Where is galileo galilei in wiglington and wenks

Read these stories with your students or include them in your classroom library for reading. In this virtual world, students have the opportunity to travel to and explore real places. As students travel through the worlds, they are presented with various quests and meet with famous historical figures. Send your students on quests to learn more about each of these characters and places.

Find more ideas for using Wiglington and Wenks in your classroom on my original post here. Tips: Make sure that you use a valid email address in your comment so that I can contact you! Leave a comment and share how you are using Wiglington and Wenks in your classroom.

What it is: I absolutely love when I learn about a new site, especially those that I immediately know will be a winner with students. You know the sites that have incredible graphics, are easy to use, and involve kids in the story instead of just drill and practice. One of the creators of the site aldricchang alerted me to the new site today via Twitter. Students are dropped into the middle of a story where they become world travelers to places around the real-world, meeting historical characters, playing brain games, building culture inspired houses, exploring secret locations, and solving ancient mysteries.

There are educational real-world and imaginary places for students to visit from the past, present, and the future. Wiglington and Wenks was originally a children story book series written by Johan Bittleston. It has exploded into an online world where students can learn and explore. Wiglington and Wenks is so much more than your standard virtual world, it has a rich story line with well developed characters, plot, mystery, and quests.

Students are dropped into the story and invited to participate, learning through exploration, problem solving, and critical thinking. The world highlights famous real-world landmarks, historical figures, inventions, culture, nature, and wildlife. Students are motivated to learn more about each as they complete a series of quests. A series of magic maps guide them as they travel through time and space.

Through a series of events, a time portal was accidentally created that transported famous figures from the past to the future. VoiceThread is very useful. Students can use Ed. VoiceThread to create digital stories, documentaries, practice and document language skills, explore geography and culture, solve math problems, and much more. As a teacher, I like VoiceThread as a place to teach.

Because everything is web-based, you can upload the days lessons to Ed. VoiceThread for students to refer to and collaborate with while doing homework. VoiceThread makes you your students personal tutor. The self paced learning is fantastic! VoiceThread to document learning, collaborate with classmates, or collaborate with other students around the world. VoiceThread can be used in any subject as a way to document and record learning and conversation.

The possibilities are endless. A class subscription to Ed. VoiceThread makes it possible to give your students their own accounts any age by creating student usernames without an email address. With a class subscription, you are automatically made co-editor of student work, can manage student accounts and create classes, and get a custom web address to easily share public VoiceThreads.

Shelfari is a great way to discover new titles, discuss books, start an online book club, and show others what you are reading. You can show off your Shelfari bookshelf on your blog, classroom website, or other social networking site of choice.

Build a bookshelf of age appropriate reading for your students. Embed the bookshelf on your classroom website, wiki, or blog to encourage reading. Shelfari allows you to create online book clubs and discussions making it easy to keep student reading and comprehension skills in top shape. Shelfari is an excellent resource for parents who may feel overwhelmed when they enter a library with their child.

With Shelfari, parents can visit your shelf before the trip to the library for some great suggestions. Shelfari is an ideal place for you and your students to connect over reading. Students can create their own bookshelves to show off what they are reading.

Students can comment and rate the books they read and check out other students reviews. Allow students to start a discussion on Shelfari in place of a more traditional book report.

Connect with other staff members over books that you are reading. Shelfari does not specify an age requirement in their terms of service; however it does require an email address for registration. If your students do not have a school email address, they can use a temporary email address to login with. Students will have to check back with their Shelfari account for any updates as they will not receive them by email.

Weebly makes it extremely easy to create a website or blog because of its drag and drop interface, ready made designs, the ability to customize content simply, and the drag and drop approach to organizing pages. These websites are easy to create and have great looking, professional results. Teachers can use Weebly to create a class website. Here your students can explore topics that you are studying in class, view any assignments that are due, see class pictures, read newsletters, and find content related links.

A class website can become the hub for any classroom. Post all current information on your class site, pictures of field trips you have taken, and add links to websites you are using in class. This is a great way to boost classroom-home communication. Weebly is also a wonderful creation platform for students. Students can create websites to document learning in any subject. Students can use a Weebly website as a digital portfolio by collecting learning, images, and other web 2.

Students of any age can use the teacher-moderated education version of Weebly. Learning is social, Think Quest engages and inspires students by providing a wider but protected audience. It turns students into multimedia authors for their classmates and allows them to think and learn together. This is more than a blog, students can hold debates, brainstorming sessions, polls, and more.

Only teachers and students from your school can enter this password protected learning community or you can open it up a little more so that other schools can communicate with yours Think Quest allows members to use websites and interactive tools to publish their ideas, collaborate on projects, and build knowledge together.

Think Quest also holds competitions where students are challenged to globally think, create and innovate using the Think platform to work together on projects, digital media, or application development. Think Quest is a highly motivational environment for students. It can be integrated into any subject and any curriculum.

Give students a writing assignment and have them brainstorm and write together using Think Quest. Students will use this tool outside of school and naturally extend learning on their own. Think Quest offers the interactive learning tool to thousands of schools around the world in eight different languages, get real world foreign language experience for your students!

Think Quest can be used with students at any age. A teacher registers the school for an account and manages student accounts. Send home the included Think Quest permission slip to be signed by parents. It is very easy to use, just upload a photo, record your voice, and send or embed it. Fotobabble can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom. Students can take pictures, or find creative commons images that illustrate vocabulary that they are learning and record themselves saying the definition and using the word in a sentence.

Students could collect and trade Fotobabble vocabulary with other students and embed them in a blog or wiki to create their own talking dictionary. A talking virtual word wall of this sort would be helpful for math, science, social studies, history, and regular vocabulary words that students learn. The format is valuable for audio and visual learners.

Upload pictures of a field trip to Fotobabble for students to record thoughts, observations, and lessons they learned on the field trip. Consider creating a class Fotobabble account that you the teacher are in charge of. Upload student illustrations and record a story that they have written in their own voice. This is the perfect type of project to share at parent teacher conference time.

If you complete a similar project several times through the year, both students and parents can see the growth and progress that has been made during the school year. Fotobabbles are an outstanding way to send young students on an Internet scavenger hunt. Along the way, record directions with Fotobabble and embed on your class website, wiki, or blog.

Nonreaders or struggling readers will be able to listen to, and follow directions for any assignment. Upload a picture of a landmark or map and have students record fun facts that hey have learned about the place. Send special messages from your class home to parents in the weekly newsletter. Take a picture of a project that the class has done, or a fun activity form the week.

Students can record a message about the upcoming events, fun highlights of the week in learning, and a list of helpers who have signed up for the week.

Parents will love hearing their kids give the news updates each week. Looking for a special holiday activity? Record students leaving a special message to their parent with a special picture made just for them-now that is a keepsake! Fotobabble requires an email address during registration.

Consider creating a class account if your students do no have school email addresses of their own. Fotobabble is set to come out with an educational version in early , this will allow teachers to create student accounts without an email address.

The Best Resources for Middle Schools ahead. Very similar to Prezi, Ahead allows users to upload high resolution images, videos, and even files from Adobe products and Microsoft Office directly as part of the interactive presentation.

The site offers website and blog embed codes for sharing and has a great high-speed zooming interface that is cool and easy to work with. This is a great tool to create presentations for students of all ages to explore and learn from, as well as one that students can use to create their own presentations. Middle School kids are sure to love the endless possibilities that this learning playground offers them! The site is very simple and easy to use.

The art can be saved, printed, and easily shared or incorporated into a document or online presentation. Students and teachers of all ages can use this webtool to create a comic cell, strip, or story and then share it with their peers or the world. The possibilities are endless with this simple to use website. You simply click on attributes of a character's build, pick the colors, the background, and add dialogue.

It would be a fantastic tool to use with illustrating a scene from a novel, or even to help a student understand a complex theory such as gravity in science. Bitstrips is fun, free although there are paid features available , and very useful as a teaching tool. Schoology leverages the familiarity of popular social media tools such as Google Docs and Facebook to improve communication and collaboration. It is a great tool to use with Middle School students and between faculty members, especially in this social networked society.

It offers students a simple way to keep track of their class assignments and assessments, as well as offering their teachers a great way to extend the four walls of the classroom and distribute information, images, documents, movies, and more. Teachers can even take attendance and enter student grades from the site - it is a brilliant and full-featured web tool that will be valuable academically for students, as well as socially as it teaches them how to use a social network responsibly in a safe environment.

A simple way to help reduce extraneous search results, especially helpful with Middle School students who are often doing their first large online research assignments. This is a great resource for all subject areas and all students to use. Great for making historical timelines and interactive multimedia presentations with or for your students. Students can even embed moving images as a background for the whole page and music to accompany the viewing of the Capzle.

In addition to being shared and commented on, students can also embed a Capzle on their classroom website or blog. Each of the several activity-creation tool helps students develop historical thinking skills and gets them thinking like historians.

Teachers simply find and insert primary sources into a customizable and very slick template in order to customize the activity to fit their unique students. This is one of those awesome sites that make teaching easier and more fun while exciting the students and engaging them to learn at the same time. It is a remarkable new way for the user to search for information and receive an interactive, customized, engaging, narrative response on the fly. I can imagine a Middle School student searching for information on a historical event or a foreign country and receiving the results in this highly entertaining and informative way.

While it is in private Alpha testing right now, this is one to watch and wait for. After playing with this one for the past month, it is easy to see that the educational possibilities are limitless. It is easy and very powerful - with dedicated options to remove all images and backgrounds. Middle School students could isolate a particular article off of an online newspaper and print just that one section instead of all the ads, comments, and junk that often times comes along with it.

You can also edit the font type, size, and even formatting of the picture in order to truly get what you want and nothing more. A great way for schools to save money on paper and toner and save the planet at the same time.

Think PhotoShop but free - and web based. A great tool for students and teachers who don't have access to or money for PhotoShop or other heavy-duty image manipulation software. Middle School students can create visual masterpieces using this very robust art program, and even edit and touch up photos that they upload. The files can be saved on the computer as a JPEG, or even on the web and accessed from any computer with web access.

Imagine the ability to post notes with reminders about class trips, even the PDF file for the permission slip, as well as photos and other great items for your peers and students. But there are so many other uses for this great tool - Middle School students can take and organize project notes or class notes on specific content, they can easily brianstorm ideas together, and even include videos and hyperlinks to other valuable content they wish to share with their teachers and their peers.

Wall Wisher is simple to use and can be shared or kept private. It is an easy way to share a workspace either with students or colleagues. Teachers can even set up the wall wisher so that they need to approve new notes if they want to monitor the content being posted.

It's simple to use and easy to use with your class or in your library. The search results are all filtered through Google's Safe Search Strict technology.

Overall, it is a nice take on the student search engine and can be a valuable search option for students. The Best Resources for Middle Schools Show Document - Show Document is a great site that allows teachers and students to conduct free web meetings to share documents with one another in real time. It is a free service that lets you explore Google Maps together, surf the web with peers or students, share and comment on a Word or PDF document, or even use a virtual whiteboard space to conduct "meetings".

This is a very simple way to collaborate online with other teachers and groups of students. There is unlimited space on the virtual whiteboard and you can always save a PDF of all the work before leaving a session. This is a great web tool that is easy to use and can be very valuable in any classroom for teachers and students alike. Middle School students can search though Google Images, Flikr photos, music, and even TV clips that are free for use anywhere in your classroom or on the web.

In addition to offering students and their teachers tons of multimedia assets to incorporate in their school work, this site helps to teach about how to give proper accreditation, and what a a copyright or creative common license is all about and why it exists. A nice resource for teachers and students alike, especially in a time where it is sometimes too easy to simply copy and paste pictures and information without giving credit or asking permission.

This site even allows you to enter a book's ISBN number and then automatically fills in the information for you. A great tool that makes the research much easier for Middle School students and their teachers. The Best Resources for Middle Schools Weebly for Education — Weebly is a website creation site that makes it simple for teachers or students to create their own simple to work with websites.

It is an easy to understand and versatile tool for educators and students alike. By using drag and drop functionality Middle School students can use Weebly for Education to start a Digital Portfolio, a personal blog, as well as create a website for any school club or extracurricular activities.

Weebly offers some great features, such as polls, embeddable maps and videos, and much more to make the sites dynamic, interactive, and very nice ways to display student work. Edmodo - Edmodo is a private microblogging site like Twitter that teachers and students can use to send notes, links, files, alerts, assignments, and events to each other. It is a great way to communicate in a safe and controlled environment while still keeping the immediacy and appeal of a social network.

Middle School students are often blocked from Facebook in school, and usually could use some guidance on how to use social media more effectively if not appropriately. Edmodo is a great learning tool and also a great teaching tool as well to help better prepare students for the social media rich world in which they live. Imagine a Middle School student being able to highlight and annotate a worksheet that they are working on, or even peer-editing documents they need help with.

The site is really easy to use and very helpful when it comes to sharing files on the web. The Best Resources for Middle Schools Glogster — Glogster EDU is a site that allows students to create a digital poster with any text, images, movies, sounds, voice recordings, hyperlinks to other resources, etc. It is a super nice way for students to create project posters in a much easier way than the traditional cut and paste - with obvious benefits.

These "glogs" can also be shared via popular social networks, embedded in a student digital portfolio or classroom blog, and commented upon. Glogster EDU is a wonderful tool that is so easily customized for a specific subject area. Kids will really love this one - and you will too. It is easy to create and is lots of fun to work with. Besides the obvious art implication, Flipbooks might be a great creative way for Middle School students or teachers to animate a historical event, show the visual representation of how to do a math equation, show a scientific process, or even retell a scene from a book.

Fast, fun, and Free! This is a nice and easy way to create multimedia work spaces for teachers and students to share.

Students can start by adding pictures, videos, sounds, or documents, and then adding voice annotations. Others are then invited to annotate on the same page using a webcam, telephone, microphone, or simply writing in a response, and users can see and hear all the comments that are recorded about the picture, video, document, etc. The Voice Thread can then be embedded in a student or classroom website or blog.

Simple to make, this really is a great way for Middle School students to share their input. The Best Resources for Middle Schools History Pin - History Pin is a site that lets teachers and students view and share their personal history in a totally new way. It uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the worlds historical images and stories.

History Pin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the History Pin map. Uniquely, History Pin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peeks into the past. This is a great tool for writing compare and contrast literature and, of course, for use with a History class as well.

One of the hopes of the site is that it will connect Middle School students with their older people grandparents, great-uncles, etc. The site can be used to create original artwork, animated movies, and storybooks, among other things.

The work can then be shared with the Kerpoof community, but only after it passes an inspection of the content to make sure that it is all appropriate. Please note that Kerpoof offers paid, premium services directed to at-home use of the site, but all basic content directed to in-school use is entirely free. One great feature is that current articles are made easier to understand by offering definitions of vocabulary words and also maps to areas discussed in articles.

The Learning Network also offers daily lesson plans which are tied into articles from the newspaper. The site also contains themed activities and lessons based on school units. For example, in February there are daily Black History Month lessons and web activities. This is really a wonderful resource to encourage students to be a part of current events and also read and understand the news.

The Best Resources for Middle Schools Museum Box — Museum Box is a site that provides the tools for teachers and students to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box.

What items, for example, would you put in a box to describe your life; the life of a Victorian Servant or Roman soldier; or to show that slavery was wrong and unnecessary? You can display anything from text files, PDFs, videos, images, even a webcam video or audio recording that you can produce right on the site. You can also view and comment on the Museum Boxes submitted by others.

Middle School students will love using this site because it makes learning engaging and fun. The site offer a one word prompt and gives the student 60 seconds to start writing. This is a great way to fight writers-block and make writing a little more fun as the words are usually really interesting and offer lots of room for students to get creative.

This is a great site, especially for Middle School students of all academic performance levels. Super simple to use, I feel like the slogan for the site should be Just do it! It can also check to see if a students paper contains plagiarized text. The locations are fantastic. They don't look real, exactly, yet they do Here's the shot they have of the Great Wall:.

And you can check out what my fellow crewmates have to say about Wiglington and Wenks at:. Any questions? I'd love to know what you would want to know in deciding whether or not this is something you want to purchase. As students travel the virtual world, they will learn geography, cultural differences, history, and inventions.

Students are encouraged to think creatively to solve the issues facing the world today. Wiglington and Wenks would be a great site to introduce to students at the beginning of the year and use throughout the year as a platform for learning. Make it a class goal to solve the mysteries of the magic maps before the end of the year. Throughout the year students can visit the virtual world, learn about historical figures, famous inventions, and geography.

Hand up a world map in your classroom and keep track of the places that have been visited. Encourage students to create character cards as they learn about new historical figures and story characters. Each student can have their own account, but keep track of progress as a class.