Guide to Free Online College Classes for High School Students

Online College Courses.net offers a list of free online courses for students in Grades 9-12. The courses are categorized by topics such as Arts Open Courseware, (art, music, and theater); Business Open Courseware (economics, finance); English and Communication Open Courseware (poetry, grammar, literature, cultures); Humanities and Social Sciences Open Courseware (U.S. History, Politics, Public Policy); Math Open Courseware (calculus, statistics, complex numbers, patterns & formulas); and Science Open courses (physics, biology, astronomy, oceanography). The courses listed are provided by universities such as Cal Berkeley), MIT, Michigan, The Open University, and Utah State.

If you are interested in free (non-degree) courses for your students, you should also browse the MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) Directory, which lists available courses for higher education and Kindergarten through Grade 12.

Paper-Folding Fun Apps for Kids

Creating animals and objects by folding paper is fun, and now there are apps that can help children create with origami.  The apps provide the designs, but the children do the cutting, folding, and decorating. TH origami apps for children, recommended by Jinny Gudmundsen in USA Today (07/28/13), are Mr. Shingu’s Paper Zoo for iPad, iPhone, Ipod-Touch; Foldify for iPad; Gomma Friends for iPad and Android; and SallyBob for iPhone, iPod-Touch, and iPad. The apps are priced from $1.99-$3.99.

Hummingbird Robotics for All Ages

As soon as I spotted the cardboard happy dragon-alligator at an ISTE booth, I fell in love with the Hummingbird Robotics Kit. With the kit, students, ages about 9 and up, can create all sorts of wonderful programmable 3D animals, people, and objects. They’ll especially like figuring out how to give their sculptures moving parts—like the jaw of the dragon-alligator or perhaps its tail.

Take a look at the tutorials, which show you how to program Hummingbird in 30 minutes, give examples of robots, and introduce you to squishy circuits, raspberry Pi support, making battery packs, using virtual programmer, and much more. The inexpensive Hummingbird Robotics Kit is a great way to incorporate STEM and STEAM (the A stands for Art & Design) into just about any classroom.

Bookabi

There are 2D and 3D characters, fun backgrounds and stickers, and lots more in Bookabi by Tamajii, Inc. Your students can make up their own stories by using the resources available and adding speech bubbles. Students can take their own photos and use them as backgrounds in the story.

TED Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing

Take the tour of TED Ed to see how you can use videos that are on the Internet to create super lessons.  On the site, you can also look at lessons others have created, and if you think you can use them in your courses, you can change them to fit your students and your curriculum. Lessons are listed by category such as mathematics, health, literature and language, social studies, and science and technology. Some of those that are called “Best Flips” or exceptional lessons featured are: Atoms from A to Easy!, Pi with Pies, The Secret to Rising Sea Levels, The Dawn of Art, and What is Nano?

Making Pop-Up Books & More

Jill Faison, a professor at Fresno Pacific University and author of the Art for Elementary Teachers blog, offers us a lesson in how to help elementary students make a pop-up book.  Faison says that these books are perfect for end-of-the-year projects. That’s because students have a great time creating the books and can include events of their lives and perhaps of the school year in them. Instructions are given for using 6 sheets of 9”X12” construction paper to make the book, how to make pop-up tabs, how to cut and fold, and how to assemble each child’s book. The Art for Elementary Teachers blog contains lots of other ideas (how to organize art supplies, observing color and drawing flowers, making Earth Day hats, finding books with great image files) that will be helpful to elementary art teachers and elementary classroom teachers.

Perfect Clip Art When You Need It

DOVERPICTURA is the place to check when you need perfect clip art images. Some of the categories you might appreciate are: Holidays, Animals, Fine Art, Historical Periods, Transportation, People, Architecture, Culture, and Silhouettes and Stencils. Go to the site and you’ll receive three free image sheets.  Suppose you are looking for Renaissance images. You can purchase a royalty-free Renaissance image collection of 452 images for $14.99. If you are looking for individual images, let’s say of a butterfly, you can buy one sheet for $.99. (Four hundred ninety butterfly and moth images would cost $15.99.) Individual images in the collections are $.99 up. The images are in jpeg and tiff formats and download directly to your computer. You will love the images made available by DOVERPICTURA because they are beautifully rendered and many are rare and unique.

Children Create Their Own Disney Stories

Disney Princess: Story Theater! is ready for students to create their own stories. It’s a delightful learning app that ignites imaginations as children enjoy adventures with Cinderella, Belle, and Ariel. They can record their own voice, move the characters, and bring their story onscreen. The app costs $2.99 at the iTunes store and is available for iPhone 3GS and higher, iPod touch, third generation and higher, and iPad. Check the Disney Book site for other children’s apps such as Disney Storytime, Sophia the First: Story Theater, Cinderella Storybook Deluxe, Monsters, Inc., Storybook Deluxe, and Phineas and Ferb Agent P VS. The Puzzle-Inator.

Creating Comic Storyboards

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) has announced the upcoming publication of Serious Comix: Engaging Students with Storyboards by Eydie Wilson. The book ($31.95, $19.95 members), which will be available this month (March 2013), features cross-curricular learning that strengthens language arts, critical thinking, and creative skills. With Wilson’s guidance, you can add the motivation of comic creation to any subject area. If you are interested in using comic creations in your lessons, you should also take a look at Plasq’s Comic Life 2, a super way to bring student’s comics to life through technology.  The Plasq software is available for Mac and Windows for less than  $30.

Exploratorium Apps

The Exploratorium in San Francisco is a fun place to visit both online and offline. This wonderful science museum now offers two free interactive books for the iPad, one featuring sound and one featuring color. Sound Uncovered lets you “hear with your eyes, see with your ears,” check your hearing and experiment with “things that go bump, beep, boom and vroom.” Color Uncovered lets you and your student explore with color via illusions, video, and text.