Online Publishing for Kids 8-08 Workshop Handout

ePals http://www.epals.com/

à Here is a wonderful way to introduce your students to an audience beyond the school walls. Penpals, blogs, in2books, numerous projects…all have students writing for “authentic” purposes.
Writing with Writers http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/index.htm
à This is a rich site, lots of interesting possibilities for teaching and learning. While the site indicates that it cannot publish all submissions, it certainly does publish a lot!
Cyberkids http://www.cyberkids.com/
à No guarantees here, but kids are thrilled when their work is chosen for publication. According to the rules for submission, “Art and written submissions can be on any topic that is appropriate for our audience (ages 7 to 12). “
KidPub.com http://www.kidpub.com/
à This is a members-only site ($12.95/year) for publishing, but anyone can read. The material is good.
Young Writer http://www.young-writer.co.uk/
à Stories, book reports, poems by and for students from age 6 to 11.
Poetry Zone http://www.poetryzone.ndirect.co.uk/index2.htm
à A great site! Students submit poems via email for publication. They can also submit reviews of poetry books. Ages 4 to 18.
Teen Ink http://teenink.com/index.php
à This is a dandy site for students who are hoping to be published. Submitted items may be published online, in print or both.

Kidsbookshelf http://www.kidsbookshelf.com/
à Publishes kids’ short poems, stories and reviews. I believe this site publishes all it receives (as long as it is appropriate) from youngsters aged 17 and younger.
Kids on the Net http://www.kidsonthenet.com/
à Not to be missed. Students K-10 (the site doesn’t put an age limit on this, but it appears that 14 or 15 is about as old as it goes) can submit a variety of types of writing. Teachers can guide students in making a “choose your own adventure” type of story.
Poetry.com http://www.poetry.com/
à I haven’t quite decided what to make of this site. It publishes all poems (24 lines or less) and enters them into contests. No cost, but clearly there is a money-making part to all of this. Maybe a teacher should submit his/her own work first, just to see what happens? Still, this site is recommended by some quality education sources, so….
Writers’ Window http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/writers/home.html
à This is an excellent site. It publishes work by students from age 5 to 18. There are options for feedback, though I see rather little of that actually posted. But it is an available option.
IEarn http://www.iearn.org/projects/2007-2008iEARNProjectBook.pdf
à A whole different approach to having your students’ work published. Take a look at the IEarn Project Book. Here are dozens of ideas for collaboration world wide, many of which result in online publication. One example: The Good Deeds Project, chosen absolutely at random, just to give you a place to look. (It’s found on page 42 of the Project Book.)
RealeBooks http://www.realebooks.com/
à A free program to download that will let you create and print a book of student work. The book is saved at least one week online to allow parents/family/friends see it in its online form.
PBWiki http://www.pbwiki.com/
à This is still my favorite way to publish student work. It’s easy for both the teacher and the student. It looks great, is quick, accessible by family members. Drawback? You will have to set up a way to have folks respond to your students’ work. Therefore, a blog does have one advantage. Check out these samples of student created wikis:
http://animals.pbwiki.com/ http://mrlindsay.pbwiki.com/

Nice Little Spelling Site

SpellingCity allows you to enter spelling lists, save them, and have students access them from any computer, including their home computers...so Mom and Dad can be involved! The site lets students hear the word in a really good voice and then hear the word used in a fairly good sentence. The youngsters can practice through a "test" or by playing games with the words. This offers you a bit of variety and fun in what is often a tedious part of teaching/learning.

Make a Snazzy Badge, Seal, Poster, Etc.

This nice little site will let you quickly make a sign, seal, badge, and more. You can then save it on your own computer to print at will. Make one or make a dozen. It is so easy that you don't even have to set aside time...you can do it now!

Ustream

Here's an easy, quick way to make a video. Once you've made your video, you can embed it (like I am doing) in your blog, you can email it to yourself or others, or you can leave it on Ustream. Take a look:

Puzzle Maker

Flash-gear offers a truly simple way to make a puzzle, then either post it to your own site/blog/wiki or put a link to their own site to house the puzzle. What a great way for youngsters to master their mouse-skills. Maybe you could puzzle the cover of a book, or a picture of a character in one of your books. Be careful with the copyright, though. Children's drawings would be great puzzles. All you'd need is a digital photo of the picture.
Check out my puzzle by clicking here.

A Quick Bit of Fun

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

At www.bubbleshare.com you can upload pictures, create a slideshow like the one above, grab the appropriate html and paste it into your blog. Or you can just create the album and view it online in your bubbleshare account. Nice, very easy, very quick.

Great News

At last! A file converter at Zamzar that will let you download videos from online sites, convert them to common formats like .avi (QuickTime) or .mov (Windows Video Player) and play them directly from your computer. Or put them on a CD and bring them to your school computer. Why the excitement? Many schools are blocking the most common video sites, including YouTube, dispite the vast number of excellent, educational videos available on those sites. With this excellent, free service, the problem is solved. (Unfortunately, when you embed the videos into your blog or wiki, they actually link back to the original site...doesn't look that way, but that's how it works.) To check this out, try this how-to video on the Zamzar site.

Zamzar will also enable you to convert other files to new formats. Among the most useful is its ability to convert .pdf files to other formats, including to .doc (Word document). Once a .pdf is converted to .doc, you can edit it. Whew...the big drawback of .pdf is now much less of a drawback. Sometimes the formatting is a little wacky, but it's usually manageable. Thanks, Zamzar!

The Invisible Web and a Principal's Blog and Copyright Fun

There is so much more on the Internet than most of us ever find. And often, what we don't see is vastly better information than what we do see. Robert Lackie has posted an excellent list of tips and resources for exploring the "Invisible Web". It's well worth the time it takes to check out some of these tools.

Now for a real treat...take a look at Dr. Williams' (the Principal of Hewitt-Trussville Middle School located somewhere in Alabama) blog entitled The Principal's Blog. More to the point, look at the comments to his blog entries. Wow....kids are creating a dialogue with their Principal. What a treat.

Finally, it's hard, sometimes, to make Copyright Law interesting. But it is always important. We educators hang our copyright hats on the hook of "Fair Use". Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.

WikiMindMap and Quintura for Kids

WikiMindMap is interesting...and fun. This site creates a mind map for you from information in Wikipedia. All you do is enter the subject you are interested in, then choose the appropriate Wiki. The English speaking world would choose en.wikipedia.org from the list of possibilities. Ta daaa....the mind map appears. From the map, you can link to the articles or websites cited in the Wikipedia article. The only drawback here is that you cannot capture the mindmap for other uses. (You can do a screen print, but that's not very useful.) Take a look at this site. For writers who are stumped, it's an instant brainstorm!

For the youngest Internet searchers, Quintura for Kids is an excellent portal. In my opinion, it is a much better choice than Yahooligans. You'll need to play with it for a couple of minutes to get used to its interface. But once you do, I think you'll find that it is very friendly indeed. Let me know what you think.

Nifty Freebie

Answers.com has a free download for both PC's and Mac's. The download and installation take less than 5 minutes. Once the program is installed, you can point to any word in any program (or at least in all programs I've tried), hold the Alt key down and click on the word. When you release the Alt key, a little window pops up with the definition and/or additional information about the word. For example, I clicked on "Oneida" and was given information about the town of Oneida, including its current weather. When I clicked on the "More" button, I was shown information from a variety of encyclopedias covering the Oneida Community and the Oneida Indians. In addition, there is always a sound icon that allows you to check pronounciation.

Think of the uses you and your students might make of this. I can imagine all kinds of "lists" a teacher might make for students, with the pronounciation and basic info available through Answers. In any case, give it a try. You can certainly uninstall this gizzmo easily, but 'til you test it you can't really envision it!

While you're at it, explore the answers.com home page. I haven't spent much time there, but it seems intriguing.

Sources for Templates

Hope these sites are useful to lots of folks. They are posted particularly for workshop participants at HF-L on August 1st. We'll be looking at interesting ways to use MS Office, and some of the templates are sure to tempt teachers.

MicroSoft Office Templates: These templates are arranged by category. Not all of them are for teachers, of course, but many, many are useful in your practice. Check out the awards category, and the calendars.

TeacherTools: This site has a great many documents which you can save as templates and use. Click on the “Forms and Letters” category on the left hand menu.

BrainyBetty: A great assortment of PowerPoint background templates, and a relief from the over-used templates available from MicroSoft!

Georgia Educational Technology Training Center: Templates for Word and PowerPoint, along with other resources, are available here. It’s worth a look.

Lexington School District 1: Templates for Excel and PowerPoint…and good ones!

Automate Excel: Wow…some of these templates are highly unusual, interesting, fun. Check ‘em out!

Mark Damon’s Games: The best, the VERY best. Try these first!

Zoho Notebook

Here's an interesting program: http://notebook.zoho.com

It looks like it has real possibilities for educators, though I haven't played with it enough to have thought it through. If you come up with ideas, please add them in the comments area. I'll be thinking too.

Skype fun

Wow, my resolve to blog more often sure did fall apart. I've been having too much fun on Skype, connecting with my beautiful new granddaughter. (Okay, I do have to enlist her parents in this effort, but they are most cooperative!)

Meantime, I can't help but think of how useful Skype could be for educators. (Skype allows you to easily use your webcam and microphone to connect with others via the Internet.) Since it's free and extraordinarily simple to use, classes could talk to each other. Better still, classes could talk with "experts" in almost any field. It would just be a matter of teachers making the arrangements. Kids would certainly take to Skyping in a heartbeat. What a great summer project for educators...to set up Skype, experiment with it a bit, then plan to incorporate it into their September lessons.

In Skype, you locate people using their email addresses. Mine is: gailgri@gmail.com Feel free to use me as part of your learning curve. I'd be delighted to see and hear you online!

Back to Blogging

I've been enjoying myself in so many ways, and can prove it with these holiday pictures. But I've missed my blog and have left it on its own for too long. Thanks to those of you who were in the NYSCATE workshop and who emailed me afterwards. I love to hear of the good instructional use you are making of the online tools we tried together!

Here's a new and nifty way to have your students respond to the books they are reading. At LibraryThing you can create a "library" for your students. Signing in is free and you can enter up to 200 books for free...after that it is either $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. If your class reads more than 200 books, it is worth every cent of $10 to keep track! It won't take you more than a few minutes to master the intricacies of this site. Your students can enter their books, read other reviews of their books, then write a review of their own. And what fun it will be to watch the list of books grow.

I ran across references to a teriffic little video called Web2.0...The Machine Is Us/ing Us. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to watch it.

Wow. It's been a long time since I posted to Musings. With my retirement in mid-August, I went on a blogging holiday. Now that things have settled down a bit, I have a ton of catching up to do in both blog-reading and blog-writing.

I was happy to see some excellent middle school activities from NASA. All three of the current modules (Tracking a Solar Storm, Star Count, and Winter's Story, are highly engaging and offer multiple opportunities for cross-curricular activities in addition to solid science. Thanks, NASA!

For the K-6 mathematicians in your life, try Math Playground. While much of the material is lower level, there are some nifty logic games here, sure to exercise young brains (and old ones!)

If you haven't discovered Gliffy yet, you are in for a treat. Sign in (it's free) and you are using fully satisfactory mind-mapping, flow-chart program. Take 10 minutes to find your way around, then use it with your classes either in a teacher-led exercise, or with small groups or individuals at their own computers.

Food for Thought

While I had to miss the best national computing conference (NECC) this year, I have been trying to keep track of what was going on. I ran across David Jakes' description of a keynote by Dewitt Jones, a photographer for "National Geographic". David's notes were enough to send me off to Jones's own site where I found, much to my joy, an article entitled "Seeing the Ordinary as Extraordinary". As I prepare for retirement from my fulltime work and ponder future adventures, articles such as these remind me of the treasure of time and limitless realm of possibilities. Thank you, David, and thank you Dewitt!

Podcasting Revisited

I will be working with some of my fellow faculty members next week as we consider the uses of podcasting in education. In preparation for that, I've been looking again at the world of audio recording. Some thoughts:

• WavePad is still my favorite free recording program. It's flexible, allows one to save in many formats, including MP3 or 4, and is reasonably intuitive.
• Springdoo takes all the work out of recording...except, of course, determining the content. Since Springdoo itself retains the recording, it cannot be downloaded. That's a real drawback in this age of portable MP3 players. Students, many of them, will expect to put sound files on their players and will NOT be pleased if they cannot do that.
• Remember to look at the March 19, 2006 post here in Musings for information about sites with free music downloads.
• I am posting a few links here to school-related podcasts. They are all live as of the date of this posting, but school materials are often deleted at the end of term. I hope that doesn't happen, but...

1. AP World History - a history teacher uses podcasting to assist his AP class
2. Round Robin Story - a group of 7th graders collaborate on this story
3. Camera Position - this is much fancier than most teachers can handle time-wise, but I love it.
4. Instrumental Music at Exton - a music teacher posts samples of classical (so far) music
5. The Udall Times Podcast - a middle school "news" report
6. ColeyCast - a 5th grade using podcasting across their curricula
7. French For Beginners - complete with .pdf handouts for each lesson; a semi-professional site, but full of ideas
8. Insta Spanish - a lot like the French site, without handouts; I'm not sure this is for beginners.
9. English as a Second Language - this site has a collection of ESL podcasts; while many of these are for adults, they have much to offer in the area of ideas if not content.
10. Learn a Song This is another ESL site, and a ton of fun! We might not be able to replicate such a site, but maybe we could USE it?
11. A few more student made podcasts are on my February 7 Musings entry. There is also a link there to the How-to handout.

I have posted a how-to and some links and demos on the West Irondequoit technology pages. We have a long way to go in developing the educational potential of technologies like podcasting, so getting started seems like a good thing to do!

Wikis, wikis, wikis

Wikis as an educational tool? It looks to me like a terrific tool which is limited only by our imaginations. So what are folks doing with them? Take a look:

• Mr. Kuropatwa uses this wiki with his Applied Math class. The idea is to create a "solutions manual" in which students all collaborate to develop a learning tool for all of them to use. Students are not only expected to provide at least one solution of their own, but also to make "constructive modifications" to solutions which others have created. This is a high school wiki for, I believe, one of the less challenging math classes. Mr. K. also has a wiki out there for his AP Calculus class and other classes. Think collaboration for kids!
• Holocaust Wiki Project is a fascinating example of collaborative work and simulation as a learning experience for students. It is well worth exploring, even if wikis are not in your future.
• Web 2.0 Analysis Project - Students in this class are evaluating web pages; they are interested in design. I'd love to see them evaluating content!
• Adavis: Improving Instruction Through the Use of Weblogs Take your time with this one. It's full of great ideas coming from a master teacher of teachers.
• Check out the list of wikis on Witest Wiki. Lots of student wikis for your consideration.

Coming of Age - and other stuff

The beauty of the Web, the huge change it brings to us and to our students, is found in its open and accessible nature. I wonder how many of us have even begun to appreciate the scope of change that this can bring, should bring, will bring to education.

Self-education for educators is essential, then, if we are to both take part in this changing world ourselves and enable our students to take advantage of it. Thomas Freedman, et al, have provided a wonderful addition to our self-education bookshelf...and it's free. Coming of Age: an introduction to the new world wide web is a 92 page compilation of some of the best thoughts of the best thinkers in field of instructional technology in education. Once you have downloaded the material, you can read online or print all or some of the essays. What a gift!

For fun, try out the Visual Thesaurus. This one isn't free, but it's definitely fun. The available trial lets you do severaly word searches, and by leaving the website and returning, you can start the trial all over again. The cost is pretty reasonable, too, if you want to "own" it or have access online. I can certainly think a ways to use this with youngsters which would broaden their appreciation of language, the interconnectedness of words, the variations in meaning, and more.

Pew Internet and American Life Project has an interesting memo on our awareness of Internet terms.

Sites to Use With Kids

The National Council for Educational Statistics provides NECS's Student Classroom with a variety of interesting opportunities for your students. This site includes an online graph-making site, a place for students to publish their own writing, math games and more.

Speaking of math, try this Count-On for the K-8 kids. In fact, click on the Games button and try it out yourself. I'm still trying to win Fliver!

Then there's Rainforest Maths (yes, maths...the UK way). Do remember that this is from the UK, so sections that involve measurement will be metric.

Carol Kress suggests Play to Learn. Her 2nd graders practice time and money skills on the site. Carol says it's pretty basic, but the kids love it!

And for the youngest of our students...or our wee ones at home, don't miss Poissonrouge. It may be too young for almost all of our youngsters, but it is so well done that it's worth a visit under any circumstances.