More than 100 Webcam Resources from Simple K12
Back in April I announced on this blog a partnership with Simple K12. This is not a financial relationship, we simply swapped advertising space on each other's blogs. For the last two months Simple K12 offered a virtual field trip kit through Free Technology for Teachers. This month, Simple K12 is offering their free Web Cam Toolkit. Simple K12's Web Cam Toolkit has two parts; a guide for Reading Rewards - Track Time Spent Reading
Reading Rewards is a free service that allows parents and teachers to track the amount of time their students spend reading. Students create goals in Reading Rewards then parents and teachers can reward them for reaching their goals. Every minute students read equals one Reading Reward (RR) mile. Parents and teachers can determine what the rewards will be and how many RR miles students need to earn to receive a reward.Willie Nelson and What the Web Can Answer Today
It seems that whenever I go somewhere to give a presentation about teaching with technology, there is someone in the audience who will say something to the effect of "this is great, but all of those sites are blocked in my school." This then leads to conversation about strategies for convincing administrators to relax strict filtering policies. One of the places I usually direct people to in those conversations is Unmasking the Digital Truth created byWes Fryer. Yesterday, I had an experience that led me to drafting an activity that could possibly help critics of open access to the web to understand how valuable the web can be in education.Yesterday, as I was listening to Willie Nelson I got the urge to look up some information on the web about the hole that appears in his guitar. This led me to thinking about the number of questions that pop into my head every day and how many of those questions would have either gone unanswered or taken a long time to research before the advent of easy Internet access.
Here's my activity idea:
1. Have a person opposed to open Internet access in schools record the number and type of questions they encounter in a given school day or week.
2. Have that person then record the number of those questions that can be answered by resources located in five