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"Quick Clicks"
Zotero looks like a potentially great tool for collecting and organizing web research. It reminds me of one of our all-time favorite sites, Diigo, in some ways. It offers a little icon that you can install on your browser that allows you to “collect” a page with one click. Zotero also has organization and collaboration features built it.
What makes Zotero a little different, and potentially very useful, is its ability to help you create your bibliography with one click. Clicking Zotero’s “cite” button creates a citation of that webpage in your choice of format. AND when the citation opens in Zotero:
…you can simply drag it into your Word document or Google Doc and–voila!–Zotero pastes it in for you! Pretty nifty.
Zotero seems like a very useful tool for students doing web research, and also as a way to focus students on being responsible digital citizens who cite their web resources appropriately and correctly.
I recently discovered the Shout Online Conference Series thanks to the always-useful Edge21 blog. The series is produced by Smithsonian Education and Shout Learning and it looks pretty awesome. And it’s free.
According to their website, Shout seeks to actively engage students and teachers in global environmental issues. Their program offers online “events” on a wide array of topics pertaining to the protection the environment.
For example, their upcoming event is called “Planet Water: What kinds of human interventions can help the health of marine life?” It actually takes place today at 11 eastern, but Shout also has archives and other upcoming events.
You should definitely check out the Shout Online Conference Series and Shout Learning as well.
If you’re an educator on twitter, you’ve invariably seen tweets like this one:
These are tweeted automatically by Paper.li, a social media curation site that I’m starting to like now that I started using it to collect tweets with the #urbaned hashtag.
Here’s how it works…sign in to Paper.li with your twitter account, and tell it what tags you want it to “collect” and how often you want to publish and there you go, you’ve got yourself a collection of useful resources all in one place that you can read at your leisure. And you can share it with your network automatically (Paper.li will tweet every time you publish if you want it to).
You can follow one or more hashtags and you also have the option of following specific twitter users, too. You can also track facebook and Google Plus content, but I opted not to do that. I put together a Paper.li for our #urbaned hashtag that is published every week and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. If you’d like an example, check out the Urban Ed Free Press.
I think classrooms and students could definitely use Paper.li to collect resources and information. One of the challenging things about twitter is that, unless you’re following hashtags in some way, if you don’t see the tweet when it happens, it’s easy to miss. Paper.li, and other curation sites out there, solves this problem for you.
So check out Paper.li and let us know what you think. And please consider subscribing to our blog for useful sites, resources, commentary, and more!
You can learn a lot in 60 seconds. Especially about science. Scientific American produces some amazing “60 Second Science” podcasts that are definitely worth exploring, subscribing to, and sharing with students. With titles such as “Microbes Make Some People Smell Delicious to Mosquitos” and “It’s Plain the Rain Ups Chili Peppers’ Pain,” not only are they highly informative, they’re great discussion starters, too.
Access the complete list of 60 Second science podcasts here. And check out all of Scientific American’s podcasts here. The full list includes 60 Second health, 60 Second space, 60 Second technology, and more!
My own students are putting the finishing touches on their versions of these podcasts for our astronomy unit, so stay tuned, I’ll be sharing those soon.
How often are you giving students the opportunity to explore? How often do you simply show them or read them something and then ask them what they think? It’s amazing the discussions that can occur when you do either of these.
All too often as educators, we’re the ones in charge of the learning and the discussions. And somehow we expect students’ thinking to grow deeper and more complex. Not likely, I say, because us adults are getting in the way.
That’s why I love sites like The Kids Should See This, a blog that I learned about in the fall from Free Technology for Teachers. Each post features a video discovered by the blogger and her young child. The purpose? Exploring things that kids might not necessarily have seen before, but that are delightful, exciting, and fun.
As the blog itself states:
There’s just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven’t seen. It’s most likely not stuff that was made for them…
But we don’t underestimate kids around here.
Gotta love that attitude! Taking a quick scroll through the first few posts reveals some videos that students might find really enchanting, including:
- A house built completely of plastic bottles
- Gorillas in Uganda
- The classic mirror scene from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup
- A time lapse video of a comet
And more! Seriously, I dare you to watch any of these with kids and not get wrapped up in a lengthy discussion afterwards. And that will probably lead to researching other information or locating places in Google Earth or deciding to create a site of their own just like it…the learning might never stop.
And all without a teacher standing in front of kids, telling them what they’re supposed to be learning.
So take a look at The Kids Should See This, share it with students or your own children, and see what happens. And then let us know; we’d love to hear about it.
Sites that allow teachers and students to explore faraway places without leaving the classroom are always high on our list of “must know about” sites. Here’s one that allows you to explore 900+ UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage sites from around the globe: UNESCOplaces.org.
From breathtaking natural sites like Olympic National Park to historic Cairo, UNESCOplaces.org is a great site for exploration, research, and discovery.
Library Thing has pretty much everything you can ask for in a web 2.0 tool. It’s useful, easy to use, collaborative in nature, and free.
Library Thing is essentially an online community for readers to connect, share, and learn. You can use Library Thing to discover new books to read or create your own page that features books from your library. Your public page then becomes your means of connecting with other readers.
How can Library Thing be put to use in the classroom? I’ve created a page for my classroom book library and then added a Library Thing widget to my classroom blog. This widget randomizes the books it displays so that students and parents can get a good recommendation any time they want:
I also could see Library Thing as a site that students could use to find new books to read. Simply enter a title and you’re taken to a page that includes a list of “similar books” based on the ratings and tagging done by Library Thing‘s 1 million+ users. Students could also make contributions to the class Library Thing page, and to the Library Thing online community as well, by writing their own reviews.
If you aren’t using Library Thing to help drive student interest in reading, give it a try and let us know what you think! And if you want to receive Quick Clicks like this one, and all our other posts, delivered straight to you, please subscribe today.
I am fascinated by ingenious ideas. And I think today’s Quick Click qualifies as ingenious…
ifttt is a website that “puts the internet to work for you.” How does ifttt do that? It allows you to set up a command based on this structure: IF THIS, THEN THAT (hence ifttt). For example, if I receive an email from John, then send me a text message. (Read more about ifft at their “about” page, which has the hilarious URL: http://ifttt.com/wtf)
Here’s an overview of the incredibly easy steps for setting up a command…
- Check out the ifttt channels. These are the things that form the core of an ifttt command. The list is pretty extensive and it includes twitter, facebook, GMail, instagram, dropbox, and many other popular web tools and apps.
- Once you’ve chosen the first channel, select a trigger. The trigger is the IF part. Each channel has multiple triggers to choose from, giving you lots of options.
- Choose an action. The action is the THEN. Again, the channels have multiple actions to choose from, too.
That’s it. Just activate your command and it’ll start working. The ways that ifttt can simplify your digital life are nearly infinite. If you get started, then you’ll keep thinking of command after command to set up using ifttt!
IF you’re already using iftttTHEN let us know what you think. IF you like what you’ve read, THEN please activate a free subscription to the EE blog today!
Normally our Quick Clicks series provides a short look at a valuable web tool and a smidgen of advice on how said tool can be used in the classroom. Today we’re deviating from that format a bit to share a recent set of slides we put together for a recent workshop. We called it “28 Ways Later: Teaching Tools for 21st Century Survival.” It’s basically 28 Quick Clicks in rapid fire succession. And we think there are some incredibly useful tools contained within…take a look:
If you like what you see, feel free to share. And if you want Quick Clicks and all our other great series and posts delivered directly to you, please subscribe. AND if you’d like us to present this workshop, or any of our other workshops, either face-to-face or via webinar, please contact us today.
What an amazing thing the folks at YoungZine have done…created an engaging, safe, easy to navigate, kid-friendly site for learning about current events.
Not only that, but their approach is from an unbiased global perspective. They don’t just tell stories from an American or Western point of view. AND [...]
What an amazing thing the folks at YoungZine have done…created an engaging, safe, easy to navigate, kid-friendly site for learning about current events.
Not only that, but their approach is from an unbiased global perspective. They don’t just tell stories from an American or Western point of view. AND the stories are well written. YoungZine is just a terrific resource, what more can we say?
It bears mentioning that YoungZine is updated every two weeks, so it’s not a place to turn for breaking news. But it’s high quality stuff in every way. And that can be hard to come by.
So if you teach social studies for the elementary or middle grades, YoungZine is a resource you need to quickly click! Let us know what you think.
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