Using Blogs in the classroom

I hope you will see the possibilities this medium offers for instruction. I've found a couple of websites to help you in the process. Blogging in the classroom http://mywebspace.quinnipiac.edu/PHastings/tools.html# has some great tips and instructions for using blogs and describing how develop them to help students interact with the curriculum materials. A list of the top 100 blogs for education can be found here http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs
Leave me a comment about any ideas you though interesting at these sites.

Intel's Thinking with Technology

I found a site yesterday that offers three interesting tools to help students develop thinking and reasoning skills. It's found at http://www.intel.com/education/tools/index.htm?iid=ed_nav+k12tools
The three tools are called Visual Ranking, Seeing Reason, and Showing Evidence. Look and some of the example projects and I think it will give you a good idea as to how these tools are being used by teachers. Projects using these tools could be used for any area of the curriculum.

Using America's funniest videos for physics

In the Physics Teacher magazine this month under Websights was a description of using AFV videos to illistrate physics principles. What fun! Here's the link to the webpage for the videos
http://abc.go.com/primetime/afv/index?pn=index
They also talked about some videos in YouTube that were made in Japan. A great on on vector addition can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPHoUbCNPX8

MIT OpenCourseware

I've been looking at a website from MIT called "Highlights for High School" located at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/home/home/index.htm

There are some wonderful ideas for all areas of the curriculum even though the major focus are the STEM courses. I've shared some of the ideas I found here with the HP participants: one on photojournalism with Shelton and one of literature with Kelly and Becky. Hopefully it will generate some ideas that can be developed into projects.