Monday, February 29, 2016

How Big is the Sun

This blog post from Free Technology for Teachers features a video from Minute Physics, the video is really nice, short and easy for students to understand, but Minute Physics on YouTube has a lot of other videos too.

How Big is the Sun?

A Classroom Timer

I love little internet tools that are free and make life a little easier. This is just such a tool, a popup timer with a buzzer.  It is very simple, easy to use and who doesn't need a timer now and again.  I got this from one of my favorite blogs, Free Technology For Teachers.

Timer Pop

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Love this really cute site I found on the Technology Tidbits blog, I think it would be a fun way to help students work on Language Arts and also digital storytelling.  Students create their own monster, they play a game where they identify parts of speech by having their monster eat them and students can create and watch their own story.


Story Monster

Thursday, February 4, 2016

A great blog about Hello Ruby

I was not a computer person growing up, in fact I am old enough that there weren't any and when I started college you had to get time at a terminal to access the main frame!  I was a theater major, totally right brained and thought computer programming was gibberish.  I had my first in depth introduction to computers in my 40s and it was love at first sight.  Mostly because of the ability to correct and rearrange my writing.  Organization is not my strong suit, in fact, I work for disorganization because it was to discouraging to try and be organized.  Computers changed that for me, I am so much more able to organize myself.  I don't forget meetings as often, my files are alphabetized!  Amazing stuff.  I learned about programming in my early 50s and I really loved it.  Programming is a language and I am good at languages.  It has vocabulary, syntax and punctuation, I could do this.  I still love programming, I never really got very good at it but I really enjoy it and love watching children master programming.  I cannot wait to introduce my granddaughter to Scratch, Alice and all of the other wonderful tools that are being developed for kids.  I just read this blog from iLearn Technology about Hello Ruby, a book about programming for children and now a whole website.  I ordered the book right away, I can't wait to see it.  This is one I definitely want to share!

Hello Ruby: A whimsical way to learn about computers and programming