Friday, August 6, 2010

Emerging Technologies

The ChemCollective.org is a website that features tutorials, simulations, virtual labs and real-life based learning problems to help teach chemistry principals.  Virtual labs are a great alternative to having students physically performing the lab themselves when resources or time may be limited.  With the advancement of technology I think it is easy to see how virtual labs and virtual schooling could be the future of science education. 


Ancient Spaces created and maintained by the University of British Columbia in Canada is a website that provides 3-D video animations of ancient places in ancient Greece, Egypt, China, and South America that shows how these sites would have looked in their prime.  Personally I love ancient history especially of the Mediterranean Region.

Other types of technologies that I can see having a big role in my classroom are blogging, podcasting, wiki sites, and google docs.  I'm still looking for the best way to create and share my podcasts.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Assistive technologies

WordTalk
Helps people with reading and disabilities. It is free plug in for Microsoft Word (versions '97 and up)that converts text to audio that can be saved as a .wav or mp3 audio file. Also can work with Microsoft Outlook. The toolbar for the program fits right into the toolbar for Word. This program is based on the idea that students who struggle to read benefit when text is read to them. I create a lot of assignments in word and print science articles from the Internet. I could see copying the text from an article into Word and allowing students to read the text with this program.

Bibme is a free online bibliography maker that allows students to create bibliographies in the proper formats. It also has a search function that allows students to search for the book they are using and automatically fills in the data. It's an easy tool and the search links with amazon.com so there are probably not many books that can't be found. I found the texts we've used in this class and it gave options for the format or how much of the book you're citing. I really could have used this when I was trying to learn the APA formatting!  Here's an example of how a search and citation works.