The Teacher's Handbook

September signifies the beginning of the year for me - not January! As a teacher, I enjoy my summer but always look forward to meeting my new 6th grade students and welcoming back my 7th and 8th graders. I also begin each school year with a renewed vigor and determination to be the best teacher I can be.

A colleague of mine, Dr. John Hrevnack, has written an excellent book for first year teachers, but this book can also provide ideas and encouragement for any teacher. The Teacher’s Handbook provides a foundation for those entering the teaching profession. It emphasizes the development of the lesson plan, unit plan, and classroom management through the integration of theory with practice. 

Here's to a great school year!

The Last 18 Years in Rap

This video was produced by Flocabulary using Vimeo
Congratulations to all graduates of 2011.
The Last 18 Years in Rap 1993-2011 from Flocabulary on Vimeo.

Videography in Education

Videography

View more presentations from pfriedman729.

This is the presentation from the Montclair State University Classroom Reset Conference on May 20, 2011.

Bubbl.us

Bubble.us is an awesome website. According to the site, the goal was to create a "simple to use and easy to learn tool to help people organize ideas in a way that makes sense to them." The cool part is that you can share your stuff with collaborators, save your projects online, change the colors and sizes of the bubbles, add/delete arrows, and move the buttons around on the page. This site was created in 2006 by two guys from Russia, Kirill and Levon. Educationally, teachers can have students use this site to organize their ideas or to visually depict concepts in reading and writing. Graphic organizers are a powerful way to communicate ideas visually. Here is a sample that I created using the site:

Technology and Language Arts: Idioms

As a computer technology teacher, I am always looking for ways to integrate other areas of the curriculum into my own. One of the units I teach to my 8th grade classes is Graphic Design. Students use Adobe Photoshop Elements to create many projects in my class. There are numerous ways to use a program like this in education. One way I did this was to have my students research idioms. I shared with them an Idiom Website where they could find many different idioms and their meanings. Once they made their selection, the students opened Photoshop and began illustrating their idiom literally. They are learning about a key concept while also practicing their technology skills!!

Weebly - Create a Free Website

I started using Weebly this year for my students' web design unit. It is such a fantastic site that I am featuring it on my blog this month. Weebly is completely FREE. The interface is extremely user friendly, with a drag and drop type of editing. There are over 70 designs to choose from, or you can completely customize a template or build your own site using HTML & CSS right in the Weebly editor.

Some of the many features include: picture galleries/slide shows, YouTube videos, contact forms, custom HTML, Google AdSense and blogs with full comment moderation.

My students learned the essential skills of web design, while creating informative websites at the same time. To see the sites from the Fall 2010 classes, click on my Students' Weebly Sites page.

Good Searching

Here's a new easy way to raise money for your favorite cause. Just start using Yahoo! powered GoodSearch.com as your search engine and they'll donate about a penny to your favorite cause every time you do a search!
In addition, do all of your shopping through their online shopping mall, GoodShop.com, where you can shop at more than 900 top online retailers and a percentage of your purchases will go to the charity or school of your choice. You pay the same price as you normally would, but a donation goes to your cause!
Here's the web site — http://www.goodsearch.com/. You can also read about GoodSearch in the NY Times, Oprah Magazine, CNN, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal

Teach Parents Tech by Google!

As a Google Certified Teacher, I couldn't be more excited! Google has just launched a new site, Teach Parents Tech. The purpose of the site is to explain, in layman's terms, how to do many comon tasks, like how to copy & paste, resize a picture, and how to crop pictures. This site is host to over 50 videos, most of which are an average of 40 seconds long. I have watched every single one of these informational videos and have come to the conclusion that they are NOT just for parents. As a matter of fact, I am a parent of three children myself and probably know way more than they do! (Of course, tech is my life...but that's another story). The videos are short and to the point. They cover topics from How To Make A Blog to How To View Live Traffic. When you visit the site, you will be able to send an email to someone, attaching the relevant videos. You can also just watch the videos on YouTube's Teach Parents Tech. There are 51 videos, and each one is narrated by a "young person" explaining in very clear terms how to perform different tasks. Enjoy!

Free Rice

I have been using Free Rice with my students for a few years now. According to their website, "FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme. Our partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University."

So far, nearly 83 billion grains of rice have been donated. If you are wondering how that translates to how much food that is, it's enough rice to feed more than 4.3 million people for one day!!

Here is how we use it at our school: Students go to the website and choose a subject. The choices are: Art, English, Chemistry, Geography, Language, and Math. There are a few sub-categories so for example, if you are interested in Language, you can choose from French, German, Italian, or Spanish. Once they have chosen their category, the students begin answering questions. The answers are always mutliple choice and begin at an easy level. As students answer questions correctly, the questions slowly become more difficult. You can change the subject at any time without affecting the amount of rice you have donated. For each correct answer, 10 grains of rice are donated.

I usually have the students spend 10 minutes on the site and the average number of rice donated is 800 grains per student. What a great way to help feed the world and learn at the same time. According to NBC News, it is "a simple way to bring kids to the Internet for a good reason, a way to feed their minds and . . . to feed a whole lot of people . . . helping fight world hunger, one grain of rice at a time."

The World Food Programme has created a site just for Students and Teachers. Teachers can register, create a Group and have their students compete against other classes to try and donate the most rice.

As Thanksgiving approaches, let's all try to remember that there are many people around the world who are hungry and need our help!

Audacity

I have been using Audacity in my classroom now for several years. Audacity is free, open source software that can be used to record and edit sounds. My students use this program to create podcasts, and to record voiceovers for their video projects. It is also compatible with many different operating systems.

Below is a sample of a student who recorded a commercial for a fashion store:

Below is a sample of a student who used Audacity to record his voice and then added music: