Interactive Whiteboard Resources – UEN

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Mar 222011
 
Interactive Whiteboard Resources

Looking for some ideas on how to use your Interactive Whiteboard? Below are a variety of web sites and resources that UEN gathered just for you.

 

Preschool Interactives

UEN gathered a variety of online activities that are appropriate for Preschool aged children. They are organized by Letters, Numbers, Me and STEM.

K-2 Student Interactives

UEN’s collection of online games for kindergarten, first and second grade students is perfect for your Interactive Whiteboard.

3-6 Student Interactives

Engage your whole classroom and promote collaboration by displaying these grades 3-6 online interactives.

7-12 Student Interactives

See your 7th – 12th grade students get excited about learning with this collection of interactive games and tools.

PBS KIDS Interactive Whiteboard Games

Here is a collection of interactive whiteboard games from PBS. Like their programs, all of their games are age-appropriate and vetted by educators.

Thinkfinity: Student Interactives

Thinkfinity provides free online learning interactive games and activities for students of all ages.

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

These online manipulatives and activities allow K-12 students explore and examine math concepts.

Shodor Interactivate

This is a popular set of interactive online materials for math and science education – for grades 3 through 12.

Freezeray.com

This site offers a bank of visual teaching-aids and interactives for the Science classroom.

via uen.org

Thanks to the good folks at UEN for bringing these great Interactive White Board activities and eMedia videos together for Utah teachers.

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A Gmail Solution for Classrooms (Especially in Elementary)

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Mar 222011
 
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via gmailblog.blogspot.com

There is a little-known trick in Gmail (and in turn Google Apps users) that will let you delegate multiple ‘virtual’ Gmail addresses to a single account.

In Gmail, account names with periods anywhere in them are ignored. Also, and more importantly for schools, Gmail will ignore anything following an account name appended with the ‘+’ plus sign.

Yeah, it took me a second as well to grok what that can mean for teachers….

I have worked with a few different elementary schools, and they would really love to have their students be able to use Gmail, along with some of these new, amazing Web 2.0 tools such as Animoto and Prezi. These services require that you have an email account to create an account. The problem is that Gmail requires (by mandate of federal law) that account holders be at least 13 years of age. If the school/district does not have a student email solution, or if their solution is that students can use Gmail, that leaves anyone under 13 out of luck.

If I would have known about the Gmail addressing trick, the problems would have been solved for these teachers and students. Now I know that 1 Gmail account can be managed by 1 teacher, but have as many unique ‘users’ delegated by using the + addressing trick.

Let’s explore… Let’s say that you teach 5th grade, and you create a new Gmail account called ‘tanners5th’, so your address is tanners5th@gmail.com. Now, if you wanted your students to use any web services that require an email address, you allow them to sign up as:
– tanners5th+janeb@gmail.com
– tanners5th+samh@gmail.com
– tanners5th+codyr@gmail.com…

…and so on using whatever naming convention you want. The tanners5th@gmail.com account will receive any and all messages addressed to any of these delegates – Gmail ignores the + and what follows, but keeps it in the address so that you can easily use filters or can see what message was directed to whom in your class.

One account for the entire class, but as many unique email addresses as you need to sign up for these excellent Web 2.0 tools. A very neat and clean solution!