Math Millionaire

It's Spring and many classrooms are in the depths of standardized testing.  Math Millionaire is a great game that offers a challenge for Intermediate students, grades 3-5, as they review many concepts they may encounter on an end of year test.

After each question is answered correctly, the participant's status is raised up to the next level.  After they correctly answer 15 questions without a mistake, they will make it to a million.

Questions cover a variety of problems you may find appropriate for this age group, including identifying numbers in a sequence, working with temperature or time, and perimeter or area problems.  

One strategy is to have students work in pairs, thus allowing them to talk through the solution.  It becomes vital that students check and verify their work, otherwise it is too often they make it part way up before starting over from the bottom.

A great motivational tool to get students to practice.  One boy told his teacher "I'm going home to practice so I can come to school and show you I can make a million".  Imagine that, no homework yet they go home to practice math.

Word Sift - Play with Words!

I enjoy using word clouds for a variety of projects with students.  Recently while at a conference, I attended a session by Ramsey Musallam (www.cyclesoflearning.com) who shared a lot of great stuff!  One of the many tools he shared with us was WordSift .  I thought I had heard of all the word cloud generators.  But this one is different and a great tool for any classroom.   

www.wordsift.com

As you can see below, I cut and pasted a blog post from our iPad blog into WordSift .  It then sifted my post and created a tagcloud of the 50 most common words (notice no "and"s "the"s, etc...).  Based on the text size, you can easily visualize what word I used the most in that post!

But beyond creating a cloud of words, the tools included take this word cloud generator to a new level of usefulness.  No, it doesn't make it into heart shapes or fun colors, but it makes "playing" with the words more interactive.  

Below I clicked on the word "writing" in my tag cloud.  From that, under my cloud, it found images for the word "writing" as well as mapping it using the Visual Thesaurus widget.   Pretty nifty!

But then there is the power of the Workspace!

Under the tagcloud box there is an option to "Create Workspace" (circled in the image below).  By creating a workspace for the words I can click and drag the words and move them about.   

And not just words, but I can pull images into my workspace as well!  As you can see below, I clicked on the word "student" on my workspace, images for student were generated in the box below, and then by clicking "Make Images Draggable" I then was able to drag photos to my work space. 

And finally (for now) when I click on any of the words in my workspace or tagcloud, I also am given examples of where that word appears in the passage that I used for the WordSift .  This is a great way to identify different ways a certain word was used.  

This would be great for all subject areas by allowing students to visualize and see the words they are discussing, whether high school students analyzing a piece of work written by someone else or first graders brainstorming what they think is happening in a picture.  WordSift was created for teachers and their site includes ideas for more ways of using their tool in the classroom.  

Free Image Search with Google

It's become habit for many of us to turn to Google when searching for content or researching a topic of interest.  Our habits extend to our students, so often times we encourage students to use Google.  Although there are several other options which I'll address in future posts, I want to write about how to search Google images for "Free to use and share" pictures.

I tend to go to Google images and do an initial search first.  After the initial search, find the gear button, for settings, and click into Advanced Search.  Below is my initial search on Whales.

Scroll to the bottom and find Usage Rights. The default is "not filtered by license" and change it to "free to use or share".

Then click the Advanced Search button.

When you continue to search, be sure you see LABELED FOR REUSE.

Look for future posts on other options, such as using Flickr, Pic4learning, and other sites.  Though the best resource is and will always be if you take your own pictures.

Interactive Whiteboard Resources

Interactive Sites for Education is a great collection of resources a teacher can use on their Interactive Whiteboard, be it a Smartboard, Interwrite, or Promethean Board.

The site is organized into several categories, with each category breaking down into subcategories, before revealing several links to online resources, which appear to be ad-free.

 

For example, if you want to find pages to use in order to enhance the teaching of fractions in 4th grade, you would click into Math, then into Fractions, and scroll through over 50 sites that might work.  Click on a site and you are taken directly to a page that can be used on an Interactive Whiteboard.

Frame Artist with Templates Pro

It's always nice to come across a great app that can be used with creation activities.  Frame Artist with Templates Pro is one of those apps.  You can create newsletters, calendars, cards, magazine pages, and much more.  There are many choices within the app to embed your own characteristics on your created documents.

You begin by creating a template from a grid, say 5x5 set of blocks.  Next, merge blocks together to form your template and region. Like shown in the image blow where I've merged two sections of cells into larger blocks.  Inside each cell you can insert pictures, text, or stickers.  Yes, text may also go on pictures, rotated, re-sized, and more.  After the insertion you can format text with fonts and colors, format the cells, and format the background.  When finished share with many of the online communities, or simply save it to your photo gallery.

The app does come in a lite and Pro version.  For a limited time only, the Pro version is free.  Have students create trading cards of themselves, recipe cards for Mothers Day, magazine pages for a research topic, or a calendar page containing photos demonstrating a progression of a science project.

BingoBaker

Many teachers enjoy to integrate the traditional game of Bingo into their lesson as a nice review or practice activity.  The time consuming part of the activity is making the actual cards.  Well, now you can use Bingo Baker to make those cards for you.

Type in your words, definitions, math problems, or other identifier on the master Bingo Baker Card.  Then generate and print.  When you print you can select how many pages to create, which prints a pdf file of x number of Bingo Cards, each card being different.

Be sure to save the URL of your master Bingo Card if you want to use those same cards in the future.

Qwiki - search results in video form

Qwiki is a search engine that returns results in the form of a video.  You type in a topic, and a video is played explaining the subject. Try it out at Qwiki.com.

Now Qwiki has provided a free app. Teachers can quickly provide their class with information about most any topic. Get the Qwiki app here  

 Disclaimer – please preview content before showing to kids, as some results may provide content you don’t want previewed with elementary students especially when related to health topics.  With that said, most of the topics I previewed I’d endorse as fine in front of any students.