This weeks Tech Tip is NetTrekker.  NetTrekker is a resource that our district provides for our teachers, staff and students.  We use NetTrekker because it is a safe way to insure that our students get good, reliable and safe information.  With NetTrekker, if you login through your schools library web page, your searches will be filtered through the state TEKS Standards.  Meaning - your search results will have true academic purposefulness. 

Here is a blurb from their web page, “Each resource is carefully selected by educators to ensure it is safe, age-appropriate and 100% academically relevant.”

I did a search on “Vitamins” and I learned something myself.  Did you know that lots of vitamin D can cause you to lose wait?  Here’s the catch, you lose the wait because too much Vitamin D can cause you to vomit.  Not the right way to loses wait!!  Anyway, I digress, so back on track.

Take the time to introduce NetTrekker to your students this week.  It is a resource that our district provides for you to keep your kids safe and on the right track with their research.  It’s an awesome tool!  The listings of uses of NetTrekker are too many to list here.  Take a look for yourself!

You can get to NetTrekker from your school’s library web page.  If you’re reading this post and you are not a part of RoundRock ISD schools, you can try NetTrekker free at http://www.nettrekker.com/

Keep up the good teaching with technology!!!

Side Note: Most web pages have links to other web pages.  These other web pages may or may not be safe, so I suggest you still do active monitoring during your computer times.  Leaving your students un-attended during computer time is not a safe practice anytime!

Weekly Tech Tip

This weeks tech tip is can be used in Social Studies, LA, and Math.

The site is http://www.visualgeography.com/ . 

Social Studies:

Visualgeography.com has pictures of interesting things from most if not all countries of the world.  Such as this dish from the country of Haiti, in North America.

 Students can learn about other cultures by studying the pictures and notes that are on the page.  Each countries map and flag is shown as well. 

Would you have ever guessed that this picture 

could have been taken on the continent of Africa in the country of Ethiopia.  How awesome is that!!  I know I need to get out more.  But I can’t, and neither can many of our students.  That’s why this type of thing is so important.

LA:

I would have my students write compare contrast papers, express their surprise at commonalities, or even use the pictures as writing prompts.  The writing assignments are endless when you begin to look at these pictures from around the world. 

Math:

The site even gives statistics about each country.  The students can do calculations comparing the countries, and charts showing different data.  When I compared the US to Brazil I didn’t know how much alike in size we are. 

U.S.A. is 1.1 times bigger than Brazil
U.S.A. has 1.6 times more inhabitants than BrazilU.S.A.Size: 9,631,418 sq km
Population: 298,444,215 inhabitantsBrazilSize: 8,511,965 sq km
Population: 188,078,227 inhabitants 

I’m learning lots from this site and I’m sure your students can also!  Leave a post and let me know how you use this in your classroom.  Enjoy your Technology!

Weekly Tech Tip

I’m going to stray today and do a back post.

** A few weeks back I did a post about VoiceThread and how it can be used in the classroom. This morning early when I was reading a blog from one of my feeds I found another post about VoiceThread. This post showed a perfect example of how it can be used in the classroom. I had to watch and read the whole VoiceThread!!! It was that good!!! (not normal for me, I get bored easy!) Please, do yourself a favor and look at the VoiceThread - http://ed.voicethread.com/#q.b62276.i322457 You will find students engaged, empowered, problem solving and passionate while learning at the same time. Thanks for the example, Cool Cat Teacher Blog! http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/ She even has a follow up post about what her students are doing to extend their learning experiences. Awesome Stuff!!!!

(Note:) I’m only giving an example of how it can be used. I’m not promoting any views in the VoiceThread.

** World Wide Telescope coming soon! This sure sounds exciting for the Education and Science worlds. Here is a description from their web page. “The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.” You can check it out further at http://worldwidetelescope.org/ I hope to be bringing you more info on this when it’s released this spring”

** What an exciting time to be a part of education in such an “information available” age! When I first started teaching we only dreamed of having this kind of information available to us. Now we can not only have it available we can have our students producing it, collaborating on it, and making it available for the rest of the world to see. There are over 100,000 new blogs created daily with a majority of them being student aged creators. There are about 300,000 new MySpace / FaceBook users every day. This is growing by leaps and bounds.

This is where our students are at: Capturing their interests + Capturing their hearts = Capturing their minds!

 Happy Educating with Technology!