Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Great integration of social studies and Internet tools

    Fifth grade students at Lewis Elementary in Portland, OR, are using the
    free services Flickr and MapBuilder.net     in their European Exploreres
    social studies unit.

  • Cold, Ice, and Snow Safety

    From KidsHealth.gov, Cold, Ice, and Snow Safety.

  • Can Wikipedia can be saved for our schools?

    Andy Carvin on his blog presents a case for Turning Wikipedia into an
    Asset for Schools    . Instead of blindly following what’s in Wikipedia,
    use it to present “teachers with an excellent authentic learning
    activity in which students can demonstrate their skills as scholars”:

    […]Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups,
    with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic.
    Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

    Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they
    selected. […] The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the
    website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it?
    Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed
    about horses on the page.

    […]The group of students breaks down the content on the page into
    manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be
    verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the
    content.
    Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a
    Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and
    present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be
    corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections,
    with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry
    they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it.

  • Winter Olympics lesson plans and resources

    Kathy Schrock has put together a ton of resources for using the Winter
    Olympics in your classroom, including the history of the Olympics,
    lesson plans, and activities. Check them out at her website.

    *UPDATE*: Her site has moved to http://kathyschrock.net/blog/

  • Google Earth – Available for the Mac or PC

    Google Earth, a free application, allows the user to view in 3D
    places around the world.

    Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in — Google
    Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search
    to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.

  • The Amazing Flash Card Machine – Online Flash Cards

    Create online flashcards with The Amazing Flash Card Machine – Online
    Flash Cards    :

    Welcome to The Amazing Flash Card Machine, an interactive web
    application that allows the user to create interactive web-based study
    flash cards.

    Students! Create flash cards to help you study for your next exam.
    Make them publicly available, and your classmates can study from the
    same set.

    Teachers! Create flash card sets for your students. Assign each set
    of flash cards it’s own unique username and password giving your
    students access to them without having to register.

  • A web based graph creation tool

    Example GraphNeed a way to easily create a graph? The National
    Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of
    Education has put together an easy to use tool to create bar, line,
    area, pie, and XY graphs. Users can email the graph to themselves, which
    will also give a link to save the graph for 30 days.

  • Fun stuff, two hundred and fifty pounds of Silly Putty

    From the Official Google Blog: I’m feeling silly:

    Naturally, we were all curious to see what 250 pounds of Silly Putty
    would look like, so before distributing the stuff, we put it all in a
    single pile to see. Huge mistake.

  • Placeopedia.com – Connecting Wikipedia articles with their locations

    Placeopedia.com allows users to connect Wikipedia entries with their
    geographical location. What a great way to see what landmarks/historical
    entries are located near your home town. It allows anyone one to place
    entries on the map, so if your area is blank you can search Wikipedia
    for local landmarks and place them on the map yourself. And if the local
    landmarks are not in Wikipedia, it would be a great start for your
    students to research, edit, and then publish their entry on the landmark
    in Wikipedia.

  • Cool search site

    We’ve all come to love and rely on Google, but I was alerted to a
    new site today, Clusty. This search engine takes your search query,
    and “clusters” the results into different search topics. For example, I
    did a search on “volcano”, and not only did it give me a list of
    websites for volcanoes, it gave me some categories to help me refine my
    search. These categories included:
    ?Hawaii (36)
    ?Volcano Observatory (20)
    ?Volcano information (16)
    ?Geological, Survey (12)
    ?Earth (16)
    ?Movie, Review (16)
    ?Kids (15)
    ?Flows (11)
    ?Mount St. Helens (9)
    ?Safety, Images

    I could then click on any of those to see URLs in that category. Try it
    out at http://clusty.com/.