Mike Falick's Blog

Feeling Smart: Here's the Website for the Official SAT Question of the Day

The College Board's website now features a SAT practice question every day.  In addition, the website provides extensive resources to prepare for the SAT.

Resources to Help Teachers Organize the Classroom

The following resources to help teachers to organize and decorate the classroom are courtesy of the Harris County Department of Education August 2009 Instructional Technology Newsletter:

Resources to Organize & Decorate Your Classroom

Internet4Classrooms - Internet4Classrooms provides printables and ideas for bulletin boards, bookmarks, flashcards, books to make, and many more.

ABC Teach—Back to School - ABC Teach provides printable borders, “All About Me” sheets, student information cards, printable shape books, story starters, and more, to begin the school year.

The Teacher’s Corner - Teacher’s Corner provides images of wonderful bulletin board ideas to start the school year.

Kaboose—Back to School - Kaboose provides links to bulletin board printables, bookmarks, and theme-based printables such as “Texas Hill Country.” Activity sheets are also available for home projects.

Free Posters at Free Stuff for Teachers - Order free online posters for your classroom.

PowerPoints for the Classroom - Nebo School District in Iowa provides many elementary and secondary completed PowerPoints for classroom use.  Click on a PowerPoint link, then click “Open” to preview, or “Save” to save a copy for editing.

Busy Teachers Care – Many printables for group activities and other classroom uses.

If you would like to get the HCDE Instructional Technology Newsletter, please e-mail Jeanie Cole at jcole@hcde-texas.org to be added or deleted from the Instructional Technology Newsletter group.  Please reply with “add me” in the subject line to be added, or with “remove me” in the subject line to be removed.

Timetric: A Free Website for Accessing and Analyzing Data Over Time

I recently came across Timetric, a very useful website for data access and analysis.  Timetric, as described from its website more fully below, allows you to post your own data over time as well as access data posted by others.   Timetric is a free service but does require you to register to use the service.

An example appears below (click on the image to enlarge).

 

________________________________________

What's Timetric for?

Timetric's here to help you make sense of data. If you think about it, most of the numbers we come across every day are things like temperatures, prices, rates, volumes: numbers which vary over time. That's what Timetric focuses on: graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time.

The fancy name for this sort of thing is time series analysis. We're building tools to make it as easy to build models on top of time series — updated whenever the data they're based on is updated — as it is to use a spreadsheet.

LIFE.com: Life Magazine Puts Its Content and Pictures on the Web with Continuous Updates

Life magazine's website, LIFE.com, has recently been significantly expanded to include free access to its millions of photographs.  In addition, the site is now is updated frequently with "Today in the News" and other photographs.

From the LIFE.com website:

Welcome to LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web.

LIFE and Getty Images, the two most recognized names in photography, have joined forces to provide you instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs — for free. LIFE.com not only lets you wander through the legendary LIFE and Getty archives, but with more than 3,000 new photos added every day, it also gives you the best pictures of the people and places shaping our world now.

These are the photos you won’t forget. Taken by the world’s top photographers and curated by LIFE editors, they tell the story of our times — our heroes, our stars, our celebrations and heartbreak, the events etched in our memory and the small moments that make life sweet. When you find a photo you like, you'll be able to share it, print it, and sometimes even buy it.

We'll update the site throughout the day, but to make sure you never miss a great shot, sign up for our weekly "Picks of the Week" E-newsletter. And if you have suggestions or comments about our site, please share them with us — LIFE.com will be constantly improving and adding new features to give you the best experience possible.

Quizlet is the End of Paper Flashcards

I have previously posted a few sites that allow you to make virtual flashcards online.  I just found Quizlet, which is another flashcard site.  What distinguishes Quizlet, other than the fact that it was started by a high school student, is that it has a extraordinarily vast library of flashcards created by its users in subject areas from Algebra to AP and SAT preparation.  It is easy to use, and has a "learning" and "testing" interface.  And for today's students, virtual flashcards will be far easier to create than old-school paper ones.

From the Quizlet website:

For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Brainflare, web developer, and high school student.

Hello.

Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time.

My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.

Lure of the Labryinth: A Fun New Video Game for Learning Middle School Math

Lure of the Labyrinth is another new website that presents a fresh approach to teaching math to middle school students.

Here is a review of Lure of the Labyrinth from a recent post on eSchoolNews:

Maryland Public Television, in collaboration with MIT’s Education Arcade and educational media producer FableVision, has applied the latest research in game theory and design to produce a free learning tool to help all students learn pre-algebra concepts regardless of their math ability.

“Lure of the Labyrinth” is an online middle-school math game developed to reach today’s tech-savvy students in a contemporary way. Using the immersive characteristics of digital games, it blends a compelling storyline with multi-level puzzle play to build pre-algebra skills in proportions, fractions, and ratios; variables and equations; and numbers and operations.

Math is cleverly woven throughout an underground, monster-inhabited world. Students disguise themselves as a monster avatar plunging into a shadowy factory on a rescue mission to save their missing pet.

“Lure of the Labyrinth” can be played individually or in teams; an online communication device allows players to exchange ideas and game strategies and encourages collaborative game play.

Free Science Website Aims to Capture the Interest of 4th, 5th, and 6th Grade Students: As the Website Says " Engage and Amaze Your Students"

The Siemens Science Day website is a new site that is designed to "engage and amaze" 4th - 6th grade students.  The website includes videos and a lot of hands on science activities.

From the Siemens Science Day website:

Teachers, engage and amaze your students. Here you'll find videos, tools and revealing hands-on activities for students in grades 4 through 6 to help reinvent your science class. New, original experiments with intuitive directions, materials lists and home extensions. Get started today.

Also, here's a review of the Siemens Science Day website from eSchoolNews.com:

The Siemens Foundation and Discovery Education have unveiled a new web site that aims to engage students in science education. “Siemens Science Day” provides standards-based videos and hands-on activities for earth, life, and physical science that can help educators turn fourth through sixth graders into aspiring scientists, the two organizations say. “Educators are often challenged to find new ways within their existing curriculum to interest students in science education,” said Dale Fulton, Discovery Education’s senior vice president of curriculum development. “Siemens Science Day provides many new and creative ways to present lessons on a variety of science topics, all tied to national science standards. In addition, each activity invites student involvement, engaging students in the learning process.” Each activity on the web site includes step-by-step directions for in-class use, a materials list, at-home extensions that promote learning beyond the classroom, and related video clips. More activities will be added to the web site in the coming months, its organizers say—creating a rich database of science experiments and demonstrations that help students learn by doing.

Academic Earth: College-Level Course Videos Designed to "Give Everyone on Earth Access to a World-Class Education"

Over the past several years, I have posted a number of websites that I believe are on the cutting edge of both distance learning and providing free and open access to world class online learning opportunities.  (see prior posts here, here, and here).

Academic Earth is another promising new player in this space.  From the Academic Earth website:

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education?  At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

iTunesU Provides Dozens of Free Podcasts on Leadership

iTunesU, which I have featured previously in this blog post, , has a series of podcasts on leadership from a number of excellent sources shown below.

From the email I received from iTunesU:

"Leadership is not something that you learn once and for all. It is an ever-evolving pattern of skills, talents, and ideas that grow and change as you do." — Sheila Murray Bethel. With this collection of content, you will discover the diverse types of leadership, skills, and talents required to succeed. Take the lead from The Center for Creative Leadership's courses in Crisis Leadership and Emotional Intelligence and learn business leadership from American Public Media's Leadership from the Corner Office or Pennsylvania State University's Smeal Executive Insights Series.

You will need iTunes (free download here).  Once you have downloaded iTunes, click on each of the images below to access the podcasts available from each source.

The Federal Reserve Bank Provides a Free Personal Finance Curriculum for High School Classrooms

In these very trying financial times, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has created a personal finance curriculum for high school students called It's Your Paycheck!

From the Federal Reserve Bank's website:

It’s Your Paycheck! is designed for use in high school personal finance classes. The curriculum contains three sections—“Know Your Dough,” “KaChing!” and “All About Credit.” The lessons in each of these sections employ various teaching strategies to engage students so that they have opportunities to apply the concepts being taught. Each lesson includes black-line masters of the handouts and visuals needed to teach the lesson.

You can download the complete curriculum (.pdf) or in individual lessons. The curriculum (which is all free) includes the following:

Unit A: Know Your Dough

Lesson 1: Invest in Yourself (PDF, 62 KB)
Students are divided into groups to produce name tents. Each of four groups in the classroom produce name tents in a different way to highlight different levels of human capital. The students identify ways in which people invest in human capital and the link between investment in human capital and earning income.

Lesson 2: “W” Is for Wages, W4 and W2 (PDF, 443 KB)
Students compute the gross pay for a fictional John Dough given his hourly wage and the number of hours worked. They compare gross pay to net pay. They learn what FICA and federal income taxes are. They learn how to complete a W-4 form and what a W-2 form is.