The Week In Review - The Most Popular Posts

The original Tigger. 

Good afternoon from New York City where I spent the day exploring the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the neat things I saw at the NYPL was a display of the stuffed animals at inspired the writing of Winnie The Pooh. This was my first time in either of the buildings since I was teenager so it was nice to revisit with a new perspective on what I was seeing. If you get the chance to visit either the Met or NYPL, do it. If you cannot visit in-person, both organizations offer nice online resources for students too.

Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you're doing something fun too.

Here are these week's most popular posts:
1. 30,000+ Images of Art and Artifacts to Download and Re-use for Free
2. Essay Map Provides Step-by-Step Help for Constructing Essays
3. A Short Example of the Benefits of Classroom Blogs
4. Finding Hidden Sugar
5. Show Students How Far a Dollar Used to Stretch With this Economics Calculator
6. Augment - A Platform for Sharing 3D Models in Augmented Reality
7. What is the World Wide Web? And How Does It Work? - Two Good Explanations

Four seats are left at the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. 

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.
Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
IXL offers a huge assortment of mathematics lesson activities.
Typing Club offers free typing lessons for students.
Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
ABCya.com is a provider of free educational games for K-5.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.
Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.
EdTechTeacher is offers professional development workshops in Boston and Chicago.
StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.

How to Subscribe to Free Technology for Teachers. 
Subscribe via RSS. Subscribe via Email.
Like Free Technology for Teachers on  Facebook.
Find me on Twitter, on Google+, or on Pinterest.

Math Graphing - A Nice Collection of K-8 Math Resources

Math Graphing is a part of a larger compilation of K-8 resources assembled by the Jefferson County Schools of Jefferson County, Tennessee. The Jefferson County Schools have hundreds of links for K-8 math, science, social studies, and language arts. I came across this great resource while looking for an interactive graphing activity. I found the activity I was looking for, but of more value is the Math Graphing collection of links from Jefferson County Schools.

Math Graphing has links to 48 interactive graphing activities appropriate for elementary school and middle school use. If you're looking for other mathematics activities, check out the Jefferson County Schools' general math page. The general math page is divided into fourteen categories including fractions, flashcards, integers, telling time, algebra, and geometry.

Gooru Adds New Content for K-4 and a New Question Type

Gooru is a nice service for creating and sharing collections of educational videos, images, and texts. Over the last couple of years Gooru has steadily added more content and more features for teachers and their students. The latest update to Gooru includes eleven new content sets for K-4 students. The content sets include materials for ELA, Science, Math, and Social Studies. You can find the new materials in the "communities" section of Gooru.

Earlier this year Gooru added the option to create quizzes about the content that you share with students. The latest update added an option to create questions that have multiple correct answers.

Applications for Education
Gooru makes it easy to create collections of videos, images, and interactive websites to use as part of a flipped lesson. Being able to add quiz questions for students to answer as they go through one of the units you've created is the feature of Gooru that I like best. By having students answer as they go through the collection I can get a sense of what I need to spend more or less time covering in my classroom.

Gooru does offer an iPad app. You can learn more about their iPad app here.

Service Through Video - A Next Vista Challenge

As many readers of this blog know, Next Vista for Learning is one of my favorite sites to share with others. Next Vista for Learning is a video sharing site unlike any other. Videos hosted on Next Vista are created by teachers and students for the purpose of sharing good news and good lessons with other teachers and students. Throughout the year Next Vista for Learning hosts challenges that are designed to get students and teachers thinking about creative video projects. This week the founder of Next Vista, Rushton Hurley, sent me an email about one of their recently concluded challenges. Service via Video was a challenge that asked students to create short videos about people working to improve their communities. The four most popular videos from that challenge are embedded below.

Live, Online U.S. History Review With Hip Hughes History

Keith Hughes, producer of the popular Hip Hughes History series of YouTube videos, is hosting a live review session for high school students on June 16th. In the one minute video below Keith explains everything you need to know about the session.


H/T to Ken Halla.