Google Earth is often pigeon-holed as niche software for those teaching geography or for the hobbyist with a keen interest in GIS applications. Google Earth has much more to offer the classroom teacher than the obvious geography connections. I will not attempt to enumerate all of the uses in this post. I did find the following links to be very helpful for incorporating Google Earth: http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/GeogP/gearthplan/, http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php/Cat/0, http://googlelittrips.com/, and http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth.html.

According to Google, Google Earth Professional offers “high-quality printing, image export, movie maker, data importer, premium support, and measurement tools.” (http://earth.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21407) The real advantage of Google Earth is the resources you can incorporate into the software. Look for “Google Earth Pro plug-ins” with your favorite web browser if you would like specific functionality from the software. You can start with perusing http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-plugins-and-resources-to-make-google-earth-more-fun/ and http://www.gearthhacks.com/downloads/. All of this comes at a price though – $400 a year to be exact. However, Google is offering the professional version of their software absolutely free to educators.

Be sure to check out the Google Earth “how to” from Hall Davidson at http://www.halldavidson.net/GoogleEarthHD.pdf.

Steps For Applying For a Free Educator Account:

1. Download the Google Earth Professional trial version at https://registration.keyhole.com/choice_kh_initial.html. Make note of your Google Earth trial account user name and license key.
2. Send an email to GEEC@google.com from your school email account expressing your interest.
3. Wait for the reply from Google. They will send a short application for you to complete in email format.

by Tim Cushman

We live at a time where all of the world’s knowledge is accessible through a singular and ubiquitous platform.  This is the unimaginable reality of the day in which we live thanks to the evolution of the Internet.  One would think that educators would be on the cusp of the knowledge revolution.  The fact is, many classroom teachers do not leverage the potential of the Internet.

A major barrier for the busy teacher is finding appropriate resources in a timely manner.  It is easy to spend several hours at several different websites looking for resources for a single lesson.  The incessant “needle in the haystack” searching for meaningful content gets old quickly and is abandoned in due course.  There is hope for bringing the best of the Internet into your classroom thanks to some great collections of digital resources.

I will not attempt to enumerate the “Top 10″ most useful teacher websites.  I would, however,  like to share a handful of sites for finding some really great resources.

1. Thinkfinity (free) – a very well organized, easy to use portal for instructional resources
2. Discovery Education Network (free) – register yourself and start collaborating with 25,000 other educators; browse by category
3. Nettrekker (by subscription) – available for all GCSD teachers; a search engine customized for schools that returns educationally relevant results to keyword searches; well worth the money

What other repositories of good educational resources have you found?

by Tim Cushman

The primary challenge in the successful implementation of technology in the classroom is the buy-in from the individual teacher.  Many districts elect to channel all of their technology funds into the purchase of hardware and software at the expense of end-user training.  This short-sighted approach leaves many teachers floundering to learn the new technology on their own time, often with limited access to self-study materials.  This frustration is enough of a roadblock for many teachers to ignore technology tools all together or to use them only at a very basic level.

I do have to wonder, at one point do we as professional educators include the pursuit of learning technology under the umbrella of personal growth?  I am not referring to simply staying current with a variety of new products in order to continually “wow” a group of students as a means of crowd control (listen to Wesley Fryer’s “Strive to Engage, Not Enthrall”).

Image details: Single Image Set by picapp.com

Technology is a tool that serves as a powerful conduit to learning in the hands of the master teacher.  A colleague of mine, Tim Van Heule, often quips that, “the effective use of technology makes a good teacher better, but the misuse of technology makes a good teacher poor.”  Like a master craftsman building a house, it is about using the right tool in the right way.

I recommend the following method for staying current: read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video tutorials.

Start Here
David Jakes provides an excellent resource on his wiki for teachers interesting in deepening their understanding of an array of technologies.  The tasks are straightforward and can easily be completed in fifteen minutes.  David’s site is full of great resources and is worth a thorough examination.  Do this if nothing else.

Blogs
Click here for a clear explanation of blogs and here to learn how to get blogs automatically delivered to your computer.

A few of my favorite blogs are dy/dan, edu.blogs, Ian Jukes, Steve Hargadon, The Strength of Weak Ties, and 2 Cents.

Podcasts
Click here for a clear explanation of podcasts.  iTunes is a great way to manage your podcasts.  Click here for a video tutorial on how to subscribe to podcasts through iTunes.

Video Tutorials
More video tutorials on the use of hardware and software packages are being posted online thanks in large part to the YouTube revolution.  Atomic Learning is well worth the money if you can afford it because of the volume of tutorials and the speed at which they load.  You can find some decent user content on sites like YouTube or TeacherTube if you don’t mind putting in extra time searching.

by Tim Cushman

Comics and education?  Can their be a more juxtaposed pairing?  The idea of using comics to teach is inconceivable for many like me who spent tedious hours in the elementary classroom listening to a lecture on this historical character or that scientific principle while nervously eying my best friend the next row over as he drew the story playing out  in his head.  Inevitably, he would be caught and would face the full ire of a peeved teacher.  The fact is, telling a good story is a very difficult thing to do.  I don’t mean telling a story that simply entertains (although there is a place for that).  Rather, using storytelling, and in this case comics, as a means to communicate a powerful idea in a concise way.

The standard needs to be set high.  I like to make the comparison to Hollywood films.  A good movie that tells a powerful story in a powerful way wins an Oscar.  Movies that may enjoy a certain amount of the mainstream spotlight and are in some way sensational may generate revenue but do not necessarily reflect good storytelling.  We need to get our students to produce ”Oscar-worthy” digital stories.  This is very difficult and requires a great deal of thought and creativity.  The challenge to be creative and innovative is what our students need.  Jobs requiring knowledge are outsourced.  Jobs requiring innovation and cooperation within a diverse community never will be.  This is the future we are preparing them for.  Enough pontificating from my soap box…

Comeeko.com offers a new take on digital storytelling by turning your digital photos into a comic-style format.  The effect is appealing.  All you need is a digital camera for taking pictures of the “characters” in the comic.  Comeeko will add the unique comic-styling.  What could you do with Comeeko?

Supporting student learning has gotten easier with modern tools like TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio 5 ($179, educational price) and Matchware’s ScreenCorder 5 ($189, educational price). Camtasia allows you to record your on-screen actions, add narration, pop-up speech bubbles, and illustrations to a video in a variety of shareable formats. Both Camtasia and Screencorder are very good if you are looking to purchase desktop recording software. You can download the Camtasia or ScreenCorder 5 trial to find the solution that work best for you.

Creating screencasts can be a great way for teachers to maximize instructional time by making technical explanations and classroom lessons available for students to review outside of class.

Screencasting would also be a an effectual means of individualizing instruction for struggling students. How much more productive could the middle school math teacher be if a series of step-by-step instructional videos were created on solving equations or working with integers? Students can also create videos to either demonstrate knowledge of a process or as part of a classroom project.

Camtasia and SreenCorder are good, but money for software may not be in the budget. There are two free alternatives for you to consider – uTipu and CamStudio. Both programs are completely free and easy to use. I prefer uTipu, but both will do the job. Be sure to check your district’s policy regarding the installation of software.

Screencasting does require a time commitment. Consider using students to create and produce the videos. The result is mutually beneficial.

MusOpen! (www.musopen.com) is a growing collection of online music, completely free of all copyright restrictions. MusOpen! is maintained by a non-profit organization with the express goal of “setting music free” by making recordings of sheet music in the public domain. In short, MusOpen! works with artists that are interested in making copyright-free music available to everyone. You can read more on the legal stuff here if you are the curious type.

The quality of the songs is surprisingly good (320kbps bit rate) and is available for streaming or download. Sheet music is also available for download and may be of interest to music teachers and students alike.

MusOpen! is “setting music free” as claimed, but it is hardly a large scale jailbreak. The collection is currently limited to roughly one hundred, classical performances. The sparse library is a bit disappointing, but the idea is innovative and has potential.

I am pleased to see sites like MusOpen popping up on the Internet. It is difficult to find no-cost, legal audio sources to direct students to as they create technology-based projects. You can read more about sources for multimedia in the classroom in a previous posting.

You may also have occasion to use a copyrighted work for instruction or in some way to promote your school. Copyright law still applies, regardless of your intentions. There are several good sources on the web for educating yourself on your legal limits of fair use. I found one good site here.

by Tim Cushman

Read the Words is a fabulous, FREE web service for converting text into speech. Instantly, many teachers will think of using this site for their special education and non-English speaking students. I would argue that the applications for this web tool is far wider.

Think about the flow of the normal school day. Hectic? How about making more of your teacher notes or other handouts available as an audio recording instead of paper handouts (be mindful of copyright)? Creating a digital reading and distributing the file to your class takes less time then running photocopies and saves precious school resources.

Read the Words has potential for some unique student projects. For example, you might want to translate student writing pieces to an “audiobook” that could be posted on your classroom web site with different voices for each character. The audio file could add some extra flair to traditional projects like Interactive PowerPoint to relay information or give directions.

Read the Words is a singularly-purposed app that does its job well. You can copy and paste text to the site or upload a PDF, Word doc, HTML file, RSS feed, or website address. Read the Words will convert the text into an MP3 file that can be loaded on your iPod or MP3 player as well as giving you a URL for embedding the audio file into a website. Don’t worry about losing your recordings. All conversions will be saved for your exclusive use on the Read the Words website under the “My Recordings” tab.

It only gets better. Read the Words will read in English, Spanish, and French in fifteen different voice and at a user-controlled speed. Worried about conversion speed? Read the Words will convert an hour’s worth of audio in literally 60 seconds. Trouble with mispronounced text in your recording? Type the problem words phonetically.

Text to speech technology has a mixed history – mostly disappointing. I admit that the voice quality from Read the Words aspires to be at the level of KITT from the old Knight Rider series, but that is not exactly an equitable comparison since KITT had an actor doing voice-over AND David Hasselhoff riding in the driver’s seat. Try it out for yourself. I used Read the Words to convert this post to speech.  However, I could not get the code to work properly within WordPress (and yes, I did follow the directions).  Read the Words was very fast in converting this post to MP3, with a processing time of exactly four seconds.

What are your ideas and experiences with Read the Words?

I did a lot of memorizing as a kid. At least, I was assigned to do a lot of memorizing as a kid. No “Fact Left Behind” could have been the unofficial tag-line of my primary education. How did I deal with all of the memorizing? My strategy was simple. I would procrastinate until the day of the test or quiz and then fake a dire attack of the stomach flu. If I would have only had Quizlet. I at least may have had classmates willing to play with me at recess without fear of a sudden flare up of “my condition.”

All joking aside, Quizlet really is a useful tool for learning vocabulary. I am a firm believer in teaching problem solving and applying logic to real-world problems, but I also believe there are times where memorization is a necessity. In fact, Quizlet was created by a 15 year old high school student struggling to learn French vocabulary (read the story here). This is one example of what can happen when we put technology in the hands of our students and make them responsible for their own learning. I will not get up on my soapbox at this time…

Quizlet is easy to use for multiple reasons. It starts with the ease of adding information that you would like to learn. Any digital text can be pasted into Quizlet with the standard copy/paste commands. This information is then transformed into individualized flashcards, a quiz style game, or a test with questions in a variety of formats. Please watch the short demo movie by clicking here.

The real beauty of this website is the inate social aspect of the modern Internet. Any data being studied, called a “set” on Quizlet, can be shared with any other Quizlet user or group of users. This means that instead of wasting valuable instructional time having students copy down important terms, the instructor could create a Quizlet set and let students work at their own pace at school during non-instructional time or own their own at home. Students could also create their own sets and easily collaborate with their classmates outside of the classroom.

Don’t want to create a set? You can search for sets created by others and take the quiz…err…quizlet and just get started. I have linked to a word and definition set as an example of some of the sets already available.

The hallmark of the digital age is communication…or at least it should be. The reality is that the efficiency of computing is hampered when the recipient of an email attachment does not have the appropriate software needed for opening the file. This is less of an issue within the business community, but there is no guarantee that the students in our classrooms will have access to the commercial programs used at school once they leave for home. I have encountered such problems frequently when sending files to my students to study or work on at home.

There is now an easy solution to this common problem. Koolwire is a handy, free service for converting among popular file formats. For example, Word, PowerPoint or Excel can be converted to a PDF without Adobe Acrobat. Need to convert a PDF to a Word document? Koolwire does that too. The two most prevelant audio file formats, WAV and MP3, can also be converted interchangeably.

What you need to know when using Koolwire:

1. The file you are converting must be less then 10 MB.
2. You are sending the file as an email attachment to Koolwire – the size of the file will have an impact on the speed of conversion. The converted file will come back to you as an attachment a few minutes later (with a few links in the body of the message from advertisers).
3. Koolwire does not store your files. All attachments are deleted on the Koolwire servers after conversion.

There is no software to install, only send an email with the attached file for conversion to the appropriate address below:

From Word, PowerPoint, or Excel to PDF: pdf@koolwire.com
From PDF to Word: doc@koolwire.com
From WAV to MP3: mp3@koolwire.com
From MP3 to WAV: wav@koolwire.com