Educade - Lesson Plans with Games

I found this cool web site that offers lesson plans for teachers that are gamed based and with Gamification becoming a big thing in education due to Minecraft and others. I thought this could help teachers build up a library of cool activities.

http://educade.org/

360 degree Spheres

We have been experimenting with 360 degree Spheres to create a virtual tour of our school.

I used the free application on the itunes App Store called Sphere and purchased a small device from Motrr called Galileo http://motrr.com/ this device only facilitates the process of creating the 3D spheres.

It can also do cool time lapse videos.

If you want to check out our school tour simply click on this link, we are still adding new locations so some pages are empty.

http://www.selwyn.ca/podium/default.aspx?t=184360

TED-Ed Clubs

A new initiative from the TED is for schools to built TED-Ed Clubs within their schools, the site provides guidelines on how to create small groups that have meaningful discussions. If you have a great talk from one of your students you can submit it to the TED ed Club site and that student could be invited to the TED ed Youth conference.

http://ed.ted.com/clubs

Padlet Blog/Web site creation

Padlet is a great platform to start creating Blogs or a simple Website, you can also choose to create a sharing platform for anyone to connect and contribute work, ideas, answers,etc... Its quite simple and powerful for education.

Padlet runs directly within the browser and does not need any additional installation.

You can also take your Padlet and get the iframe data to incorporate it directly in your school website, so the users can edit the page directly without needing much experience with HTML or complicated software.

httphttp://www.padlet.com

Future Classroom

Maybe a glimpse of the future of our classroom

Google Lit Trips

Google Lit Trips

Google Lit Trips are free downloadable files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth. At each location along the journey there are placemarks with pop-up windows containing a variety of resources including relevant media, thought provoking discussion starters, and links to supplementary information about “real world” references made in that particular portion of the story. 

First Install Google Earth

http://www.google.com/earth/

Then you need to go to google lit trips website, fill out a very short survey and download the grade level pack of stories.

http://www.googlelittrips.com/

Here is a short video demonstration of the software in action
http://vimeo.com/30679979

Play Youtube video in the background on an iPad

Simply start your video and either open a new tab or return the home screen, then scroll up to access the Control Center, then click play.