General Colin Powell shares about the benefit of structure in education:
Students need structure.
January 28th, 2013 by Brian No comments »SmartBooks from McGraw-Hill
January 24th, 2013 by Brian No comments »At CES, McGraw-Hill showed off a collection of etextbooks that periodically quiz the reader for comprehension. That’s pretty cool for reader engagement (although it will definitely get annoying if I’m trying to skim for a particular section), but what makes it even more intriguing is the fact that, based on the results of the quiz, the text adapts the complexity of its vocabulary.
It reminds me of Renaissance Place’s STAR Test to determine the zone of proximal development. It’s also similar to Brainrush, which School Library Journal pointed out. Brainrush’s CEO is Nolan Bushnell, the guy who founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s – so you know he knows how to have fun. Brainrush will teach you a concept and adjust the game to fit your skill.
Code Snippets in Flash CS5
January 16th, 2013 by Brian No comments »Sometimes you use a piece of code so much that you just wish that you could hit a button and insert that code. In Flash CS5, Adobe has included code snippets that can be re-used to speed up your programming. To view the snippets, choose Window->Code Snippets.
Let’s make the world’s simplest game!
To test it out, create a movie clip symbol and put it on the stage. With the symbol selected on the stage, open up the code snippets and select Animation->Move with Keyboard Arrows. Flash will ask you if you want it to make the symbol an instance.
Yes. Yes, you do.
Test the movie and run it. Move the symbol instance with your keyboard arrows. Take it one step further and edit the action layer in the timeline to adjust variables like speed.
Check out the Event Handlers->Key Pressed Event for some extra fun.
ePals Global Community
January 15th, 2013 by Brian No comments »Writing assignments are more engaging when they have a real-world context (think quadrants B and D on the Rigor/Relevance framework). One way to incorporate that is through written correspondence to people of other cultures from around the globe.
Instead of just randomly emailing people, ePals has set up a community specifically for educators to connect classrooms from around the world. It’s like paper and pencil pen pals, but for the new “flat” world.
Google’s 2012 Review
December 31st, 2012 by Brian No comments »Google has been putting out some great videos at the end of each year to summarize the major news events and search trends. The 2012 one is no different. Have fun reflecting on the past year and see if you can name all of the big events.
Pixorial: Free Video Editing Software
December 19th, 2012 by Brian No comments »Yes, I’m a huge fan of Premiere, Final Cut, and iMovie (Movie Maker’s decent, but I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan), but sometimes students don’t have access to those applications. More and more we’re seeing webapps that offer full features to rival what you would have had to download mere years ago. Thankfully there are webapps that work well and are free; Pixorial is one of those.
Pixorial allows you to upload videos, trim them, add titles and music, and then share them online (from what I can tell there’s no DVD authoring). Sure, you probably won’t use it for a dance recital, but Pixorial seems to offer what we need for video assignments with students. The fact that there are Android and iOS apps that help with uploading is a big plus for me. Add to that the ability to incorporate your Google Drive and it looks promising. I’ll have to try it out more when finals are over.
Ebb and Flow will crash into the moon today
December 17th, 2012 by Brian No comments »NASA’s GRAIL probes will crash into a mountain on the surface of the moon today around 3:28pm Arizona time. NASA will start its coverage a little bit before that to add commentary to what is going on. You’ll be able to view the coverage on NASA’s streaming channel.
Thankfully they’re not so big that a situation like Life As We Knew It would occur.
Primary sources from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
December 13th, 2012 by Brian No comments »Check out Cornell University’s collection of testimonials, newspaper articles, and letters from the time period of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Hear what happened from the people who were actually there.
My current favorites for historical fiction and nonfiction
December 13th, 2012 by Brian No comments »I put together a list for a 7th grade Social Studies teacher and I thought that others could benefit, so I’m posting it here. This is just a sampling and is in no way an all-inclusive list. If there are books that you would recommend that make history lively, mention them in the comments.
The students just learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, thus the first bit:
Books about the Shirtwaist fire like Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch:
Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix; Threads and Flames by Esther Friesner
Mr. Griggs’s Favorite Historical Fiction Books
• Fire from the Rock by Sharon Draper (Little Rock 9)
• March Toward the Thunder by Joseph Bruchac (Civil War)
• The Journal of Scott Pendleton Collins by Walter Dean Myers (World War II)
• The Journal of Patrick Seamus Flaherty by Ellen White (Vietnam)
• The Red Umbrella by Christina Diaz Gonzalez (Operation Pedro Pan)
• Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai (Sept. 11, 2001)
• A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park (Sudanese Civil War)
• Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers (Iraq War)
• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (The Holocaust)
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (Revolutionary War)
• Fever, 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson (Yellow Fever Epidemic)
• Revolution is not a Dinner Party by Ying Chang Compestine (Chinese Cultural Revolution)
• All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg (Vietnam)
• Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (Civil War)
Mr. Griggs’s Favorite Historical Nonfiction Books
• The Dark Game by Paul Janeczko (History of Spies)
• Lost Boy, Lost Girl by John Dau (Sudanese Civil War)
• Bloody Times by James L. Swanson (Lincoln’s mega-funeral and the hunt for Jefferson Davis)
