Earth Day

 

    Do you want a great virtual interactive activity for Earth Day?!

    Try a ThingLink Virtual 360 Field Trip. ThingLink has multiple 360 field trips. There are a few that will support Earth Day activities. The field trips will show you an environment in the area and give interactive buttons with videos or articles that will teach the scholars something new about the topic. 

Erintegration has multiple ways you can incorporate technology on Earth Day. They completed a list of 3 of the virtual field trips to incorporate on Earth Day. 

• Learn About Trees explains different types of trees and the parts of one. This virtual field trip pairs nicely with Tell Me, Tree by Gail Gibbons or Tree, Leaves, and Bark by Diane Burns.
• My Interactive Beehive lets the scholars see inside a beehive and understand the different parts. It pairs nicely with the read-aloud The Bee Book by Charlotte Miller. You could also find facts about bees on National Geographic for Kids. 
• The Wetlands Restoration is a virtual field trip that walks you through the wetlands and gives you detailed information on them. It pairs well with the read-aloud Who Loves Here:Wetland Animals. Then have the scholar visit this wetland mapper to view where the wetlands are in the world.

Conker.ai

AI Powered Quizzes & more

Conker.ai is a new website that allows you to harness the power of artificial intelligence to generate quizzes... fast!

Navigating to conker.ai/create the first time will prompt you to continue with Google and ask for additional access to your Google Account. (Note: You do NOT need to give it additional access to continue.)

Once you decide upon permissions, this is the screen you'll see.  Each of the colored areas (Quiz, 5, Multiple choice, and Grade 5) can be adjusted with a dropdown menu of options.  Lastly, you can type in your topic area in the greyed out area that currently says, "e.g. Marie Curie."

Your three assessment options are Quiz, Fill in the Blank & Reading comprehension.

Your two question types for Quiz are Multiple Choice & True/False.

Where I think Conker really shines, however, is the line of text at the bottom that says "Use my own source material."

As the website states:

You’re in the right place if you’ve got an article, essay or extract and want to create a quiz based solely on that content. Simply paste the text below, tweak the title and click Generate

To test this out, I went to Apple News and pulled an article about the recent train derailment in East Palestine from the Washington Post.  (Note: Conker currently only supports 800 words or less)

I was pretty impressed with its ability to quickly generate questions based on the text.  It also generated different questions when I went back and hit 'Generate' a second time.  The questions can then be exported to Google Forms or a .pdf.  I also see value in creating Edulastic quizzes by simply copying and pasting the text and questions to the site to take advantage of the data tracking insights currently available to 6-12 grade teachers as part of the district subscription service to that platform.

Useful Links:
conker.ai/create

 

Black History Month

There are multiple sites that have FREE Black History Month content.

 Discovery Education contains anything from podcasts, videos,          podcasts, activities, slide shows & quizes.  

  BrainPOP  has anything from Black History changemakers, to      historical  dates and times in history that are relevant to Black History.

 INFOhio under the district login page, you will find   reputable research resources, webquests, & videos. 

Pear Deck  has multiple decks you can copy,  edit  and use to teach a interative lessons that is either teacher or student paced.

World Read Aloud Day

 

        World Read Aloud Day was created about 13 years ago in order to create unity and interest in reading. The goal was to bring everyone together to share reading and bring more interest to children and parents. For World Read Aloud Day I have compiled a few websites that will give you read-aloud ideas along with multiple eBooks to enjoy with your scholars. Along with the resources I have included the WRAD-A-THON schedule, that includes multiple live events of people reading around the world!

QR CODE READ ALOUDS

PICTURE BOOK COLLECTION

PEBBLEGO

INFOHIO

          

Sora

The reading app for students!

With Sora, you and your students can borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your district's library.  Powered by OverDrive, Sora is similar to Libby, but geared specifically towards school aged content.  For instance, Sora curates books into collections like, "Appreciate a Dragon Day," "New Year New Series," and currently an "MLK Day" collection:

Borrowing books with Sora is easy! Simply access the site through the Logins page on the district website, choose Youngstown City School District, and login with your district Google account.  

The program includes quite a few student-centered features.  I was specifically drawn to the ability of readers to define words and then review all of the words you've looked up, essentially creating your own personal vocabulary list!

Links:

https://soraapp.com/
 

OpenAI

On the OpenAI website, you will find two unique artificial intelligence platforms with potential classroom uses: Chat GPT & DALL-E  

ChatGPT

What is Chat GPT?  Chat GPT is a text-based AI platform that can recognize human language and respond.  What in the world does that mean? Essentially, you ask it questions and it responds.  Here is an example:

I logged into Chat GPT and provided it with the following prompt:

'Introduce Chat GPT to teachers by explaining its educational benefits.'

This was it's response:

"Hello teachers! I am Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am not able to browse the internet, so my knowledge is limited to what I was trained on, which has a cutoff date of 2021.

With that being said, I can tell you that Chat GPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a type of AI technology that can help teachers in a number of ways. For example, Chat GPT can be used to automatically grade student assignments, providing teachers with more time to focus on other tasks. It can also be used to provide personalized feedback to students, helping them to better understand difficult concepts.

Additionally, Chat GPT can be used to assist with lesson planning and curriculum development, allowing teachers to create more engaging and effective learning materials for their students. It can even be used to help facilitate online learning, allowing for more interactive and personalized instruction.

Overall, Chat GPT has the potential to greatly enhance the educational experience for both teachers and students, providing new opportunities for learning and growth."

Some potential classroom uses for ChatGPT:

Conversational Practice

Writing Practice

Vocabulary & Grammar Practice

Reading Comprehension

Some potential negative impacts on the classroom:

Dependency

Privacy Concerns

Inequalities

Dall-E

As a segue, I next prompted ChatGPT to provide a summary of Open AI's artificial intelligence image generator, Dall-E.  This is what it wrote:

"DALL-E is a large-scale neural network created by the AI research lab OpenAI. It is capable of generating images from text descriptions, using a process called "deep learning". For example, if you were to provide DALL-E with the text description "a dog playing with a frisbee on a beach," it would generate an image of a dog playing with a frisbee on a beach.

The main purpose of DALL-E is to demonstrate the capabilities of deep learning algorithms and the potential for AI to create new and interesting things. DALL-E has been used to generate a wide range of images, including photorealistic images, abstract art, and even characters and scenes from popular movies and TV shows.

Overall, DALL-E is an impressive example of the power of deep learning and AI, and it has the potential to be used in a wide range of applications in the future."

In the present, DALL-E is more fun than educational, but I could definitely see ways to utilize it in the classroom.

For example, I prompted DALL-E to generate 'a Picasso style painting of a high school classroom.' This is what it created:

Not perfectly Picasso, but impressive nonetheless.  Despite any imperfections (and potential headaches), Chat GPT and DALL-E offer unique and valuable capabilities that can help teachers to create engaging and effective learning materials for their students.  They also provide a glimpse of the future of not only education, but of the trajectory artificial intelligence is taking society.  

(Cue your Skynet reference now!)

If that hasn't totally scared you off, check out the links below to gain further insight into these apps as well as experience both of these platforms for yourself! Just sign up for OpenAI access with your Google account and then you're ready to get started.

Useful Links:

The Atlantic Article: The End of High School English

DALL-E

Chat GPT

Bookflix & Scholastic Literacy Pro

 

 

     Scholastic Literacy Pro

                        Did you know that Storia is now called Scholastic Literacy Pro? Teachers can get online stories for FREE as long as they sign up for grades 3-6. If you are a K-2 or 7-8 teacher just sign up, but make sure you choose grades 3-6. Some of the stories in Scholastic Literacy Pro can be read aloud! The scholars have the ability to highlight, take a note, zoom in and out, and skip to different pages. With over 2800 titles this website will be sure to support your scholars' learning!                              

                    If you are looking to sign up. Follow this link to learn how to acquire an access code to get connected! 

    Bookflix

                       Bookflix is a PreK - 2 website where scholars can access paired fiction and nonfiction texts on the same topic. Along with the videos and stories the scholars have access to activities related to each topic. Enjoy English and Spanish versions of multiple stories to support your English Language Learners. Bookflix is equipped with a read-aloud option so that students will be able to follow along and listen to all stories on the site.  This resource is great for struggling readers of any grade level.