended 10,000 steps a day is usually not much of a challenge, and I bet the same will be true for you, too.

Now here's how you can turn your New Year's resolution into a fun class project.  By logging in to an account at http://peclogit.org you can keep track of the steps you take each day and the site will trace your progress on a map of the United States, as if you were walking from state capital to state capital.  (Right now I'm approaching Dover, Delaware en route from Trenton, New Jersey.)  You can even set up a group account so your students who wear pedometers can keep track of their progress as well.  As account manager, you can set daily goals, participate in a challenge with another class, and print readily accessible Certificates of Achievement for members of your class who reach a milestone, or simply need a little recognition.  You can even use the built-in mail function to easily send messages to the whole group, or individual participants.  (That function alone can be worth creating an account if you have no other means of online communication set up.)

And here's a suggestion for taking the project just a little further.  Add a wall map of the U.S. to your classroom and keep track of your progress there too.  In my classroom (I use the hallway, actually, but I digress), I add a star to the map each time we reach a state capital, and trace the straight-line path we took to get there.  You can even print the congratulatory message from the site and learn something about each capital along the way.  

This website really will help you keep that New Year's resolution, and may encourage your sometimes-too-sedentary students to be more active as well.  And who knows, you might even get a parent or two to participate.

With all that said, let me take a minute to wish everyone a quick Happy New Year before I dash away from the computer.  For some reason, I have a sudden urge to hop on the treadmill.

Look out, Dover, here I come!

Socrates Would Be Pleased

Twas the day after Christmas and teachers worldwide

enjoyed some hot cocoa, and relaxed fireside.

Still, as joyous and fun as Christmas had been

the thought of their classrooms caused some chagrin,

for as the last Christmas ember fades and flickers,

they remember their wish for student response clickers.

Their request to Santa had been quite emphatic.

"My lessons need 'oomph', from questions Socratic."

But, alas, no clickers neath the tree appeared.

"It's back to the same old stuff," they feared.

Only the most eager of students will react

when asked to express opinion or state simple fact.

All hope is not lost, though, my good fellow teachers,

for we, as a group, are resourceful creatures.

To gauge students' learning with just a few questions

I have what I think are some worthwhile suggestions.

However, from here I'll proceed without rhyme,

for this is taking WAY too much time.

If you're lucky enough to have a computer lab at your disposal or a set of laptops to share, creating an account at Socrative.com will turn your present technology into a student response system that can be used with prepared questions, or "on the fly."  Here's how it works:

Go to http://www.socrative.com to request access to the site.  Once you receive an invitation to use the private beta site you'll go to http://t.socrative.com to sign in, and be assigned a room number.  Instruct your students to go to http://m.socrative.com and enter the same room number to become an active user.  Once everyone is logged in, you will have a number of options for using the site.  The immediate feedback you get from just a few questions will surely prove helpful in determining the pacing and direction of the remainder of the lesson, and the reports generated from a short quiz provide the all-important documentation you need before moving forward.  Can you think of a more impactful way to integrate technology?

BTW:  Any internet-connected hardware can be used with the Socrative website.  If your students have phones, or iPods or tablets at their disposal, they can all be viewed as a means for student interaction.

Of course, Socrative.com is far from the only option for electronically getting feedback from your students.  Polleverywhere.com, for example, is another option that's worth investigating, and free to use, assuming your class has fewer than 40 students.  Check out a concise "how-to" for using Polleverywhere here.

As valuable as they are, these websites do, unfortunately have their short-comings.  They will, however, give voice to those students whose hands rarely are raised, and whose vocal cords are normally dormant in class.

So there you have it--my advice for the week:
a website inspired by a wise ancient Greek.
Now I'm left with just one thing to do,
express my very best wishes to you.
Happy holidays, blog readers--each and every one.

You'll be happy to know, my poetry is done.  :)

The Writing on the Wall

Not long ago I was asked by one of our school administrators to send out an email to the parents of our junior high students to let them know volunteers were needed for the junior high holiday dance.  After receiving several quick responses, I was again asked to send a message to these same parents to let them know our updated needs.  "Hmm . . . " thought I, "there must be a better way."  And, of course, there is.

Sharing information in real-time is easy, and a lot less cumbersome if you use the right tool.  A collaborative site like Wallwisher.com will allow users to post virtual sticky notes, complete with a link to  an image, audio or video file.  When building the wall, you can specify whether or not you want to approve each post before it goes live, so it's perfect to use for student projects.  You could, for example, ask your students to predict what's going to happen next in the novel you're reading, or brainstorm ideas for a class bulletin board, or . . . collect information from parents about who will be volunteering at the dance.  This might also be a good way to have your fellow attendees indicate what they'll be bringing to the neighborhood potluck dinner, so you don't end up with five variations of sloppy joe's for dinner.

Now, being the creature of habit that I am, and having used Wallwisher for some time now, that's become my default "sticky note site".  There are, of course, many other options.  Stixy.com, for instance, is certainly worth checking out.  While similar to Wallwisher in many ways, it offers the additional options of being able to upload entire documents, add To Do list items, and invite specific contributors.

You may also want to check out AnswerGarden.ch for a simple way of sharing information.  Scroll to the bottom of this blog to find an example of an embedded Answer Garden, and share a favorite web resource, and don't forget to add a little something to the wall below.  Happy collaborating, everyone!