Don't Forget Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media is a site that can help educators keep up with what's happening with media for kids. It's also a great site to recommend to parents of your students.  There they can get the scoop on the latest movies, books, DVDs, television shows, video games, and Web sites so that they can decide what is appropriate for their children. Some of the advice articles on the site include helping kids understand political advertisements, learning about addictive behaviors, helping parents understand social networking sites, learning about food marketing for kids, and providing parents with what they need to know about cell phones, video games, and MP3 devices. Signing up for the Common Sense Newsletter is easy. Just enter your email address and zip code.

Teach Kids about Caring

FableVision, one of our favorite sites for educators, invites you and your students to join in Generation Cures, a new Website dedicated to curing and caring. The folks at FableVision are working with the folks at MIT Education Arcade to produce the site for Children's Hospital Boston. Targeting children ages 8-12 and their parents, the site hopes to help children learn about compassion and giving through online games, animated webisodes, and kid-directed videos. The Web stories and puzzle-adventure games are created by award-winning designers. The site is free, safe, and fun for kids, but it's still in the Beta version. After visiting the site, if you have ideas that you think will improve the site, you'll want to let Paul Reynolds at FableVision know.

Summer Time: How About Some Weather Games?

Weather Channel Kids! offers a nice selection of educational activities for kids including a Weather Center, Weather Education (weather encyclopedia, glossary, resources for kids and teachers), Let's Play (fun ideas for inside or outside) Cool Clips (awesome weather), and Weather Ready (dealing with severe weather, too much sunshine, etc.) There's also a Photo Gallery with albums filled with pictures of sky and beaches, hurricanes and tornados, thunderstorms and flooding, and winter storms. The Games section includes Forecast Earth, Seek and Find, Word Search, Interactive Weather Forecast, Severe Weather Challenge, Watershed Worries, Jigsaw Puzzles, and weather mazes. If you need help using the kids' section of the Weather Channel site, there are guides for you and for the kids' parents, too.

Summer Time: How About Some Weather Games?

Weather Channel Kids! offers a nice selection of educational activities for kids including a Weather Center, Weather Education (weather encyclopedia, glossary, resources for kids and teachers), Let's Play (fun ideas for inside or outside) Cool Clips (awesome weather), and Weather Ready (dealing with severe weather, too much sunshine, etc.) There's also a Photo Gallery with albums filled with pictures of sky and beaches, hurricanes and tornados, thunderstorms and flooding, and winter storms. The Games section includes Forecast Earth, Seek and Find, Word Search, Interactive Weather Forecast, Severe Weather Challenge, Watershed Worries, Jigsaw Puzzles, and weather mazes. If you need help using the kids' section of the Weather Channel site, there are guides for you and for the kids' parents, too.

Monsters to the Rescue

Educational Insights offers Make-a-Monster, language arts resource games for Grades 3, 4 and 5. These Make-a-Monster games help students master skills such as word analysis, vocabulary, punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, and usage. The games cost about $30 and include question cards that are great for practice with questions that are often on state and national standardized tests. Students enjoy assembling crazy monsters each time they get a correct answer. The winner of each 2-4 player game is the student who gets most of questions right and has won the race to complete the first monster.

Second Life in the Classroom?

At a meeting of tech leaders from the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, educators engaged in a dynamic discussion of possibilities for use of online environments such as Second Life in schools. Second Life is a virtual 3-D world, which has areas for teen and adults. You join, create your avatar, and take off on explorations of what has been created by others, or create your own special places. Like many online communities, you cannot be guaranteed that your students will be safe within the world and will not encounter what you wouldn't want them to experience. That said, think about what's available there. In the adult area, for example, Vassar has created a Sistine Chapel. You as an avatar can explore the Chapel by flying up to the walls and around the ceiling to learn about the paintings. Someone in the discussion commented that kids would love this way of learning about the Chapel. The problem is that it's in the adult (18 up) section. Areas like this are usually free of problems, but .... Besides the Sistine Chapel, there are loads of other great places to visit in Second Life: like NOAA where you can hold on to a weather balloon and go up into the sky and NASA where you can experience a launch. Although Second Life isn't exactly ready for our students now, it does include professional development areas such as ISTE and Discovery.  And it is something to think about as we look into educational possibilities for the future.

eLections: Politics for Your Students

Cable in the Classroom offers the free interactive game eLections: Your Adventure in Politics to help students (or anyone who wants to have a great time playing it) understand what's happening in our elections. In the game, players can run their own presidential campaigns, become the actual candidates for election, create a platform, get involved in fund-raising, learn about poll numbers, react to news events and negative advertisements.... The game includes 30 video clips from the cable networks-CNN, C-SPAN, and History^TM . The clips are designed to help students understand political history and media context. Everyone will appreciate George Washington as the game host, Vote Notes that highlight major election themes, and options for school-based competitions for number of games played. Why not try the game yourself first and see how it will fit into your lessons? Send any questions about eLections to Cable in the Classroom.

Do 5-7-Year Olds Need to Work on Conflict Resolution?

Yes, according to the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services (FMCS) and several universities. Young children need to work on social skills "such as negotiation, compromise, and empathy," advises Professor Melanie Killen of the University of Maryland. They need to be given "a positive alternative to the violent images that pervade the video game world." To help primary level children with these skills, gaming author F. J. Lennon developed Cool School: Where Peace Rules, a lively game that does not involve physically aggressive behavior present in most video-type games.  Designed to help children with problems such as respecting others and sharing, Cool School will help you with peer difficulties that may be cropping up in your classroom. You can download the game (It's free.) and teachers' materials at the Curriki Web site.

Play Games: Learn Math

How do you get kids interested in math when prealgebra and algebra seem meaningless to them? Maybe turning to what they love to do is the answer? Playing a video game.  Several Florida school districts are using Tabula Digita's educational video game DimensionM to get kids going in math. The game is designed to teach key algebraic concepts and reinforce these concepts so that students master them. Players interact in a 3-D setting by taking on missions in which they have to use math skills. The games are being used in math classes, computer labs, at special events, and at home. Reports are that students are asking math teachers for additional tutoring so that they can outwit others in DimensionM. If you'd like to test your skill with the CODiE Award-winning software, go to Super Smart Games. You can also read the case studies, download game demos, check out the learning objectives, and find out about the national tournament.

Teaching Teachers Tech—Any Ideas?

Everybody talks about the need for in-service tech education. You've probably heard school board members and district administrators say, "We've got to get all teachers using technology effectively in their classrooms." Schools schedule sessions that sound good, but often end up with only part of the teachers in the session learning from it and the rest of them complaining that they already knew the content, that it didn't have anything to do with what they teach, or that they didn't understand one word of what the session leader was talking about. Reactions usually range from "Great session" to "Total Waste of Time". Because teachers are at so many different levels of knowledge and because what they need to know depends upon grade level, student ability, and subject area, one-size-fits-all training doesn't work. Training needs to be individualized. Workshop sessions offered at conventions like NECC and online courses such as those scheduled by PBS TeacherLine are better suited to meeting the tech learning needs of teachers. In addition, there are online learning experiences offered by textbook publishers, computer and software companies, and educational sites (like Powertolearn.com) that may be perfect for individualizing teacher learning about tech.