Eclectic Technology

If you are looking from some short (as in 1 - 2 minute) videos that may help you begin a science lesson check out Ask Smithsonian, located on the Smithsonian website.

You will find over 40 videos available. The topics vary, from What is the Origin of Applesauce to Is Quicksand Real to Why Do Bugs Die on Their Back. You will also find some videos that are applicable to social studies, such as How Did King Tut Die.

Richard Byrne (of FreeTech4Teachers) has created a new slideshow of his top picks of web tools for 2014. He states "I shared only tools that are new-to-me since last year's NCTIES conference and or have released significant enhancements in the last year."

As always it is worth looking through this lengthy slideshow, which is embedded in the post and also available through Google docs so you may choose to save a copy. He notes that he will continue to add speaker notes to include "more links."

Some of these tools have been mentioned in this Scoop.it but there are quite a few that are new to me that I will be checking out.

If you or your students use Google Docs they can quickly generate a word cloud when their document has 100 or more words. Richard Byrne provides clear instructions in this post as well as suggestions on how your students might use the word cloud to help them revise, to find words the may have over used and more!