Guess the Wordle

This site, Guess the Wordle, by @jenwagner, is a great site to use with your students every day. A new wordle is posted online every Monday-Friday. Each wordle will have a topic and the students must figure out the topic for the day's wordle.

Each wordle in January deals with vocabulary. Each day you will see synonyms for grade level words. One way to use this tool is to have it displayed as students arrive each morning, then work with your class to find the answer! To find the answer to the wordle, simply hover your arrow over the wordle and the answer will appear. Challenge your students to think about the answer for the wordle before giving up!

This site really encourages students to think! Another great feature is that Jen archives past Guess the Wordle challenges, so if your students love it (and I think they will), you have more to choose from than the one for today!

Give it a try! You can start Monday with your class! Then, challenge your students to create wordles for their classmates to guess.

ZooBurst (Create an Online Pop-up Book)

Have you tried Zooburst? If not, try it out! I think your students will love this tool! ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books.
Below is a sample book that I created in about 10 minutes to show what I did this summer. You can search for graphics to include in your book, which really helps save time. Each page can have text and you can make the characters (or clipart) have text on the free account or record your voice for a character (or clipart) on the paid account
There is a premium account, but the free account allows you to create 10 free books with 10 pages each, upload your own artwork or jpgs,  and more. For $50 a year, you can create student accounts (you create their user name and password, so it doesn't look like the students need an email address to use this site if you purchase the upgrade.) Check out the features for all account types here. A school license is coming soon that is $30 with a minimum of 5 accounts purchased.
Check out ZooBurst and see if you can create a book to introduce a unit, a story, or tell students all about you! The possibilities are endless! You can even sign up for the free account and let your students create a book using your login. If you create one, feel free to post the link to it in the comment section below.
One more plus, you can control if the book is public or private and they can easily be embedded into a class website or blog!
Happy ZooBursting!

Free Online Conference-Jan. 8th

		Just wanted to let everyone know of an online conference  on January 8th that you may be interested in checking out. It's the Reform Symposium.  http://reformsymposium.com/ Here is a description: This year the conference will focus on interactive presentations that help teachers with creating engaging classrooms and lessons, building relationships with students, improving literacy, working with interactive whiteboards, and much more!  We look forward to 2 keynote speakers, 18 presentations, an open discussion on classroom management, a panel discussion on parental engagement, a mentor program, and an open lab for hands-on support in helping you continue your professional development in online educator communities. Here is the schedule (choose your time zone): http://reformsymposium.com/january-8th-schedule-of-presenters/ Lots of the sessions look great! If you have some time Saturday, check it out! Have a great weekend!

Great blog post with MLK Sites

I saw this on twitter and wanted to post it in case anyone was looking for sites for Martin Luther King day. This is a blog post by Larry Ferlazzo. It has a lot of sites that you may want to look at to use for studying about Dr. King and his life.

Calendar Activities

This is a neat site I ran across today with calendar activities for classroom use.

It's by ReadWriteThink, which it you haven't checked out their site, I recommend giving it some time!

Here is the description from the calendar activities site:
Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students. View by day, by week, or by month.

This could be used to share a fact each day with your students or have a student research the site on interesting things that happened during the week in history to "report" back to the class. Students could also research things that happen on their birthday.

Have other ideas on using this site? Post a comment so everyone can benefit! :)