Downloading Pictures from Groupwise

I had a question about how to take pictures that were sent in Groupwise and put them into a document. I thought I would post the answer here so others could reference it. When you are reading a message in Groupwise, when you go to save the message, you can choose to just save the photos. As you can see on this clip, the text of the message is there, but there is a .jpg file that contains the picture. You would click on that .jpg file and save it. You might want to rename the file as something that would be more meaningful to you than img_5691.jpg.
This will give you the file that you will import later on in the document you are making.

Selenia - Science Cartoons

This is a great science site that has 10 lesson plans for science built around comics of a student. There are downloadable investigation sheets that go with each of the comics. There are topics on density, insulation, and geysers to name a few of them. Selenia is a fun loving girl who can work magic, but still is keeping to science topics.

Google Earth and Literature

I was reading about a workshop offering about Google Earth and literature. I don't have time to go to the workshop, but thought I would investigate it myself. It turns out there is an amazing blog about this GoogleLit. If you have Google Earth installed, you can go to this website and download virtual tours of books. It looks as if this site is being added to all the time by teachers.If you had access to a projector and a computer, this would be a wonderful way to lead a discussion about literature. Give yourself some time to really explore this site. I love it and am trying to find a way to include it in our curriculum. They have titles about the Civil War, Revolutionary Way, Paddle to the Sea and Big Anthony. There is a really interesting mix of books and I do expect this will grow to a great resource.

Books for beginning readers of all ages

This site, Tar Heel Reader has books that have been created by others on a wide range of topics. These would be great for the older student who is just learning how to read or for younger students to read with the class. There are some books that might be inappropriate for the very young, so make sure you have read the book before you recommend it to others. You can sign in and make a favorites page so you can access your books that way.

There is a program that lets you make a book that you could post. This might be a good exercise for students to do on their topic.

Time Zone Experiences

If you are looking for a project to do with your class around time zones and times of years, this would be a good place to start. Time Zone Experiences is the name of the wiki. Students follow other classes in other parts of the world to compare what they are doing with students in other time zones. Schools that are participating are encouraged to write each month to the wiki to say what they are doing in school and what is happening in their area.

Ideas to Inspire Web Site

I found this website, Ideas to Inspire through a recommendation of a friend. It is a collection of collaborative presentations that have been made by many teachers. They are all done in a powerpoint fashion using Google Tools. I found the curriculum ideas about writing and math to be really full of great links that I might use. This site was done in Great Britain so it gives links which often don't show up as quickly in our web searches - and they are really great. I recommend you spend some time poking around this web site.

Game Classroom http://www.gameclassroom.com/

This website Game Classroom features many different types of educational games. The webmaster takes good games he has found from other places and puts them all on one web page. The great part about this web site is once your student is here and plays the game, it takes them back to Game Classroom. It is much harder to get off of this site by accident than a lot of the other sites. The games can be sorted by grade level or by content. It is a good site to have bookmarked for your class. There is also a nice homework helper component to this web site. I recommend highly. You will probably see it being used in this classroom sometime this year!

Typing game online

I found out about this game while reading another blog and decided to try it. It is certainly NOT a substitute for teaching typing, but if you want a fun way to get the students to think about knowing where keys are located on the keyboard, this is it. I spent quite a bit of time with Pacman Typing! The actual name of the game is Keyman and if you start from the home page of typing games, you can customize it to either just work with home keys or random keys. I plan on putting this link on the school web page when I work on that again. Try it and find out how difficult it really is!

Great Source for Math Games

I found this site I Play Mathgames.com and thought it was something that teachers might want to know about. All of the games are in .pdf format, they are not computer games, but the site has a well organized way to find good paper games to play with the students. These games are all from different types of workbooks that could be purchased, but I think that there are enough games on the site to make it worth your while to check it out!

Article about why to use Open Office and how to set it up!

I found this great article on another blog. This is written by Solveig Haugland, an author of a blog I follow that is called Open Office .org Training. It has great ideas for how to install Open Office and how to use templates in Open Office. If you are really interested in using Open Office, this is a good place to start.