Making Teachers Nerdy

I was tagged by three great educators to post my 5 things: abeam, Technorth, and RickH.  Honestly, I’ve been tossing this idea around for over a week so I could reflect on what I considered should be altered.  I came to the conclusion that I would focus on the positive opportunities teachers and students could have with the best talent we all share – imagination.  I love to see teachers become giddy with new ideas.  Do you know that feeling?  The one where you walk a little lighter,  your mind wheels turn much faster, and best of all the your energy virtually soars.  Just like the moment of screaming, “Surprise!” at a secret birthday party, adrenaline builds and builds until you can say, “Guys, I can’t wait to share what we are about to do in class!”  I almost get giddy writing about it.  It is that feeling that I’m hoping some of you get when you consider these five things and hopefully get to put them into action.

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Do you remember you favorite stuffed toy as a child?  Was it your best friend?  Your confidant?  The center of many childhood adventures?  My stuffed animals certainly were.  They played just as hard as I did and gave a sense of comfort and companionship.  Today it still rings true for children all over the world, and there is an opportunity for these stuffed friends to take on real global adventures through Travel Buddy Projects.

What Are Travel Buddy Projects?

These are intercultural exchange projects where a stuffed animal is chosen by a classroom to be an ambassador or “foreign exchange student” for research in another school anywhere on the globe.  Using postal mail, students ship the travel buddy in a box along with documents such as a travel diary or log to record the buddy’s experiences, gifts for the partner school, and the curriculum project requirements.  Both classes provide periodic updates on the travel buddy’s visits via email, wikis, or blogs loaded with digital photographs.  Upon completion of the visit, the travel buddy is mailed back home with souvenirs for his home classroom.

American teachers are most familiar with an alternative travel buddy project, Flat Stanley, which regained popularity after the re-release of the children’s book, Flat Stanley in 2003.  In the story, Stanley experiences a terrible fate when he is flattened by a bulletin board , but being in this flattened condition provides many physical advantages for him as he embarks on adventures and even solves a mystery by posing as a piece of art in a museum.  His greatest advantage, however, is his opportunity to travel around the globe for the price of postage.

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Today’s post is another teacher freebie gathered to help enrich learning through multimedia web tools.  These links provide your students opportunities to virtually experience some of the world’s finest art, science, and historical museums.  Some sites are image galleries, some are learning games, and others are unique multisensory journeys through the past. 

It’s important to differentiate the difference between virtual field trips and online exhibits.  Virtual field trips allow the student to explore a museum on the web, as if he were physically at the location.  Many museums are now utilizing Second Life for such adventures, and I’ll pull a list of those on another post.  Online exhibits, on the other hand, are virtual kiosks of learning.  Imagine stopping at one of the exhibits in a museum rather than touring the entire building.

The criteria to make the list included:

Interactivity – does the site allow the student to do something other than read text?

Visually Stimulating – does the site draw the student to explore more?

Content Validity – will the content support state standards?

Coolness factor – would this be a site teachers would talk about and share with others?

To help navigate through these links, I've listed curriculum units these links could support in red.  Hopefully this will help you discover some new and innovative sites to use with your interactive white board or with students in a lab.

Of course, even with this list, there are probably some that I have missed.  If you would like to suggest another link, please post it in the comments.  Thank you.

View the Links

Mastering effective web research skills certainly takes time and practice.  Learning to "think" like a search engine or playing the keyword game is similar to learning a foreign language, which can leave a teacher or student overwhelmed.  We have all been there more than once.  Luckily there are some wonderful tools to help.

Below are a list of reference links categorized by resource and grade levels making it easy for everyone.  Do you have elementary students researching rainforest animals?  Scroll down to National Geographic's Creature Feature.  How about high school students gathering current event stories?  Look for the links from the daily political cartoons or CNN Student News.  Also in the list are bibliography generators, conversion tools, biography databases, encyclopedias, weather data links, and more.  

You will also see Google tips in purple explaining how many of these reference tools can be used in a simple Google search.  They are easy to implement and only require one stop to Google.

I would highly recommend teachers to pull some of these links and place them on their classroom webpages.  As students conduct research, providing them with direct links will give them the scaffold they need to research effectively and efficiently.

Click Here to View the Links

Do you get excited for professional development days?  I'll let you reflect on that a moment....what meetings do you attend?  What opportunities do you get to grow as a professional?  What technology training do you receive?  What conversations do you have?

Can you recall a great professional development day?  Was it hands-on?  Engaging? Fun?

Now imagine a Teacher Field Trip Day. The Science department spends a day at a museum doing hands-on experiments and research.  The K-2 teachers visit a local children’s museum to learn about a new exhibit on frogs.  The Language Arts teachers spend the day with the educational department at the Art Museum discovering how to incorporate art and poetry.  The health teachers visit a hospital to meet with nutritionists and psychologists on teen health.  The elementary PE teachers travel to a dance studio to learn folk dances for a spring unit.  The social studies teachers visit three historical landmarks and mark them with GPS for a student project. 

The power of teachers being able to receive professional development from local resources is amazing, but where would you start putting a day like this together?

• Start with investigating what resources are within an hour?  Zoos? Museums? Universities? Health Clubs? Major Industries?  Many of these have community outreaches and some specifically for teachers that few know exist.  Call them to see what opportunities are available.  You might be surprised to find they are very willing to partner with you for classroom projects.  Even if your student field trip budgets have been reduced, these contacts might be able to Skype or UStream into your classroom for free.
• Take a look at your curriculum standards.  How would you improve your classroom instruction by participating in a teacher field trip?
• Brainstorm what you need to learn.  You might need to learn a specific skill (a dance, how to use a new piece of equipment, how the GIS society uses GPS) or need to discover how the professional world is using new technologies (forensic scientists, robotics, Auto CAD, graphic design, banking systems).
• Consider forming a partnership with the resource.  Would that person be an expert in the field for a student project?  Could your students gather data for that resource (we had 5th graders gather data on bagworms at a local nature center for an entire year)?  Does that resource sponsor a charity your students could support through a community service project?
• Build a plan to use the new information in your classroom while your enthusiasm is high.  Teacher field trips are rare opportunities, so take advantage of the knowledge as much as possible.

Now consider if you were paid to take an in depth Teacher Field Trip to one of America's landmarks.  Would you volunteer to take a workshop at Ellis Island?  The Constitution Center?  Pearl Harbor?  The National Gallery of Art?  On a sailboat at sea?  Believe it or not, these opportunities do exist!  

Here are a few:

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