Online Notes, Backing Up Your Blog - Richard has the answers

I read Richard Byrne's blog every day. Free Technology for Teachers never fails to offer up good resources, good advice, and good tutorials. For example, here are two recent posts worth reading, if you haven't already...

Scrumblr - a site for sharing online sticky notes. Like Wallwisher and Corkboard.me, Scrumblr is an easy to use tool with great application for classrooms and any groups that need to share bits of information.

And if you have a blog - and who among us doesn't these days - you should back it up! Here, Richard gives step-by-step instructions for backing up your blog on Blogger, Edublogs and WordPress.

And stick Free Technology for Teachers in your RSS feed. You'll be happy you did!

Grade Level Resources for the Classroom

This is a terrific site shared by Kathy Schrock recently. It is the eThemes list from the University of Missouri. It has a tremendous list of resources broken out by themes for each grade level. You can check it out here.

A Group of Resources

Today I just wanted to throw out a bunch of great web sites that offer curriculum resources in reading, keyboarding, and math.

READING

Bookleads

Worksheet Works

60 Second Recap

Tar Heel Reader

Bookshare



Storytime For Me


KEYBOARDING


Arcade Typing Tutor
http://www.rivulus-sw.com/Rivulus/Arcade_Typing_Tutor.html
A download to help kids learn to type on the Mac.

Good Typing
http://www.goodtyping.com/
Free online typing course for all ages.

Typing Web
http://www.typingweb.com/
Free online typing lessons and games plus a large teacher portal for managing a class roster when several kids are learning to type.


MATH

Worksheet Works
http://www.worksheetworks.com/math.html
A treasure trove of resources from basic math facts to algebra and geometry and measurements and more.

The Problem Site
http://www.theproblemsite.com/default.asp

SuperKids Math Worksheet Creator
http://www.superkids.com/aweb/tools/math/index.shtml
I'm definitely not the kind of person who believes in lots of worksheets. And yet, when you need one, it is great to have some quick resources.

Khan Academy
http://www.khanacademy.org/
A tremendous collection of videos showing math skills from the most basic to the most advanced.

Mathway
http://www.mathway.com/
Put in a problem, get an answer. Sometimes seeing one problem solved provide the clues necessary to learn how to solve more.

A Springtime Garden

It really is spring. At least the calendar says so. The forecast for snow later this week isn't in agreement. But I know spring really will get here. And that means time to work in the garden!

For those of us who work with kids on the autism spectrum, gardening can offer some unique and fun learning opportunities. It doesn't matter if the garden is outdoors in a nice gardening space or just some containers filled with flowers, herbs and/or vegetables.

One interesting way to approach gardening is to create a sensory garden. Caitlin Wray of Welcome to Normal recently wrote a post on just that topic. Her post was a guest column over at Hartley's Life With 3 Boys.

Caitlin's post provides some excellent suggestions for plantings that would help children explore all 8 senses - touch, vestibular, sight, smell, sound, proprioceptive, interoceptive, and of course, taste. The kids we work with can all use practice in exploring those senses. So check out Caitlin's post today!

By the way, both Welcome to Normal and Hartley's Life With 3 Boys are terrific blogs! So make sure you explore more than just that one post.

A Couple of Great Resources

Here are two links that will get you to some terrific resources!

First up, the Free Stuff for Teachers page at K-3TeacherResources.com. The free stuff includes printable posters and charts for the classroom, pictures to practice such skills as rhyming and vowel sounds, game board templates, Dolch word cards, and more. And if you enjoy the free stuff, you can join the K-3 Teacher Resources site for just $22.95 per year and get full access to the hundreds of resources available. A full list of the resources on the site an be found on their sitemap page.

Another great resource is the Graphic Organizers page at Education Place. There are more than three dozen different graphic organizers that teachers can download and print and use in the classoom.

Customizing Google Search Results

Google amazes me. It does so many things and does them so well, it really wouldn't need to add any features to keep me coming back. However, Google always adds features.

This tip lets you view Google search results by reading level. In working with students, that is a terrific option to help narrow down search results in a way that is meaningful and helpful to them.

So how does it work? When you go to Google to do a search, click on the "Advanced Search" option.

On the Advanced Search page, type in your search words. You can see I've entered "autism aspergers" as my search words. Then, lower on the page, you'll see one of the tools available to you is "Reading level". You can pop open that menu and select from several options:

• no reading level
• annotate reading level
• show only basic results
• show only intermediate results
• show only advance results

I chose to "show only basic results" and clicked the Advanced Search button in the lower right-hand corner.

You can see the results I got...and the options at the top of the page to explore search results at other reading levels.

I picked up this tip from Paul Hamilton at his blog Free Resources From The Net For Every Learner. A terrific blog! And he says he picked it up from Cheryl Oakes, who also has a terrific blog.

Reading Resources

If you teach reading, you'll love Melissa Edward's blog. Melissa has worked as a reading instructor and an educational technology specialist...so she knows how to find great reading resources on the web!

For example...take a look at one recent post where she shared more almost two dozen great reading resources!!

Spelling Always Counts

In these days of spell checkers, we don't always pay enough attention to spelling our words correctly. But as teachers, we absolutely have to help our kids learn to spell. It is a critical literacy skill.

And I could go out and find some great websites that help with spelling. But sometimes that work has already been done. And when it has been so nicely, the smart thing for me to do is just to send you right over to their results.

The good folks at MakeUseOf has put together a list of 10 Spelling Bee Game Sites that offer a lot of variety in how they present their information and challenge kids to spell correctly. The games are fun and engaging. And one site even includes an interactive YouTube video!

Check out their list for some great spelling resources.

(Now let me run spell check before I post this...just to make sure!)

Easy Tools for Creating Word Search Puzzles

Word search puzzles are great for reinforcing new vocabulary words, science terms, body parts, colors, spelling words, people and places in a history lesson, etc. And they are fun!

The trouble is, they aren't always so much fun to create. The link below - to a posting on the MakeUseOf.com web site, gives you ten different sites for creating word searches. Each site offers a slightly different tool with different options for how difficult to make the puzzle, how large, what shape, etc. Choose the site that works best for you.

And give your kids a word search!

10 Websites to Make and Print Word Search Puzzles

Resource for Younger Kids

A great way to gather resources for kids who have a developmental delay is to look at options for younger kids. And the PreKinders site has a ton of those options! PreKinders is a site for Pre-K teachers put together by Karen, a teacher in a Pre-K classroom. This site has resources broken down into easily searchable categories such as Art, Fine Motor, Literacy, Math, Printables, Themes, etc.

Karen also has a blog where she continually posts great ideas and lesson plans.

If you work with kids functioning in the Pre-K range, this site is a must!

Searching By Color

A terrific new tool for searching by color is the Multicolr Search Lab by the folks at idée.

The idea is simple enough - choose any color or combination of colors you desire and the search engine will search through more than 10,000,000 Creative Commons images on Flickr to find images that match your color choices. In the sample below, you can see I chose the combination of a medium blue, pale yellow, and pale sorta peachy color.

The color palette on the right allows you to select your colors just by clicking. You can click the same color several times to increase its prominence. Down below, you can remove some of your color choices just by clicking the little trash can.

This is a great tool for finding images that match a color scheme or for working on activities around a theme.

While visiting the idée site, don't miss out on their other search engines. The Visual Search lab allows you to choose one photo from a collection of nearly 3 million photos, then find other photos that are visually similar. There is also the BYO Image Search lab. In this engine, you upload one of your own photos and it will search for a visually similar photo.

All of these are nice tools for quickly finding photos that "match" according to color or other visually similar details.

New From AssistiveWare

AssistiveWare, the company that gave us Proloquo2Go has just released a new product for the iPad. Pictello - Visual Stories for Everyone.

Pictello is an easy way to make talking photo albums and talking stories on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Using photos on the device, the user can create stories with one photo per page and up to five lines of text. All the creation and editing is done with an easy visual story creation wizard, so everyone can use pictures, text and sound to tell their stories.

Ideas for Pictello -

Social skills stories
Responding to simple writing prompts
Reporting on an event, activity, or daily journal
Step-by-step instructions for an activity
Schedules
And much more.

Pictello is available on the App Store for $14.99.

Great Map Resources

Teachers are often looking for good maps to support a lesson or activity. Here are a few of my favorite map sites that offer a wide variety of maps - from street maps to historical maps, and more.

Historic Maps

US Map Collections

State Maps

National Geographic Maps

Library of Congress Map Collections

Quick Maps of the World

Resource for iPad and iPod Recommendations

I'm always on the lookout for a good source of referrals when it comes to technology. There are just so many options, there is no way I can check them all out. So finding someone else who has put together some great recommendations is awesome.

And that is what I've found at Babies with iPads.

The focus of the blog is more about very young children using iPads and/or iPod Touches. But if you scroll through a few of her posts, you'll find quite a few general posting about iPads and children with Autism. For example, check out his two part post on App Recommendations for Students with Autism here and here. She gathered those from some other blog, but shared all of them on her blog.

Also check out such posts as New Apps That I Found Lately and Tanya, a Speech Language Pathologist, Offers Her Top 10 List.

This blog seems to consistently offer great recommendations for apps....so check it out!

Print Your Own Calendars

I get asked numerous times every year about finding and printing calendars. Some teachers want a blank calendar form. Others want months and dates filled in. Some want a week...others a month. Some want the year with all the holidays.

No matter what sort of calendar you need to print, you can probably find it at one of these two sites. These sites offer dozens of options for printing calendars and calendar grids for your classroom.

CalendarLabs  

FreePrintableCalendars

Reading Resources

Bookleads
http://bookleads.wikispaces.com/
Tons of resources - book guides, book reviews, links to podcasts about reading, etc.

Worksheet Works
http://www.worksheetworks.com/english.html
Quick worksheets to practice vocabulary.

60 Second Recap
http://www.60secondrecap.com/
Short summaries of books.

Tar Heel Reader
http://tarheelreader.org/
Easy to read books that can be downloaded and used with a variety of adaptive devices.

Bookshare
http://www.bookshare.org/
Books and periodicals for individuals with print disabilities

Getting Ready for Halloween

Halloween offers a lot of fun options for classroom activities. We always have a pumpkin carving competition between classrooms. Sometimes we have a scarecrow building competition. We'll host a Harvest Festival with all sorts of games involving leaves, apples, and other fall favorites.

Now the photo editing website picnik is offering one more fun option. You can take a photo give it the Halloween feel with some very easy and fun editing features. You can add fangs, change skin tones, throw on some fun frames, and more.

Some editing features are part of their premium package, but there is no need to pay for the premium features in order to enjoy picnik. Many of the editing options are free of charge.

If you choose to play with picnik, all you'll need to do is upload a good head shot and start having fun!

Typing Programs

Teachers often ask me about keyboarding applications. And at home, parents and kids are often looking for some fun typing games and tutorials to improve their skills. So here are a few really nice typing programs...two free and one shareware.


Arcade Typing Tutor is a nice little typing program you can download to your computer. It is shareware...the cost is $11.99. It is colorful and simple and fun.



Good Typing is a free online typing program. It offers graduated lessons for you or your students.



The third option is Typing Web. Perhaps the most sophisticated of the three, Typing Web offers free typing games, lessons and certifications at all levels. It also includes a Teacher Portal so that teachers can grade and track student progress of each student.

Printing from the Internet

I've posted about this in the past, but it is definitely worth repeating. We all print lots of pages from the internet. And when we print, we get the text and photos we want, but we also get all sorts of background images, advertisements, sidebars filled with links to things, etc. None of that is what we want. And it uses up a lot of ink - especially if you are printing on a color printers.

The solution...PrintWhatYouLike. PrintWhatYouLike is a website that lets you type in the URL of any website, then gives you options for how you want to print and what you want removed from the page before you print. It is the perfect way to clean up a page to save ink.

Perhaps more importantly than saving ink, it is a terrific way to clean up distractions. If you are printing an item for a student, you can help focus their attention on the key parts of the page by eliminating the extraneous materials.

To use the service, you can visit the website and enter the URL each time you need to print. Or you can visit the website once, follow the instructions for using the Bookmarklet, and then you'll have a little button right on the top of your browser. Any time you are wanting to print a page, click the bookmarklet and you'll immediately see the controls for managing the printing.

This is a great tool that you don't want to miss.