The problem with facts is that there are so many of them
– Samuel Mcchord Crothers easayist
Interest Surveys
Student Interest Surveys are one method to delve into the mind's eyes of your students.
- Sample survey
- Student Interest Survey
- If I Ran the School Survey
- Web sites to create online surveys
- Google Forms If your use Google Docs then I suggest that you look at Google Forms for an excellent survey tool. Learn more
- Click2Answer no registration survey tool
- InterestID The basis of their coaching comes from an understanding of each student’s strengths, weakness, and interests. NextLesson makes it easy for teachers find out what interests students. K-12 students can share their likes and dislikes for interests in over 30 categories, ranging from careers to amusement parks. Teachers can determine student interests as a class and find interest-aligned projects in NextLesson’s bank of projects
- Dotvoting during a meeting or class, it's good to get votes on a number things in order to rank or choose a subset. A quick and nice way to do this is dot voting.
- Urtak simple polling service that can be used on any blog or website. The polls you create can have multiple questions, but they must be "yes or no" questions. But Urtak isn't that limited because visitors to your poll also have the option of writing in their own questions.
Interest Strategies
- Choice of task - see Instructional Strategies page
- Interest Centers
- Literature Circles - Getting started with Literature Circles
- i-Search - Students decide on topic or from a teacher's list of topics
- R.A.F.T. see Instructional Strategies page
- Jigsaw
- WebQuest
- Nuskool This is a site that uses pop culture as teaching moments for students. Tailored to grades 6th-12th students learn a variety of subjects such as: Math, Science, English, etc through educational lessons based on the different elements of pop culture (video games, sports, films, etc.).
- Computer software or browser-based programs
- APPitic - A site for finding educational apps. There are over 1300 apps reviewed by Apple Distinguished Educators.
Virtual Field Trips
Virtual field trips are interactive Web-based experiences that guide students through an exploration of content about themes, such as a specific place or time.
Although virtual field trips may not offer the same sensory experience as being the physical location, they do have some advantages over traditional on-site field trips. Students are given the opportunity to take control of their own learning, making it a more meaningful experience.
- more opportunities because you can take them to places they wouldn’t normally be able to go to otherwise - like inside a volcano or ocean floor!
- may boost students’ reading comprehension skills and will expose them to different cultures and environments
- students are given the freedom to move at their own pace
- explore topics related to their own depth of interest
- students can revisit these field trips over and over, providing many opportunities to review and explore
Google Maps website , search for a city or a place you want to visit, then drag and drop the little orange man onto the map to get started. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, pick him up and drop him anywhere.
Virtual Field Trips Field trips in numerous subject areas and a tutorial how to create your own.
Mapwing Build, share, and explore virtual tours. Use Mapwing to turn your digital photos into virtual tours that include interactive maps, images, and comments. Then, share your virtual tours.
Gigapan create or explore panoramas from around the world
Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage is a virtual tour of Charles Darwin's nearly five year journey on the Beagle. Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage has fourteen segments chronicling Darwin's voyage from start to finish. Throughout the tour viewers will see sketches from the journey, hear readings from Darwin's journals, and learn about the journey as a whole. The virtual tour is not limited to just Darwin's work as a naturalist. Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage explores social issues of the time such as slavery.
An Illustrated Guide to Creating Virtual Field Trips Using Google™ Services Here’s a free ebook
Google has created a gallery where you can visit historic areas around the world using its Street View feature.
Historical narrated panoramic tours of interesting and significant historic sites. Some of the panoramas you will find in the collection include Davy Crockett's childhood home, Appomattox Courthouse, Thomas Edison's birthplace, and Valley Forge.
Project Explorer Categorized by age groups and by length to complete. All content is in one place.
Planet in Action Google Earth is a highly detailed 3D representation of our entire planet. Rather than just looking at it, why not play on it! PlanetInAction.com brings you top quality ideas, applications and concepts that will let you experience your planet in a whole new way.
Internet 4 Classrooms travel to museums, exotic islands, and even outer space.
National Geographic: Lewis & Clark
World Wonders Project From the archaeological areas of Pompeii to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Google’s World Wonders Project aims to bring to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world.
Google Art Project website, which we’ve mentioned before, you can explore 17 different museums from all around the world. Whether you’re interested in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Palace of Versailles in France or the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you’ll find it here.
100 Educational Virtual Field Trips
Africam offers live webcams from Africa, 24/7. You’ll have to watch an advertisement, but once you have, you’ll get a high-quality video with sound.
Eternal Egypt a living record of a land rich in art and history, people and places, myths and religions. The stories of Eternal Egypt are told using the latest interactive technologies, high-resolution imagery, animations, virtual environments, remote cameras, three-dimensional models and more. There are many ways to begin your journey through Eternal Egypt. The guided tour is a quick way to experience the best that the site has to offer. You can also begin with one of the cultural highlights below, or make your own discoveries using one of the many other ways to explore.
San Diego Zoo’s website offers a variety of live cameras pointed at the animals in its enclosures. Pick your favorite camera and watch the pandas, elephants, polar bears, apes or condors.
National Park Service - Distance learning opportunities. Can arrange to skype with rangers
Meet Me at the Corner Virtual Field Trips for Kids takes you to meet fascinating people from all over the world.
360 Cities Interactive Panoramas of interesting places
Virtual Adventures. Elementary grades
Virtual Field Trips This website contain a great list of several other virtual field trips. Check them out.
The European Virtual Museum is the product of collaboration between twenty-seven European museums. The European Virtual Museum makes artifacts of European history available in interactive 3D form. Visitors to the European Virtual Museum can browse through the collections by chronology, geographic area, object type, contributing museum, routes, and tour itineraries
Virtual Dinosaur Dig will show you how to unearth buried bones. You can peek at some cool three-dimensional images of real fossils afterward by taking the accompanying Virtual Museum Tour.
Tenement Museum is a resource for US History teachers that can best be described as an interactive virtual museum. Students select a male or female character for their passport from Europe to Ellis Island. Once at Ellis Island students learn about the process of legal immigration. Eventually students make it to the Orchard Street tenement where they have to choose an occupation as well as make choices regarding living conditions. At the very end of the exhibit, students can write a post card to their friends and family back in Europe. Throughout the journey, students see short video clips featuring "Victoria Confino" who explains to students what they are seeing and reading.
Games and Simulations
Tools to Build Interest
Worksheets is a program that allows teachers to create worksheets that go beyond the capabilities of paper-based worksheets, adding interactive and multimedia elements such as drag-drop matching, instant feedback, and audio recording and playback.
Nuskool This is a site that uses pop culture as teaching moments for students. Tailored to grades 6th-12th students learn a variety of subjects such as: Math, Science, English, etc through educational lessons based on the different elements of pop culture (video games, sports, films, etc.).
Wonderopolis is a site for finding interesting articles to spark your students' imaginations. At its core Wonderopolis offers more than 2400 interesting articles for elementary school and middle school students. Each article covers a different topic that your students might wonder about. For example, today's article is Who Invented Friend Chicken? Every Wonderopolis article is accompanied by a short video and some corresponding images. All of the articles are also accompanied by a short reading comprehension quiz that can be printed or taken online. A vocabulary matching exercise also accompanies the articles on Wonderopolis. www.freetech4teachers.com
Frolyc a
tool for teachers looking to design their own lesson-based
activities. Teachers can create activities for students like:
completing a graphic organizer, identify cause and effect in a passage,
draw a response to a question or take a quiz. Students can access
activities that are assigned to them by a teacher using Frolyc’s iPad
app Activity Spot.
As students complete the activity, teachers will receive feedback on
student progress in real time! You can access a library filled with
Common Core aligned activities created and shared by other teachers.
You can create a unique learning experience for your students. a
learning and assessment tool,
Froylc is a powerful platform for increasing student engagement and
monitoring student progress. Since Froylc lets users assign activities
to students individually, it’s easy to differentiate student tasks.
Skype in the Classroom - Designed for education, this site brings teachers, projects and resources together from all around the world. This is a free site designed for video conferencing and global learning.
5 Tools to Promote Brainstorming and Slide Show with Brainstorming Lessons
Explania is a web platform that provides hundreds of animated explanations , interactive tutorials and instructional videos.