Free Online Graph Paper/ Grid Paper PDFs

Incompetech offers a variety of free graph/grid paper, which is downloadable and printable.  You’ll find traditional graph paper, dot paper, cross grids, grid lined, inverted graph paper, and more. When you click on the type of paper you want to download, you’ll be able to select the size of the paper and options related to color, border, and line weight. It’s a great way to have these types of papers available to you and your students. If you have students who have difficulty lining up columns for arithmetic, this paper will work well for them.  Be warned: the site does contain a variety of advertisements, which students might be tempted to click on.

Shows Students How to Avoid Plagiarism

Our job is to teach students how to avoid plagiarism, not especially to catch them after they submit a less than acceptable papers. PaperToolsPro is a writing and research management program designed to help both students and professional writers with their work. With it, users can collect notes, organize content, move information to a word processor, and create bibliographies and citations such as MLA and APA. The program includes resources designed to help teachers help students avoid plagiarism, understand research paper style and citation formats, and evaluate sources. If you are interested in learning more about PaperToolsPro, you’ll want to the watch videos that introduce the program, show how to use the program, and how to make notes into a draft. There’s also a detailed tour , as well as demo accounts. Individual subscriptions are $20 a year and school subscriptions are $200 plus $1 for each enrolled student. Other pricing options are available. Until 12/31/09, there’s a special—two teacher subscriptions for one price of one.

PaperToolsPro™

Halloween & Thanksgiving Lessons & Activities

HotChalk LessonPlansPage offers lesson plans especially for the Halloween and Thanksgiving season.  You’ll find lessons featuring art, computers and the Internet, Language Arts, Math, Physical Education, Social Studies, Science, and lessons that cross the curriculum. How about a candy corn math lesson for Grades 1-2, a family collage lesson for older students, a Tell-Tale Heart lesson for Grade 8, a haunted museum lesson on sound for Grades 2-3, or a pumpkin math riddles lesson or Grades 3-6?

Are We There Yet? With Technology in Schools?

What’s the perception of how schools are doing with the integration of technology into classrooms? How are we coming along with incorporation of 21^st Century tools in our schools? Guy Weaver’s article Changing Society: Why Teachers Need to Embrace Technology discusses the need for teachers to adopt tech tools that work in education. In The Evolution of Technology in Schools , student Daniel Brusilovsky (TechCrunch.com) discusses problems related to technologies and tech use at his school. Imagine what teachers and students are saying about this topic in your school or district. Perhaps with media focus on the latest and greatest, we expect that all teachers should have classrooms equipped with interactive white boards, video production equipment, expensive software, and computers that can handle operations that take a great deal of memory? —And that all teachers know how to use and incorporate 21^st Century tools into their lessons? Does the grass seem greener in schools we hear about in the media where one imagines that the needed equipment, knowledge, and enthusiasm exist? In these economic times, it might be wise to focus upon how to make the best use of what we already have and learn to use that as best we can.

Some of Us Suffer from Technolust

An Edutopia poll  asked educators to give their opinion about whether teachers should embrace the latest tech available or use tech only when it enhanced a lesson. Of the 172 votes in the poll, 73% selected “Teachers should use technology only when it enhances a lesson, which is not always the case.” Makes sense. Seems to be a no brainer poll. We know that technology isn’t going to solve all the problems of education. An evolving problem in providing technologies in education is not only funding limitations but deciding what technologies teachers will put to use to enhance lessons and which teachers will embrace the technologies. Methods that work well for one teacher may not be the best or another.  Some teachers are great at integrating tech into their lessons, but that doesn’t mean teachers using traditional methods aren’t doing a good job. Long ago I learned that just because I was excited about a particular tech solution in education, didn’t mean that other educators would embrace it as well.  Some of us who love technologies and see their promise for our schools lust after the latest and greatest. For us, these technologies would work, but for others they may be a waste of money. One size fits all doesn’t work in education.

Design Your Own eLearning Courses

If you’d like to develop eLearning courses or interactivities for presentations or other learning models (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.), Raptivity can make it easier and quicker for you. The program offers a library of over 200 pre-built activities such as brainteasers, interactive questions, learning games, and simulations, which can be customized to fit your students and course content. Think 3D objects, crosswords, puzzles, videos, surveys, flipbooks, learning aids, and experiential learning, all of which you’ll be able to integrate into your lessons. You don’t have to do any programming or designing, but you’ll be able to develop Flash files of what you want to create for your students.  To learn more about Raptivity, take the video tour,  download the White Paper and/or sign up for the 14-Day trial.

Hispanic Heritage Competitions

Grades 6-8 students within Cablevision’s service area in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have the chance to win a $5000 savings bond, a laptop computer, an iPod Touch, or a portable DVD player in the  What Does It Mean to Be a Latino Essay Contest. The essay should be no longer than 1000 works, needs to be submitted by the deadline, 11/13/09, and must follow the rules specified.

Making Photobooks

Get your free photobook BookSmart software at blurb.com, create a book, and make it available online. The book might be text (black and white) or color photo in a range of book sizes. Page counts range from 20 to 440, and prices from $4.95 to $186.  Although the software is free, you’ll need to order at least one book to make the book available online. You can choose to make your book public or private. If it’s public, others can go online and order it. For example, if you create a class book or a book on a school event, and you want to make it available for parents and students to order, this is a great way to do it. Works on PC and Mac. There are also photobook competitions you can enter.

Want to Change a PDF?

Have you ever had a pdf document you’d like to edit, but didn’t have the Adobe software to accomplish the task? It’s either copy the whole thing over or find someone who has the software and can do it for you. Now you can do it on your own. Just go online to OnlineOCR.net, a web-based OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service that allows you to convert documents, photographs, etc. “into editable and searchable electronic documents including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Rtf, Html and Txt.” It’s available for use in 28 languages. I tried it using a pdf, which I uploaded, and requested a MS Word document. It worked perfectly. The online system uses a credit system, which I found a bit confusing at first. You get 5 free credits to begin with, which translates into 5 pages. Once your credits are used up, you can purchase more ($3 for 30 pages) or be awarded additional free credits by posting links to and information about the service online, making a video about it, etc.

Google Apps Tutorials for Teachers, Administrators & Everyone

Google offers a nice introduction to Google Apps through a slideshow presentation. The show describes essential services that are available for schools, businesses, and families and how these services can be unified through the Google Start Page from which everything can be accessed. Some of the areas covered are Google Apps Mail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Start Page. Administrator tutorials include information on signing up for Google Apps, comparing different editions of Google Apps, a demo on navigating within an administrator account, and Google Apps’s APIs (tools/programs). Although you are probably familiar with some of Google’s free products, this “Welcome to Google Apps” presentation will give you a good overview of the extensive tools that Google provides.