iCue

NBC has introduced a new online resource for teachers and students called iCue. Notice how everyone is trying to cash in on the whole iPod revolution by making sure to put an "i" in front of whatever they create? I heard there is even a state out west called iDaho. Where will this stop? Any way, back to iCue.

I didn't sign-up for an account yet but I did sit through the demo, narrated by Tim Russert no less, and it provides a nice overview of the tool. The demo focuses on the presidential campaign for 2008 but this is just one example of the many topics students can learn about with this tool. The main strength of iCue seems to be it's huge library of video clips from the NBC newsroom. Students can access "cue cards" that are video clips pertaining to different topics. The cue cards also have keywords, can be tagged with new keywords and include transcripts and additional information about the featured subject or event. Students can add notes to them, save and categorize them and share them with their network of friends within iCue. In that sense, this is really a social network with a huge collection of topic specific video clips.

There are games for students to play and a forum where they can discuss different issues. The theme of the content is certainly focused on history, politics and current events but it seems like an engaging way to learn about these types of things. Since the site is so dependent on video, many teachers will probably find it necessary to get the site unblocked in order for students to make full use of it.

Crayola Physics

There are two cool and very simple tools I recently came across that are designed to help kids learn basic concepts of physics in a fun and engaging way. The tools are called Crayon Physics (Windows only) and Phun (Windows and Mac) and were recently reviewed on the iLearn Technology blog that I follow. I had seen Crayon Physics before and shared it with my graduate students but this was the first time I had seen Phun. Both programs are very similar in what they allow students to do but Crayon Physics presents a task (moving a ball from one location to another) while Phun doesn't provide a specific task for students to complete. With both programs students are able to create shapes and see immediately what impact gravity and friction has on those shapes. That's a pretty simplified explanation of what can be done with these great tools but the best way to explore their capabilities is to watch the respective demo videos.

TeachersFirst.com

TeachersFirst is an online resource that provides teachers with lesson plans, learning activities, web reviews and much more. You can sort through their collection of resources by different classifications including subject & grade. They are currently offering a full service membership for free to the first 100 teachers that sign-up. They also have a regular free membership that provides access to a limited range of their resources, which is available regardless of how many people sign-up.

Apture the Experience

I recently learned of a great new tool called Apture from the Weblogg-Ed blog, a fine blog that I follow regularly. I was intrigued by what I read so I decided to look at Apture myself. At first glance it seemed to be quite similar to Snap Shots, which I use on this Blog and a Wiki I maintain. Like Snap Shots, Apture allows you to link to other content and display that content in thumbnail preview windows. Snap Shots, and other services like it, automatically provides a snap shot (thus the name) of any webpage you may link to on your website or blog. Apture takes this process about 15 steps further. You can link to websites, news articles, images, videos, audio and even files such as PDFs. In addition, you can have multiple content sources linked to a single topic.

As I watched the tutorial video on the Apture site I couldn't help but think about how I consumed content and information as a child. We would read books in a very linear fashion. After all, books don't make much sense if you randomly jump around from page to page and paragraph to paragraph. But the nature of the Internet has blown that idea out of the water and Apture is a perfect example of this because it allows you to access content from so many different sources and in so many different formats. I think this has the potential to provide students with a much richer learning and research experience as readers of information but I also think it has huge potential for them as writers of online content. They can have the experience of weeding through content and deciding what they want to link to in order to augment their text and tell the story they are sharing. It's a lot like writing a traditional research paper where you have to find references to support your claims but instead of just citing relevant quotes you can share a huge array of multimedia content and really bring your writing to life.

The way Apture works is that you write your content first and then go back and add your links afterwards. Of course, it is web-based, multiplatform and free to use so I can't think of a single reason why you shouldn't at least try it out. I have put it to use in this posting so you can start to get a sense of what it can do. The list of topics below is simply to give you an idea of the different kinds of links and media that can be added. I want to add this to my UMD EdTech Wiki but that process is still underway at this point.

• Grand Canyon
• Civil Rights
• Global Warming

Now that I've had a chance to work with Apture a bit I thought I'd add a few more comments about this tool. I found it relatively easy to use but it was necessary to refresh my browser on several occasions when adding links. It is still in Beta so there are probably a few kinks to work out but I enjoyed using it. The other thing I noticed was that when I had Snap Shots and Apture enabled it was almost overload with all the pop-up thumbnail windows flying all over the screen so I just turned off Snap Shots.

Build Your Wild Self

I learned about Build Your Wild Self several months ago but I can't put my finger on the source so I apologize for not giving credit where credit is due. This is a great site for helping kids learn about animals and the different features (wings, fins, claws, horns) that allow them to survive in their respective habitats. Students can create their own "wild self" much like they would create an avatar by picking a human head and body and then adding different animal body parts in place of their arms, legs, ears, eyes and much more. They can even select a background image for their creature. Once they are done they get to read about the different body parts they selected and see how those parts are unique to an individual animal and help that particular animal. I used Build Your Wild Self with my daughter's class last week since they were researching the different types of animals and they had a lot of fun creating their own wild creatures. The site doesn't require a log in or registration and when they were finished they could easily save their creature as an image file to use later in Power Point presentations they will be doing. Here are some other ideas I had on how teachers could use this tool.

1. Students could create their own wild self and then use that image as their profile picture for different online tools they use. This would allow them to visually represent themselves in a safe way.
2. Students could create a wild creature and then design a habitat that would be best suited for that creature based on the different body parts it had.
3. Students could be assigned a habitat and then asked to design a creature that would be able to survive in that habitat.
4. Students could create and name a brand new creature and write up an informational guide about their new creature. This could even be turned into a class book on mutant animals or some other catchy topic.
   

As with any tool like this the students (this was a 2nd/3rd split class) wanted to play a lot and had fun just clicking through the different body parts so I think it is important to allow time for some of this exploration before you ask them to complete specific tasks.