iTunes Store

The iTunes Store is not just good for finding the lastest songs and movies, but can be used to find many options for classroom ideas. It would not be hard to find a video to incorporate into a lesson you may have for the day. You can search by grade level or subject area. What is so great about the videos are most of them are very short which helps students who have a short attention span, especially for younger children.

I watched "Total Solar Eclipse Animation." This would be neat to show if this were something that was being studied or even if it may be occurring at the time. This video explains what a Solar Eclipse is and also shows the process. It was only a little over a minute long.

I believe these videos would be great to use in the classroom, especially for visual and auditory learners. The videos are good to reinforce material that is covered in class. Most of the videos are sponsored by prominent groups such as PBS and WGBH These are both great educational websites that reach all ages.

iTunes University

iTunes University can be used in classrooms to look movie clips and other material for teaching tools. Teachers are setting up programs called iLife and iWork which allows them to provide customized lessons for the students. This allows the students to listen to the lesson wherever they may be. You can find iTunes U located in the iTunes store. It includes over 100,000 audio and video clips.

iTunes allows you to set up accounts for schools. You can have an opened or closed site. If it's protected you must have a password. On your own iTunes site, you can have information about the school and what's offered. (audio/video) As far as the classroom, you could have podcasts on how to do something, lessons, and other assignments. Also you can include videos on the site as well.

This site would be beneficiary if as a teacher you posted everything on the site from your class. For example, if someone missed class they could go to the site and listen to the lesson they missed. Also if you showed a video in class you could upload it so students can view it again. If a student is struggling and needs reinforcment on an area they could use this site. I would think this would be neat to use in the classroom. It would be great for visual and audio learners. It would be a great study tool for students to prepare for tests.

Edutopia is a site for teachers to get different ideas to use in their classroom. There are also downloads on iTunes to help teachers. "The Edible Classroom" was so interesting. During 1st period this school uses gardening to teach different subjects. It is used, along with cooking, to teach all ares of learning, math, science, social studies, etc. This is a great hands on experience for children. This would be a wonderful idea for bodily learners. Not only is this a great idea for teaching school material, but they also learn the fundamentals of cooking. The next video, "A Night in a Global Village" was also a really neat idea. I believe it taught students the importance of teamwork and also gave them a great perspective of what it would be like with essentially nothing. I think it is important to stress the idea of community service and having projects to help out around the community.

Wikipedia

I'm sure like most people, I have always used Wikipedia to get background information on a topic before writing a paper. These blogs were interesting to read. I knew people edited this site, but I didn't know there was a way to check to see who is changing the articles.

Wikiscanner is a website anyone can go to in order to see who edits articles on Wikipedia. It was very interesting to see how many big name organizations were editing the articles. Some of the corporations included The New York Times, Fox News, and Walmart. This could be both, good and bad.

On the positive side this could be a great tool to have these articles edited by these companies because they may have a little bit more information on a topic or oould give an inside perspective, which could be really neat. On the otherhand, it could be negative, by being biased or having a political slant on the issue. Encyclopedias are supposed to be nonbiased, stating facts for both sides. Negative examples given in the blogs included the voting centers from a few years ago. There was an article written and the Diebold voting machine company cut out numerous paragraphs.

As far as in the classroom, I would not allow students to use this as a resource, however it may be a starting point. Maybe it could even be used to compare. For example, present to the class, "this is what Wikipedia says let's do reasearch to see what we can find." Then you could teach about reliable sources and how to find them.