dig-dug treasure hunter(updated 8/22/2022)

EXPLORE! And don’t say it’s… tl;dr… if you know what that means, don’t say it here.. remember you’re doing this for college credit, not just for fun. You may have to dig a little to find a treasure (tl:dr = too long; didn’t read). So explore and get in touch with your inner “Dig Dug” if you remember that game).

We will discuss ethics, acceptable use policies, and safety in another cycle.. but for now, remember the first concern of any parent or administrator is going to be security, safety and privacy of children whom you allow to access the Internet in your classroom as part of your lessons.

Most teachers new to technology integration start out with using the Internet just for retrieving facts… like a simple substitution (think SAMR) of the web for a school encyclopedia.  So tons of facts like Nation Master are used to provide data to the classroom. But anyone with a smartphone knows the Internet is not just for facts… it’s place to read, write, discuss, play and interact. And it is these more active learning uses that teachers need to understand to wisely integrate technology.

And still on the practical side of teaching– how about Remind, a free mobile app to text messages to students and parents as reminders, as we do here in 2 Summers.

A starting note: Not all software is “free” or “freemium” (basic use free plus paid premium upgrades). In fact schools can and do pay for educational materials and app and resources should not be entirely different. Would you rather have Google Earth VR or a globe costing $100 or more in your classroom? Which might be updated fasters based on Ukraine war outcomes or other global political changes?

Maybe we should start at the Digital Public Library (I know, it’s just an info source like I said above, but it’s a good one)

Let’s first consider some of my suggestions for promising educational resources and tools. 

Here are some downloadable resources to help you complete your Digital Age Work and Learning Badges capabilities:

And now for some cool places I think every teacher should explore:

Here are some sample treasures for you to explore. Peek at each to get a sense of what they can provide, either to individual students, or displayed to the whole class on a Smartboard. Glance and all, but explore a few that catch your interest and be prepared to discuss what kinds of things the Internet can afford for classroom instruction.

  1. 3-D avatar-based worlds. Consider virtual worlds with game-like interfaces, several exclusively for K-12 students, such as Minecraft Competition 2020-21 and Minecraft Education Education (free with your UConn ID).
  2. Virtual 3D avatar-based worlds of the past Second Life, EcoMUVE, and the now defunct Quest Atlantis. and ongoing like Secondlife and Metaverse AR.
  3. Learning Languages? Consider the Spanish teacher who would like her students to send e-mail to native Spanish speaking students. Can e-pals be helpful? Or maybe make a connection through My Language Exchange.Or better yet, consider creating listening and speaking assignments that get automatically transcribed for you using the capabilities of Google Voice.
  4. Experience 11 minutes of the 1864 Civil War “live” in Virtual Reality on Youtube. [click and drag your mouse left/right up down on the video, to “turn your head”]
  5. Classic Reading/ Literacy: Your students are looking for e-books about war and peace that they can download to read in their iPhones. Consider The Gutenberg Project where full text downloads of classic texts are available and readable on ebook hardware (recent CNET reviews) or even just on your cell phone.
  6. Concept Mapping, Conceptual modeling tools.
    1. Concord Consortium’s Sagemodeler free online tool.
    2. CMap online concept mapping tool.
  7. Want students to read online with your questions and highlights embedded– take a look at Curriculet with existing files and the ability for you to mark up any book for you students.
  8. Take a look at Knowing Poe as an example of a flexible interface to literature. Note: You will be asked to examine other transmedia literature like Inanimate Alice more closer, later in the semester during the Transmedia storytelling cycle. But you could certainly take a look now if that is a key interest of yours.
  9. Writing on the Internet: Consider a site like FanFiction where students can write about their favorite movies, TV, games and cartoons… and equally importanly, peers can comment, review, and edit the writing to improve their writing and editing skills. If you are interested, consider how writing is different in a wiki versus Googledocs.
  10. New Reading Literacies… consider how students might “read” this interactive text on the Dynamic Earth from learner.org. Does reading this require the same skills as reading a paper book?
  11. Math tutorials: If you don’t know it already, definitely check out Khan Academy video tutorials, and consider that your students could not only use the existing resources, but contribute by making their own tutorials on how to do math. Some Math teachers ask students to view the presentation of new material at home and use class time to discuss problem sets (thus reversing teaching and homework). Then consider how student both giving and receiving homework help on social networks like Chegg, might support effective student learning.
  12. Language Tutorials: Similar to Khan Academy, take a peek at the online language learning lessons available at GLOSS from the Dept of Defense.
  13. What about live video with experts all over the world, take a look at this brief Video Intro to Skype in the Classroom and the Skype a Scientist program.
  14. A Math teacher is looking for challenging problems and ideas to enhance their lessons. Someone recommends Math Forum (http://mathforum.org) where Figure This! and Problems-of-the-week are available, but also consider the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. Or for younger students how about math games from Sumdog? Or have you seen the free possibilities of Desmos for graphing functions? And how about some free videos for introducing graphing?
  15. Computational thinking– a part of many sciences these days and hard to introduce to students in the context of programming and coding. Take a look at NetLogo as a free tool for introducting programming.
  16. What might students learn by watching San Diego Zoo webams (penguin are my fav!)? Or just observing live stream wildlife? If you can’t afford the field trip every week, consider a weekly virtual tour of a museum or aquarium from around the world. Also consider starting with EarthCam and then checking out Connecticut Live traffic WebCams or even Google Earth. Or maybe just watch some Explorlive puppies cam.
  17. And in the Art room, check out sites like artPad that allows a user to playback the drawing process and include your drawing in a gallery of other paintings, Bomomo, a site that uses abstract paintbrushes to create imaginative and beautiful artwork, Repper a site about patterns you create can be used and shared in various ways,  a site that pours colored sand from where you are touching on the screen, BeFunky a site that lets you make cartoon images of yourself using your own pictures, or National Gallery of Art’s  NGA Kids Art Zone.
  18. A middle school science teacher would like her students to become more familiar with how real science is done. She would like her students to examine more than just their own short lab experiment data, and is looking for places to see authentic real-time data about whales, weather, astronomy, and possibly other things. Consider Real Time Data including real time conditions in Long Island Sound! What might students learn by seeing the real “messy” raw data, problems with calibration and instrument anomolies, that they might not get from textbook presentations of facts or pre-determined lab exercieses? And what about live operating room video or OR work chronicled live for the non-queasy?
  19. High school science teachers with an eye toward college prep need personalized, gamified learning for students. Simulations like Concord Consortium’s free online Molecular Workbench (YouTube Intro) online at NextGen could be integrated into any lesson. As could the computation thinking and modeling enabled by Northewestern’s Frog virtual dissection  Dynamic Systems Game and watershed modeling app 
  20. Another middle school science teacher is looking for an interesting context to get students excited about science and exploration in a full-year theme- a stark contrast to the idea of “minute physics!”. Consider the comprehensive STEM curriculum provided by the Jason Project
  21. Interested in science observatories… how about controlling your own observatory at Harvard.
  22. Maybe some rules for online chatting should be established for the students using ideas from Netiquette or learning to be a better digital citizen on the island at Be Internet Awesome.
  23. Why Whyville.net? Hmmm.. I wonder. why.. try clicking ABOUT Whyville and say you’re a teacher, even enter as a guest and explore. This is a very extensive game-based site for science learning that is research-based and well documented in the Learning Sciences literature. During COVID Whyville was an interactive place to learn about pandemics
  24. Want your elementary students to be helping real scientists collect migration data? This is authentic science activity consistent with Situated Cognition’s Legitimate Peripheral Participation… Consider Journey North (particularly Monach Butterflies project)
  25. Simulation– a Web Classic! A biology teacher is intrigued by the concept of artificial life. Perhaps a simulation would be interesting. Take a look at a JPL solar system simulator and an electronic circuit simulation, and don’t forget to peek at the economic business simulator Beer Game that is a serious role-play simulation game for more serious learners that lets students experience typical coordination problems of (traditional) supply chains, in which information sharing and collaboration does not exist. In more general terms, this supply chain represents any non-coordinated system in which problems arise due to lack of systemic thinking.
  26. Off to school we virtually go…With school budgets in trouble, perhaps several Virtual tours, that are more than just webquests (e.g., Virtual Field Trips) could be taken to enahnce learning. Consider Education World’s virtual tours.
  27. The political science class is looking for real time voter tracking data.
  28. And if you think I forgot about Social Studies, consider Mission US, Reacting to the Past and the ongoing dialog at Play The Past.
  29. If you like Flipped Classroom idea, and can see a use YouTube Videos, how about EdPuzzle for adding questions to YouTube videos, pausing the video automatically to insert your questions or links to outside documents?

Of course these are only a few examples of how Wikipedia and Webquests can be expanded to make reading and writing on the web part of every class. 

Finally consider many broader social issues of Web Access including Fake News, new online reading/writing literacies, and the Digital Divide:

Can you detect fake news?

These are complicated issues that will be addressed in other discussion in our course.