Exhibit Hall Finds @CUE 2011

COOL FINDS on Friday
I found a neat exhibit / website that helps you and your students collaborize.  It is called Collaborize Classroom.  (http://collaborizeclassroom.com/) You can sign up for FREE!  It has many great functions to use with your students and your lessons. (No, I am not getting any reimbursements from them)
From their website: 
Why Collaborize Classroom?
Collaborize Classroom is designed to complement classroom instruction and engage students in online activities, assignments and discussions that allow for deeper participation inside and outside the classroom.
•Do more with less. Allow your students to participate on their own time with an easy-to-use platform.

•Enrich your curriculum with multimedia. Embed Microsoft Office documents, videos, pictures, and PDFs.

•Give every student a voice. Teach students how to have productive, respectful and supportive discussions online.

•Publish discussions to a results page so students can see tangible outcomes of their conversations.

•Access detailed student participation reports that make grading easy!

•Download FREE lesson plans to help get you started.

• The next cool thing is an Interactive White Board.... Star Board Link by Hitachi (http://www.hitachisolutions-us.com/starboard/tcea ) 
• make any hard surface interactive
• can be mobile
• $749
• can buy a pad to walk around and write for an additional $250
• ALLOWS FOR UP TO 3 USERS TO WRITE ON BOARD!!
• hand movements to write, zoom in /out, scroll

IQuest presents STEM resources

First session of the day gave me numerous online STEM RESOURCES. I have used the roller coaster interactivity at Funderstanding with my students before building Knex coasters and found it valuable. Go to http://www.funderstanding.com/coaster
Students can manipulate height, parts, speed, and record their findings on a spreadsheet. Another Physical Science interactivity is from PHET, called Moving Man. http://PHET.Colorado.edu/en/simulation/moving-man . Same principles of manipulation and recording of data. More soon!

CUE 2011

Palm Springs is engaging Ed Tech leaders with great workshops, keynotes, and vendors hall. I am here at The CUE Conference as a learner and presenter. I come here for inspiration and innovation and leave with a brain spinning with ideas and plans. If you haven't already, take a look at CUE http://cue.org. Check out http://kerncue.org for more updates from Kern CUE on fantastic things we have seen here at the CUE Conference.

Updates from Other Great Blogs

I was looking through my PLN blogs and saw a couple websites that I wanted to share.
From Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers-
Rocks and Weathering - a great interactive activity to use with students to learn about rocks.  It shows how different types of rocks form and provides for students to create, inspect, and destroy rocks using different tools.  It also can be captioned (see top menu of website) for those who are Deaf, hard of hearing, ESL, or simply like the captions.  This could be used on individual computers or as an interactive whiteboard activity.


From Digital Goonies -
Wikicards.net is a great way to organize your information and be able to share it with others.  You can create as many cards as you want and organize them into groups.  You can put links, jpegs, videos on the cards and group them under one heading.  You could use this to build your resources for a unit and then share it with your fellow teachers.   Here is an example of using Wikicards from Digital Goonies.

That's all for now.   I am attending two conferences in the next two weeks and hope to have more to share!  CAL-ED for Deaf Educators in California and CUE - Computer Using Educators big conference in Palm Springs!