Tips, Tools and Technology for Educators

Incredibox is an up and coming website where children can create their own music! This fun and educational site created by a French design company and a French musical group, allows children to build their own songs including effects, beats, melodies, chorus, and voices. 

Easy to Use & Compose

Each of the color coded musical options can be dragged onto the main screen and then a character appears and will begin to sing in the selected option.  The characters take on the personality of their beat including hats, glasses, and different shirts.  Once the characters have been added to the screen, you can mute, include a solo, or delete their addition to the song.    This will require the child to be interactive with the site and muting, adding solos, or deleting the various musical sounds. This can be something that was created on the spur like improvisation or something that was already rehearsed.  Once happy with the song, you can record your composition for sharing.

Additional Options

Another option available on the site is to shuffle your song.  This moves the characters and the sounds around to create a completely different song based on the same sound choices.  There are also shortcuts to the mute, solo, and delete options.  To mute you can single click the character, to add a long you hold the left mouse button down, and to delete an action you can double click on the character.

Another interactive element of the website is that there are awards that can be earned.  These include bonus songs made by the creators of the website for using different aspects of the site like creating a song you enjoy and trying out all of the different effects.

Educational Use

This website is great for children who are interested in music.  They can easily compose their own songs, record them, and share them with friends via email or social networking sites.  An upgrade that is soon to be released will allow users to save their songs as embed code to add into their own websites.  Children of various ages could use this site from elementary to college aged.  I think boys would be particularly interested in this website as the musical characters are men.

This site can be used for children to learn about beats, musical composition, and express their creativity.

Additional Free Online Music Creation Sites

1. Jam Studio (a bit more complex, but teachers more about keys, chords, and tempo)
2. Aviary Music Studio (easy to use, many more instrument options)
3. Creating Music – Musical Sketch Pad (great for younger children)

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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On Sunday May 6^th, Adobe released the much anticipated programs, Adobe CS6.  This package of software includes the most popular graphic design programs used in the industry including Photoshop (photos), Illustrator (graphic design), InDesign (books, brochures, and newsletters), Flash (animation), and Dreamweaver (web design).  While the original focus of the package was professional, these programs are now what is used in many schools and what students like to use to create top-notch projects. These are great programs for teens to learn if they are interested in photography, web design, graphic design, interior decoration, and other creative fields. 

There is an educational version of the suite that is provided at a reduced price to make it more affordable for students.  However, even with the reduced price, the product is fairly expensive for the novice user. 

Adobe has heard the complaints of the cost and has come up with a solution called “Subscriptions” that was released on May 11th.  This would allow users to pay a monthly subscription price ($29.99 for students) for the programs along with having cloud storage to save the large graphic files.  This can be a great advantage for teens wanting to learn the program over the summer or as part of a class without having the large upfront investment of having access to the program at home.

Updates to the Program 

One of the updates to the CS Suite is that they have updated the user interface of all of the programs.  They are trying to make the tools more integrated between the various programs. They also took feedback from current users to come up with over 65 new or modified tools to make using the program easier to increase productivity.  The program also loads much quicker and saves large files almost instantly.

InDesign has been updated to allow for the creation of publications that are friendly for tablet devices.  New features include the ability to zoom, add slide shows, audio, and video.  It has also been updated to allow for the creation of eBooks.

Flash now has been updated to be able to be used on the iOS devices through an additional add on feature in the program.

Muse is a new program that was added to the suite.  This program allows users to create HTML websites without having any knowledge of programming code.  It allows the novice design to create a professional looking website with minimal experience.   

How to Help Your Child Learn CS6

There are many ways that your child can learn and explore the use of the Adobe CS6.  Many individuals like to just play around with the tools and see what they can do.  Other children may be more interested in learning the program through the use of a hands-on textbook that they can use at their own pace.  A good book to learn Photoshop would be The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby.  I really enjoy the Adobe books written by Scott Kelby because they are in full color, provide real life examples for how to use the programs, and have very detailed directions and explanations of how to use the program.

Another way they can learn the different tools of the program is to watch videos online.  There are many websites that show the functions and how to use them in everyday graphic design. 

Once they learn the basics of the program you can also encourage your child by giving them creative ideas of design items they could create like create a logo for a brand of cereal that they made up, or create a movie poster.  You could also encourage them to edit family photos from an event or vacation, create the family reunion newsletter, develop flyers for the garage sale, or use the programs to develop some very fun projects of special interest

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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The Internet is a wealth of resources for parents to find information about how they can help their child learn at home.  As a teacher, this is a very frequent question asked by parents who see their child struggling in school or who want their children to continue learning and advancing at home.  I have an arsenal of resources that I provide to parents so they can help their children.  Here is a list of a few of the more popular online resources.

Internet 4 Classrooms – Parent Page

One popular website for parents to help their children at home with learning is Internet 4 Classrooms.  This popular website has many child-focused online games and activities.  They have a specific parent page on their site including links to these activities as well as other links for topics including homework help, internet safety, reading help, family planning for the future, time management, character education, how to get involved at your child’s school, and reviews of great educational apps.  

Scholastic – Parents

Scholastic also has a parent friendly site for information.  Topics include books and reading, child development, school help, activities, and kid friendly websites.  Articles, activities, and videos are provided for various age levels to help their children.  This site is very informative and user friendly and updated frequently.

ED.gov – Parents Site

The government education website, Ed.gov, also has a parent website geared to help children with learning.  This site is written in both English and Spanish and includes online booklets about preparing your child for school, after school care, helping your child read, helping your child be academically successful, assisting special needs children, and planning for college.  Each subpage of the site includes either online booklets, articles, or research to help parents gain the information they need to help their children be successful in school. 

The Child’s Academic Success page was especially informative including booklets on how to help your child at home with learning at home and is broken down by subject area.  It also includes a segment on helping children with homework.  I see this as an important skill so that parents can help their children, but not actually complete the assignments for their children.

Education.com

The entire website education.com is geared toward parents.  This site is very well designed and easy to use for a parent to plan activities and gain educational insight to support their children.  It is engaging, includes videos, interactive postings, articles, and activities to do with your children.

To access the worksheets section of the site, you do need to create an account, but the worksheets are free.  For the workbooks, there is a small monthly fee to access complete sets of materials.  The remainder of the site can be accessed without an account, but it does include advertising including advertising videos.

Being active in your child’s education is very important.  It can help them to be successful lifelong learners.  These sites will help you to learn more about being active in your child’s education.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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My students introduced me to a comedian named Victor Borge last week.  He was a comedian and pianist that was very popular in the 40’s and 50’s.  Part of his comedy act about punctuation has been added to YouTube.  His skit starts off with a funny explanation about how we use punctuation in writing to separate or emphasize ideas and how we do not always clearly use the same intonations while we are speaking.  He then creates silly sounds like popping noises while reading a story to verbalize the punctuation.  As the students were explaining the skit to me, they were so excited and engaged in expressing punctuation.  I thought that this was a great video to start a discussion on the importance and uses of the various punctuation marks. 

It also led me to think that other engaging education videos on YouTube that could be viewed at home to encourage children to learn language and reading skills.  I went on to YouTube and then started searching  key terms of popular language arts skills that are taught in school and found a wealth of educational videos that could be used for learning and reviewing material.

Pronouns

One of the keywords that I typed into the YouTube search was “pronouns.”  One of the first links I came across was a School House Rock video that teachers children about pronouns through silly animations and rhymes.  The next link was a video with Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Duffy Duck.  In this cartoon Bugs and Daffy have an argument based on the confusion about the pronouns him, me, and he. These videos could be used for review of the topic or as a starting point for learning more about pronouns.

Another video includes a teacher explaining singular and plural pronouns.  The teacher goes on to explain the differences of a pronoun as a subject, object, possessive adjective, and possessive pronoun.  This video is great for high school students wanting to learn advanced uses of pronouns.

Literary Elements

Literary elements are also a topic that is discussed in reading classes.  The elements include plot, character, conflict, theme, and setting.  There are great videos online to learn about the different literary elements.  One video I found is called flocabulary.  They teach children all of the elements in a rap song with visual representations and examples that kids will relate to easily.  There are also other “flocabulary” videos on other language arts topics. 

Figurative Language/Literary Devices

Examples of simile, metaphors, personification, alliteration, and hyperbole are used in a video about literary elements found in songs.  This video is great for middle school aged children as it used popular songs that the children will relate to while learning about the literary elements.  The video is set up like a question and answer activity where the students have to answer the questions after they heard the song.

When actually searching figurative language, there was a great series of videos created by figurative-language.com.  This video uses a flow chart method to help a child learn about how to use and recognize figurative language.

YouTube is a great learning resource for children to use at home for an extension of what they are learning in school, practice on subjects they may be having difficulty with, or just for fun!

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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After working with a group of 6^th graders for a day preparing them on taking their upcoming standardized test on the computer, I decided to see what educational websites they enjoyed “playing” on at home in their free time.  Some of the popular sites that I’ve used in my classroom came up like FunBrain and Poptropica, but I also learned and played on a few sites that I haven’t explored before and that would be great additions for home learning.

Edheads

One website that the students showed me was Edheads.  This website has free science and math games and activities.  This site partners with various companies and universities to help develop their games so that they are accurate and educational.  Activities include learning about stem cell transplants, design a cell phone, simple machines, perform a hip replacement, and crash scene investigation. 

The cell phone activity includes a video on background information, researching, design, and implementation of a cell phone that would be user friendly for the elderly.  In the research segment, you learn about the customers need and wants for a cell phone, then you design the phone, and then test it with the market and see how your sales are for that phone.

The activities are interactive, provide great background information, and require children to use critical thinking skills.

Friv

Another website that they really enjoyed playing on is Friv.  Friv is a compilation website that has hundreds of online games for children.  Some of the games have an educational value and some of the games are just for fun.

The game Cannon Experiment has children aim a canon to shoot a ball into a basket.  The challenge is that the angle of the cannon must be taken into consideration along with walls and other obstacles in order to make the basket.  This game will build a child’s problem solving and spatial skills.  The game Plummer 2 is a puzzle game.  Children have to rotate the pipes in order for the water to not spill, and make it to the end of the pipe. Liquid Measure has children practice math and measuring skills by combing vats of liquid in the appropriate sequence based on their number totals.  With all of these games, the higher the level the more challenging it becomes.

Cookie

One student also shared a website that their little brother uses called Cookie.  Cookie is a great website for pre-school and lower elementary aged children.  The games and activities encourage children to learn their colors, letters, numbers, counting, addition, subtraction, and shapes.  There are also lessons to learn about science topics like animals, transportation, growing plants, and the five senses.  These activities are very kid friendly with bright colors, building background knowledge, and using vocabulary that is age appropriate.  Young children will definitely benefit from these fun educational games.

Online learn games are a great way for children to learn educational skills that can be applied into the classroom.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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I have noticed recently  that my middle school students really enjoy taking photographs on their mobile phones and on the iPad’s that they use in school.  Sometimes they are silly photos or just photos of their friends, but others are very creative pictures. Parents could harness this interest in photography at home to get their tweens and teens learning at home while using their digital cameras and a few cool apps.

Here are several excellent apps and activity ideas to spur your kids to develop their photography and educational skills at home.

Instagram

Instragram is a very popular, free photo filter and photo sharing app.  It allows users to take photos on their mobile and tablet devices (both Apple and Android platforms), and add cool filters.  Then the users can seamlessly upload them to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

On the Instragram blog, they have weekly challenges for Twitter users.  This weekend the “hashtag project” was to get out on the town and take pictures of buildings, moments, and other historically significant landmarks.  The winner of the challenge is posted on their blog on Monday.  This is a great way to get kids at home interested in photography, Instragram, social networking, and history.

Skitch

Skitch is another popular free app for photo editing, annotation, and sharing available for the iPad, Mac, and Android platforms.  This app differs from Instragram in the ability to annotate the photographs.  This includes being able to add arrows, shapes, text, crop, and record your movements on top of the photos and then being able to share them.  This would be great to annotate photos that were taken for a school project.  This app can also be used as a drawing pad or to add annotations to a screenshot, website, or map.  It is a very versatile app that could be used in many learning applications.

Camera+

Camera+ is a 99 cent app for the iPhone/iPod Touch to improve the quality of the camera.  Features include better exposure, focus, zoom, lighting, and saturation.  All of these options help to improve the photo quality and clarity. Additional fun features include adding effects, choosing scene modes, cropping photos, and adding borders.  Children could use this app at home to help improve the photos that they take on the iPhone or iPod touch.  Activities could include taking photos on a nature hike through a local park and then attempting to classify the animals and plants that you encountered, or taking photos of everyday objects and discussing their geometric shape.

Other Photo Apps to Check Out

• Pic Stitch & Pic Frame – allows you to combine multiple photos to build collages
• Color Effects – allows you to remove and add color to specific objects and portions of a photo
• CamWow Retro – allows you to make current photos look like older photos through filters

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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This Thursday is national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.  (Due to State mandated testing, this day may have been affected and changed for your local area.  For example, Miami-Dade County in Florida, has moved this event to May 3^rd.)  This opportunity allows school-aged children the opportunity to see what their parents do at work every day.  Many companies are evening hosting events including informative sessions about the company, lunches, and hands -on -sessions with children.  It is a great time to get your children involved in learning about career choices and experiencing the workplace.

Planning to build prior knowledge before they visit, planning for what your child will do at your workplace and following up with questions and activities at home makes for a more meaningful experience. 

Building Prior Knowledge

It is always important when a child is learning about something new to try to make connections with ideas and concepts that they already know. Depending on your job and the age of the child, building background knowledge can vary.  A great resource would be to review my previous post on career website resources for children.

Planning Your Child’s Visit

It is very important to plan the day for your child while they will be at your workplace.  You should setup a schedule including a tour of the facility, meeting individuals you work closely with and explain their positions at the company, and plan a hands on activity to get them involved in what you do.  The Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation has great examples of sample days for various styles of workplaces and ideas to get the entire company involved.

Another website that is a good resource for ideas to help your plan their visit is Chiff.com – Take Your Child to Work Day Ideas.  This site has ideas for ice breakers and ideas for individuals who work in the science, art, and finical fields.  There are also additional resources and links to other websites to help you plan the day as well.

Follow-up

After your child has spent a day at work with you, it is important to follow-up with your child at home.  You can ask questions over the dinner table such as what was their favorite and least favorite part of their experience or which of the careers that they learned about at your workplace was the most interesting to them and why.  Asking these probing questions helps you to then provide opportunities, books, and learning experiences for them to learn even more. 

Many teachers at school may even want their students to follow up and share what they learned while they were at your job for the day.  You may want to encourage your child to key a log of their visit, write  a formal reflection, describe the skills that they saw being used in your workplace that they are learning in school, or conduct an interview of one of the individuals you work with to be shared later.

This is a great learning opportunity for children and should be planned carefullyto provide activities before, during, and after their experience.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Earth Day is celebrated on April 22^nd and Arbor Day is celebrated on April 27^th.  These days represent a day that your family can honor our earth and trees.  There are many ways that you can get your children involved in learning about the importance of caring for our environment and planting trees. 

Apples 4 the Teacher – Online Articles for Earth Day

Apples for the Teacher has online articles that are geared for children that cover topics for at home learning about Earth Day.  The articles include learning how to compost, to create an energy-efficient home, eco-friendly cleaning products, and recycling at home.  These articles can be a springboard for activities you can do at home during Earth Day.

Earthday.org

Another excellent website for going green on Earth Day is earthday.org.  This site has information on various ways to take action including the “Billion Acts of Green” program where individuals post their act of how they will be green this year.  This includes conserving water, recycling, reducing, transportation, energy and being green at school.  You can read other user’s posts on how they are going green and the impact they are making on their community.  These ideas could then be discussed and possibly implemented in your home.

Another cool tool available on this website is calculating your footprint on the planet.  You choose your country and then create an avatar.  Your avatar then helps to build what your footprint looks like by using your answers to various questions about the types of food you eat, the products you buy, recycling habits, type of house you live in, electricity habits, driving frequency, and traveling.  Once your virtual world is complete, you are provided with an ecological footprint.  This helps you to understand how your choices impact the world.  They then provide various ways that you can reduce your impact on the earth.  This would be a great online tool to do together as a family for Earth Day.

ArborDayNow.org

ArborDayNow.org is a good online resource for children and families to learn about Arbor Day and how they can impact their community by planting trees, gardens, and .  Their site also has a volunteer page so that you can search up your local area and see volunteer opportunities that include planting trees, or working at wildlife and nature centers.  This would provide a great place to look up opportunities for your family. 

The site also has many other useful resources like an online tree guide, learn the anatomy of a tree,   and a toolkit for families including activities involving nature for all ages of children.

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods is a virtual photo montage of a walk through the woods of Illinois.  This picture story is great for families to watch together.  It encourages curiosity by looking closely at the woods around them.  Each of the different seasons will provide a different “look” of the forest.  It is definitely a cool website to check out for Arbor Day!

Have fun celebrating our world this Earth and Arbor Day by exploring great online resources.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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March was Women’s History Month and April represents Poetry Month.  There are many resources available online that children can utilize at home to celebrate and learn more about both of these topics.

Poets.org

Poets.org provides 30 ways that children can celebrate Poetry month.  There different ideas include reading and writing poetry, visiting poetry landmarks, attend a poetry reading, and listen to poetry.  One of the ideas also includes integrating technology with poetry by creating a tag at the end of your email signature that includes a line of poetry.  Each idea includes a link to more information about the idea and stanza’s of poetry.  These ideas would be great for older children to get involved in their community with sharing poetry during Poetry month.

Scholastic – Poetry Month

Scholastic has a wide variety of resources for poetry month.  Video links include poets reading their poetry and encouraging children to write and publish their own poetry, poetry workshops on how to write poetry, and poets discuss the inspiration behind their poems.  Activities include creating a poetry slide show, writing poetry riddles, writing haiku’s, acrostic poems, and analyzing other poet’s writing.  All of the activities include specific directions to help a parent guide their child through the activity as well as giving grade ranges for the activities. 

Fact Monster – Women’s History Month

Fact Monster is always a great resource for information specifically written for children.  For Women’s History Month they provide the history of important women including influential women, leaders, and award winners.  There is a full section of biographies of important women covering various fields and achievements.  The Fun Features for Kids section includes fun facts about women including women who have been featured on stamps, female children who have made inventions, and daughters who followed in their mother’s footsteps to become famous.  After reading the various facts on the website, you can then challenge you child to one or more of the twelve quizzes on women’s history found on the website. 

Time for Kids – Women’s History Month

Time for Kids is a website devoted to teaching children about current events, history, and other social studies skills.  There is a page devoted to Women’s history month by providing various articles and online activities.  This includes a Q & A session with Kristi Yamaguchi, a video about Amelia Earhart, an article and video about women serving in Iraq, an interview with Astronaut Sally Ride, and an article about why we celebrate Women’s history Month.  I think this would be a great resource to encourage boys to learn about women in history as some of the successful women held careers that are high interest subjects for boys.

Months that honor specific subjects and ideas give a time at home for children to learn and expand their knowledge about a variety of subjects.  Building upon what they learn at school is an important home learning experience.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Learning how to read a clock is a very important skill that all children must learn.  I know that some may find it surprising that even tweens and teens still do not know how to read an analog clock.  Learning to tell time is a skill that is covered in the early years of elementary school, however many students to not master this skill.  It is important that parents get involved in the process of helping children learn how to tell time on both an analog and a digital clock.  There are many different technology tools that can be utilized to help your child learn how to tell time.

Time Monsters

Time Monsters is an online animated site for children to learn time.  The main character, Professor Tempo leads children through the skills of learning to tell time broken down starting with learning the hour numbers on the clock and ending with reading the minute hands.  Each skill has its own animated story lead by Professor Tempo provides an overview of the skill and then a hands-on activity.  Without even saving, each time you go back to the site it will start your child where they left off.   Quizzes and printables are also provided on this site.

Apples for the Teacher – Learning Time

Apples for the Teacher has an online interactive quiz to help children to practice telling time by comparing a digital clock to an analog clock.  This is a good activity for older children who are struggling with telling time.  Another game that they offer, clock practice, has children drag the hour and minute hands to match the time that is represented in the question.  Both of these sites can be used for practice, after the skills have already been taught.

Live in Nanny Blog – 10 Fun Ways to Teach Kids to Tell Time

The blog, Live in Nanny, has informative articles based on education and raising a child.  A recent post includes many great ideas to help children to learn how to tell time.  Her ideas include songs, games, books, toys, videos, crafts, and online reinforcement.  Each topic contains a link to an example.  The YouTube video, “Hip Hop Around the Clock”, was really catchy teaching children to learn time through song, technology, and visual representation. 

Flik-Flak Telling Time Watches

Flik-Flak is a brand of analog wrist watches specifically designed for young children to learn how to tell time.  The hour, minute, and second hands are very prominent and different colors on the watch face.  This helps the children to be able to determine which hand is used to tell the hour, minute, and second. On their website, Professor Flik, guides children through learning how to read their watch with the characters Flak (the hour hand) and Flik (the minute hand).  The site also has an online game for children to practice their time telling skills with Flik and Flak.  The child has to be able to read the analog clock and then enter its digital value.  Providing your child with their own wrist watch is a great way to have them practice at home.

Teaching children to learn how to tell time is both a school and a home activity.  There are many ways a parent can get involved in teaching children to tell time through the use of technology and online resources.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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