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October 1, 2001
Computer Learning Month
By Kim Carter
October is Computer Learning Month - time to investigate the many ways that computers empower learning. The Web sites below look at resources for empowering learning with technology as well as opportunities for creative learning.
Curriculum Resources
The Gateway to Educational Materials
Here's your "one stop shopping" for high quality educational resources! At The Gateway, you can search or browse over 21,000 educational resources. If browsing is your thing, you can browse by the Collections List, by subject, or by keyword. Search capabilities allow you to select as few or as many grade/educational levels, limit your searching to free resources, and search by full text, keyword, title, or description.
MarcoPolo
Looking for quality Internet content to match your standards-based curricula? Look no further! Here you'll find your entryway to six discipline-specific educational Web sites for K-12 teachers, developed around national standards by MarcoPolo partners, including American Association for the Advanced of Science, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council of the Great City Schools, national Geographic Society, Kennedy Center, National Council on Economic Education, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and MCI/WorldCom.
Thinkquest.org
No exploration of teaching with computers would be complete without ThinkQuest. Whether you're a teacher, parent, or student, you'll find hundreds of the best learning opportunities available online. Play with water balloons, explore sign language, explore economics, try your hand at the stock market - the possibilities are endless!
Knowledge Network Explorer
You'll find hundreds of resources here to help you integrate Internet resources into your teaching. Start with Blue Web'n, the grandmama library of "Blue Ribbon learning sites" for web-based tutorials, activities, projects, units and lessons plans, and "hot lists" of great Web sites. Check out Filamentality, an interactive Web site that guides you through developing your own Web-based learning page. And don't miss their collection of Web Quests, online challenges developed around curriculum topics.
The WebQuest Page
Not only will this page teach you about WebQuests, "inquiry-oriented" activities where most of all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web, but you'll be able to access hundreds of WebQuests created for learners from Kindergarten through adulthood. Visit the Community area and peruse transcripts from past WebQuest chats and join the e-list of educators working with WebQuests. This is a 21st Century Education Movement!
The Amazing Picture Machine
Use this specially designed database to find graphical resources on the Internet to support your curriculum. You'll also find strategies for teaching with pictures as well as a sampling of lesson plans and guidelines for citing images and pictures. This growing database taps into the power of visual learning.
Creative Learning Resources
One of the real advantages of computers is their ability to provide visualizations and models of concepts and phenomenon, allowing us to process the information from different perspectives. The following Web sites provide just such opportunities:
Sodaplay
Billed as "the home of creative play," Sodaplay features the Sodazoo, virtual creatures created with springs and masses that you can adjust and play with, and Sodaconstructor, where you can create your own creatures.
Exploring Emergence
This interactive essay invites you to explore the concept of "emergence." A "simple" Java program provides the foundation for exploring how objects and patterns can arise from basic interactions that are surprising - and counter-intuitive.
Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus
Those of you who are strong visual learners will delight in this new perspective on the relationships of words! Data-animation technology allows you to visually explore the sense relationships of English language words. Enter a word and view synonyms and close relatives in either 2-D or 3-D motion.
An Atlas of Cyberspaces
At this online "atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories," you can view the growing cyberscapes through a variety of lenses: conceptual, artistic, geographic, topology, historical, as well as several others. You may well be startled by how much information can be conveyed visually!
Technology Resources
Other unique online resources provide windows into the power of computer technology to "go where no man has gone before"!
StarLogo
Use this programmable modeling environment with your students to explore real-life phenomena such as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies. From this site, you can download the program, walk through the tutorials, explore others' projects, and tap into an extensive community of educators committed to empowering student learning through modeling.
A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation
Looking for a little conversation? Alicebot will converse as long as you want. You may start out testing the bot, but don't be surprised if you find yourself forgetting you're chatting with a computer!
What Is?
You'll never be stumped by a high-tech term again - as long as you have ready access to this online encyclopedia of over 3,000 technology-related terms. Track the expansion of the language (or the evolution of the tech industry!) through the "Top 20 Words of the Week."
Just for Fun
Last Page
Here's a surprise page for those of us who spend a LOT of time online.
Email: Kim Carter
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