CurrClick - the homeschool store where you can download the books - is having a "Back to Homeschool Sale"! They have a bunch of titles that are up to 70% off right now -- including a good one on the upcoming election. This place is great for last minute homeschool needs. Plus they have a some freebies on their site, and everyone loves free homeschool curriculum, right?
8:17 PM - Aug. 11, 2008 - {0} -
I've just stumbled across a great site for practicing spelling words! It is called Spelling City. You can enter your own lists, and the words can be practiced with online games. There is even a "Teach Me" feature where the words are pronounced and spelled aloud in a real sounding voice. www.spellingcity.com
9:50 PM - Jul. 20, 2008 - {0} -
There are several good, free options for teaching your kids to type. My kids like the one from BBC School the best. Play around with them and see which one clicks for your guys.
Dance Mat Typing from BBC Schools is an online, fun typing program. It is free and doesn't require you to sign up.
Tux Typing is a free, open source software that you can download for Mac, Windows, or Linux systems.
Typing Tutor is a little more sophisticated than the previous typing programs, and would be great for an older child learning to type. It is also free, but it does require you to sign up so that it can keep track of progress.
Typing is a very important skill for kids to learn these days! Make it fun and they will enjoy learning how to type.
For more free software recommendations for homeschoolers, please visit Homeschool 2.0.
8:22 PM - Jun. 20, 2008 - {0} -
I've been having fun tonight playing with a kids' search engine called RedZee. It is filtered and only has sites that are ok for kids to view. But the part that I like is being able to flip through an image of each website similar to the way you flip through album art on an iPod. What a cool way to know where you are heading on the web before you go there.
8:09 PM - Jun. 17, 2008 - {0} -
Just wanted to shout it out that I've found several good sources for free curriculum online.
I'm going to use the Jason.org - http://www.jason.org - science curriculum. It is from National Geographic and Robert Ballard, and it looks like my kids will love it.
I've also decided that a free math curriculum from the UK from the Centre for Innovation in Math - http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mep/default.htm. The website is somewhat clunky, but the actual math curriculum is printable and pretty thorough.
Also, ChristianBook.com has a bunch of homeschool books on sale.
I'll add a couple of more sources soon...
3:05 PM - Jun. 17, 2008 - {0} -
Homeschool EStore has changed its name to CurrClick! It has a nice new look to the site. Sign up for their online newsletter and get some really good free downloads. This is one of my favorite places for a quick options when we need to add a new unit study or lapbook to our curriculum.
10:02 PM - Mar. 10, 2008 - {0} -
http://www.circavie.com/ - CircaVie is a site that lets you create and share timelines for free. They are marketed towards creating personal event timelines, but the site would be great for creating interactive timelines to go along with history or a unit study! We are going to try this one out next week.
2:38 PM - Feb. 26, 2008 - {0} -
I've found neat new site called ScrapBlog.com The site lets you combine photos, video, and audio along with their templates to create digital scrapbooks. As a mom, I thought this was a great way to share photos with grandparents and other relatives.
Scrapblog would be a great way to create a digital lapbook of whatever unit study you are working on. Imagine how fun it would be to very easily create a digital scrapbook of the American Revolution - or wherever you are studying for geography! Then you can share it with friends and relatives.
3:58 PM - Dec. 7, 2007 - {0} -
I have been hard at work on the Homeschool 2.0 website (http://www.homeschool20.com)! I am adding more free curriculum links, projects, and now have the community group set up on Google groups.
Please take a look and join the group!
7:58 PM - Dec. 2, 2007 - {0} -
I came across an interesting podcast today that I wanted to share. It is called "Ten things to do with a laptop" and is from an education conference. The podcast give several ideas on how to integrate computers into a public school setting. But most of the ideas would be even easy to incorporate into homeschooling where we can spend as long as we like on projects.
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2007/09/17/podcast192-ten-things-to-do-with-a-laptop-learning-and-powerful-ideas-by-gary-stager/
2:40 PM - Sep. 27, 2007 - {0} -
There are several good collaborative science projects beginning in September from k12science.org. Go to http://www.homeschool20.com/collaboration.html and click on the CIESE link. The projects do not require special lab equipment and are a great way to involve your kids in science. The projects cover a wide range of grade levels.
Several of the projects involve water usage and water quality. It will be interesting to see the results from around the world.
9:15 PM - Aug. 5, 2007 - {0} -
There is a great new show called Design Squad available through PBS that involves engineering challenges. The episodes are all available online. There is an educators guide and student activities to go with the episodes. MAKE magazine also has activities to correlate with the episodes. Check it out at http://pbskids.org/designsquad/parentseducators/activities/1:12 PM - Jul. 25, 2007 - {0} -
I'm always on the lookout for ways to keep my kids safe online. They have a personalized start page (see my last post on Protopage!) with links to sites that they can use, but they also need a way to safely search for information on school topics. AOL at School Search seems to be gone.... Yahoo for kids is ok...
But if you want to limit the sites your kids can search to specific places, Rollyo is a fantastic way to do it. You can enter up to 25 websites to be used in your search results. I've used it to create a list of great American History sites that I would let my kids use for their history projects.
8:12 PM - Jul. 22, 2007 - {0} -
One of the best ways that I've found to keep my kids safe online is to never let them type urls into the address bar. I even went so far as to take the address bar off of their Firefox browser.
So for the past several years, I have created web pages for a "starting point" for my kids. The starting point had links to their favorite online places, links to sites they needed to use for school, and links to kid friendly search engines. This has worked well, but it isn't always convenient for me to make changes, add links, and upload to my web server. So I had been looking for an easy, on-line solution.
Protopage.com is a free and pretty cool solution to my starting point problem. With Protopage, you can create a custom page with links, widgets, games, calendar, to do lists, and more. I have customized the page to have links to my kids favorite games sites, a view of their school assignment calendar, a calculator, and more. It is easy enough to use that the kids were able to customize it themselves.
I am constantly amazed at the new tools being developed and offered for free on the internet!
4:34 PM - Jul. 19, 2007 - {0} -
Today I've been playing with one of the coolest things I've found in a while - Scratch! It is a free, basic computer language that lets you snap together bits of code to control the action of graphics and sounds. With Scratch you can create games, stories, animations, etc. And it is easy enough that my 10 year old has had no problem figuring it out. This is such a great way to teach the logic of programming in a way that is highly interesting and fun to learn!
4:42 PM - Jun. 24, 2007 - {0} -
I think that Lapbooks are a great way to do unit studies! But my boys, now 9 and almost 11, no longer enjoy the cutting, pasting, coloring, putting together of the lapbook.
So I've created a new website for the concept of Digital Lapbooking. My website is www.digitallapbooking.com.
What is a digital lapbook? It is taking a unit study and putting it together in one place using a computer (laptop... lapbook... :-).
There are tons of great, free online tools that can be used to create content for your lapbook. Here are a few ideas:
- You can use video editors to create documentary like videos using still photos, video clips, and your narration. There are free online video editors and hosting that lets you embed your video in your digital lapbook.
- You can create comic strips online and the embed them in your lapbook.
- Google Maps has a neat feature where you can customize a map with points, pictures, text, and lines. This is great for a history study (like Lewis and Clark!) or a geography study (link in pictures of the area.)
- Writing assignments are easy to add into a digital lapbook!
3:32 PM - Jun. 21, 2007 - {0} -
I've found a couple of interesting concept mapping and brainstorming websites that would be useful for homeschool projects. I haven't tried these out with my kids yet, but I've been using them for my own web design project planning.
Once again, these are all FREE.
Bubbl (www.bubbl.us) is a simple to use brainstorming website. You can try it, create a concept map and print it out without even creating an account. With a free account, you can save and collaborate. Pretty cool!
CMAP is a free, downloadable concept map creation software. It is a bit more complex than Bubbl, but great for older students or more complex projects. (http://cmap.ihmc.us)
MindMeister (www.mindmeister.com) is an online mind mapping and collaboration tool.
MouseBrains is a creative brainstorming tool for advertisers. Cute idea - and it could be used for a study of how advertisers market a product. (http://www.kennieting.com/mousebrains/) (Also posted at homeschooltech.blogspot.com)
3:32 PM - Jun. 21, 2007 - {1} -
Travel from Home....
I love the DK Travel books for planning out a trip. Recently, I discovered that DK has a travel section to their website. They have a number of international destinations that are great for travel planning. But the site is also great for Geography lessons! Check it out at http://www.travel.dk.com/. You could combine this with Google Maps or Google Earth to get a really great view of a city or area.
2:22 PM - Jun. 21, 2007 - {0} -
Homeschool 2.0 is a new website that I'm working on to bring together in one place ideas for using technology with homeschooling. It will contain links to software and online resources and ideas on how to use them for educating your kids.
Homeschool 2.0 will be a permanent resource for links and ideas that I have talked about in this Homeschooling with Technology blog. I think blogging is great for getting the word out about new ideas, but a website is a better way to organize the information.
I'm planning on adding a section on current collaborative projects for homeschoolers and a section of online educational sim sites.
Please let me know of any great sites for online simulations that you are using for homeschooling! Or of any other ideas that you have for educating with technology.
http://www.homeschool20.com
9:03 PM - Jun. 2, 2007 - {0} -
I've recently had my kids try out several online comic creators. Creating comics is a great way for kids to use their creativity, show something they have learned, or teach someone something new.
ReadWriteThink has a comic creator made just for kids. It lets you choose one through six panels for your comic. The characters, props and backgrounds to choose from are kid oriented. You cannot save the comic to view it online. It is printable in black and white, which is great for adding color with pencils or markers afterwards.
ToonDoo is a more sophisticated online cartoon strip creator. This is NOT a place to let the younger kids play unsupervised. Some of the cartoons contain crude language and adult situations. I would advise setting up a login for your kids, logging in for them, and heading to the MyToonDoo section. That will get your kids past the home page which may or may not have inappropriate materials. ToonDoo has lots of backgrounds, characters, and props to use in creating your strips. It allows you to save your comic and publish it to the web. ToonDoo keeps track of stats on how many times your cartoon has been viewed (important to some kids!) and you can embed it in a blog.
The last place that we have tested out is Comeeko. This one comes with the same warnings as above! Go ahead and create a login for your self and log in before letting your kids play. Comeeko lets you create photo comics. You can upload your pictures and add text and effects. Not only can your kids make funny pictures of the family, but this is great for using historical pictures in an interesting way. Just make sure to follow copyright laws!
6:30 PM - Jun. 1, 2007 - {0} -
|