Fusion Finds

This looks like a great collaborative project. If I Were Running for President is hosted by DeAnna Sheets, a teacher in Branson, MO.

Students will poll adults and students from their school and collect data about what issues make them choose one presidential candidate over another. The students will then use that data and create a mock presidential candidate of their own. They will include background information on their mock presidential candidate, key issues, political party ticket, campaign slogan and title. After all of the participating schools have created and entered their mock presidential candidate, an election will be held to see which candidate has been elected as the new president.

• Project Dates: September 2, 2008-November 7, 2008
• Grades 1-6
• Registration is open
• To see the list of classrooms currently registered visit the project wiki and look for the Sidebar on the right.
• Minimal tech tools required. “The basics you will need: either access to a digital camera or a way to upload pictures of your kids drawings etc (unless you choose to do them on a computer). You or your students will need to have access to one computer to type in all of the completed information about the candidate for others to read.”
• Information must be uploaded to the wiki by October 27, 2008
• Election will be held November 3-7th. All students will get to cast their vote.

I would love to see a Willard class participate in this. Let me know if I can help!

Image Credit: EJP Photo

• The Learning Page: Primary Source Set: The Constitution: teacher guides, primary documents and resources. You view authentic maps, diary entries, letters, speech notes, newspaper articles, images, song sheets, audio of speeches, etc.
• National Archives: Teaching With Documents: Observing Constitution Day: lessons, worksheets, simulation, activities, workshop, etc.
• Center for Civic Education: Constitution Day: Lesson for Constitution Day and Citizenship Day: lesson plans
• National Endowment for the Humanities: Constitution Day: text and image of constitution, lesson plans, etc.
• National Constitution Center: Constitution Day: activities, lessons, books, DVDs, etc.

Technorati Tags: constitution_day

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While reading Suzie Vesper’s blog I learned about Magic Studio. Magic Studio is a free site for publishing Image Explorers and Timelines which can include text, images, video, and audio.

Image Explorers remind me of the note feature in Flickr. You click on any hotspot in the picture to have text, images, video, or audio displayed. Here are some examples:

The Parts of a Plant
Computer Systems
Explore! The Tower of London

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The Timeline builder caught my eye since that is something my daughter’s 4th grade class is currently working on. Here are a couple screenshots of a timeline available on the site.

• Women at Work

Readers can click on an event to display the accompanying content.

Code is provided to embed your publication in a website, blog, or wiki. It worked great using the widget button in Wikispaces. I haven’t been able to get it to work in Edublogs, even using the flash button. Obviously you can link to the publication as I’ve done in the examples above. On the webpage for each publication, there is a comment box available to logged in viewers.

You can choose to make your publication private or public.

Each creation can be licensed as Public Domain or Creative Commons. You can view, embed, and copy public items made by others. Tags are used for indexing. This tool has obviously been created for education purposes. It includes a Teacher Notes feature for identifying standards, prior knowledge, curriculum links, and more.

Content: You can access the public content uploaded by other users, or upload your own content.

• Image - JPG (not progressive JPG) or PNG up to 64mb - but preferably not over 4000 px wide
• Video - flv (flash video) only (up to 64mb)
• Audio - mp3 (up to 64mb)

Tutorials

• Here’s a short screencast on how to publish an Image Explorer.
• Here’s a short screencast on how to publish a Timeline.

Technorati Tags: Suzie_Vesper Magic_Studio timeline photos Creative_Commons

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Google Earth now include the Milky Way.

Willard Staff: The YouTube video below will be blocked at school. It is worth the time to watch it elsewhere.

Google Earth is a bandwidth hog and must be used conservatively. It should not be run on multiple lab stations at one time. One suggestion from Google is to access the pages prior to the lesson and your computer will store some of the information in its cache. Then when you use Google Earth in your lesson, some of the data comes from your hard drive, as opposed to the Internet.

Technorati Tags: Google_Earth science edtech geography space