Save your Skin

In these months where the sun's strength is at its peak (at least in the Northeast), Save your Skin could be a nice language activity. The activity provides information about the sun's rays and chemicals used in sunscreen, then lets you "mix" up a sunscreen and test it out.

Language Lens

• In addition to promoting healthy sunning habits, understanding of cause-effect, and reading comprehension strategies, Save your Skin would connect to curriculum areas around energy/light, chemistry, and human anatomy.

Technical Note: This site uses the Shockwave Player, and appears to work better in the Firefox browser on Macs.

Reduce Reading Distractions

Apple web browser (also available for PC) Safari 5 was released yesterday, and has a nice new feature that reduces ads and other distractions on pages that contain articles. Though images related to an article are clearly helpful to our students, having one's brain pulled in a million different directions definitely is not. This feature only works on article-based pages, though I have no idea how it determines when to work (probably RSS linked)- you will know you have the option when the page fully loads and you see the Reader button at the far right in the address bar.

So, looking at an article in the Boston Globe from this morning, here's the webpage view:

And here is the view after activating Reader:

Very cool. If you are not at all a Safari person, a similar effect can be created with a simple install of the bookmarklet available at Readability.

Wonder Pets! Save the Day

Wonder Pets! Save the Day is a cute interactive arcade-style game from Nick Jr. that would be a good activity for kindergarten-level students. Players get to choose a mission- an animal needs to be saved-dress the pets, assemble their boat, and rush to the rescue! The arcade controls are extremely forgiving, so it's unlikely that you or the kids would get frustrated. Some odd music here- I wonder if the Wonder Pets! should burst into song quite that much, but I bet kids would love it.

Language Lens

• This activity relates to a number of curriculum-based categories younger kids need to learn, such as animal habitats and living vs. nonliving things. Additionally, part-whole relationships and basic categories such as clothing are targeted.
• The arcade game provides a good opportunity to model spatial (up/down, right/left) and temporal concepts (before/after).

Now Guest Blogging for Advance for Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists

Advance for Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists recently posted on Facebook looking for guest writers for a new blog about school-based issues and I threw my hat in the ring! My first post, about the role of technology in "contextually relevant" interventions, is up there today. Please go check it out here!

Click on Over and Make a Google Search Story

Please venture over to see my post on the Mindwing blog about Google Search Stories.  This is an incredibly easy and engaging tool that you/students can use to create short movies that demonstrate narrative and expository structure.  Enjoy!




Here's one I created while playing around with the tool.  It retells the first few epsiodes of one of my favorite shows, Alias.  What?  I admit I am a nerd.








According to the FTC guidelines, I will disclose with each of these cross-posts (and in other references to Mindwing products) that I have a contractual relationship with Mindwing as a guest writer. In no other instances am I compensated to review or endorse products or technology resources (i.e. websites).

A Little bit of Zoology...

Who Pooped? is a totally gross, yet strangely beautiful activity from the Minnesota Zoo.

The graphics and interface are gorgeously simple in this interactive about animal digestion- it's sort of like a pop-up book about poop. As much as we might want to say, "Oh, gross...totally inappropriate," fact is, zoology has not a little to do with animal waste, and this is part of the curriculum. I know my district isn't the only one that does an owl pellet dissection unit in 5th grade. You know your kids will be enthralled; hopefully you can stomach it!

Thank you to Larry Ferlazzo for mentioning this resource.

Language lens:

• Clear cause-effect and seqential relationships are embedded in the information about animal feeding and digestion.
• The interactive aspects (dragging sun across the sky, feeding animals) are likely to make it easier for students to remember facts about the featured animals.
• This could be a good jumping off point to make an art project or book about...uh, other aspects of animal description. "Who shed?" or "Who passed by?" could be used with animal coverings or locomotion, for example.

Bad Credit Hotel

It's not quite as scary as that hotel from The Shining.

The Bad Credit Hotel from the US Treasury would be a fun exploration for MS/HS students, particularly after providing a background context, perhaps with the engaging Common Craft video on Borrowing Money. The site provides you with a creepy/funny tour of a number of aspects of credit, and would be especially appropriate for students studying some functional math or budgeting, etc. Overall it can be a little texty, but there are some great interactive features as you can see below, and some videos such as advertisements about using credit wisely.

Language Lens

• Any resource that provides information in a visual and interactive manner would be ripe for teaching comprehension strategies such as information mapping and higher-level categorization (e.g. looking for text structures such as lists and cause-effect).

Colonial Williamsburg's Site

Many museums, parks, etc have great interactives that approximate the experience of going to the place itself! Colonial Williamsburg has a surprisingly generous range of interactive games and activities that are well worth exploring for elementary or students who are studing colonial history.

Colonial Postcard Maker can be used to construct a historical scene, thus targeting storytelling skills in context.

Use Brickmaker Buildup to address goals around describing complex processes/sequences, while providing exposure to background information about colonial jobs.

Heads Up for the Colonists is another activity that speaks to how clothing related to vocation and social standing in colonial times.

More at the site!

Language Lens

We need not go far to find engaging, free activities that allow students to use classroom language and concepts in creative ways (thus targeting thinking skills on higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy).

On "Handouts"

I love the recent developments on easily sharable handouts and documentation using resources such as Google Docs, Scribd, and Issuu. I know that some people prefer traditional printed handouts, but paper all over my life really ruins my sense of feng shui. I still have a large lavender tote bag (not my color) full of handouts from the last two ASHA conventions in my car. I prefer to save such resources in my delicious and diigo libraries. If you'd rather have paper, all of the above options allow you to print to your heart's desire.

My blogging compadre Eric Sailers has recently published his handouts that support his presentations at the FLASHA convention. I really appreciate his promotion of SpeechTechie in his great work! You can see his post about the convention here, as well as handouts on apps and Web 2.0 in our field.

Have a great long weekend!

High 5 Etiquette

This is a wonderfully humorous (especially for a target audience of teenage boys) look at that boisterous greeting technique known as the high 5. As tongue-in-cheek as the video is, it could prompt some helpful role plays and discussions of this and other ways to use nonverbal communication during greetings.


Thanks to Neatorama for featuring this video.