Posts Tagged ‘electives’

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Stossel in the Classroom Resource

July 2nd, 2022

It’s Saturday, July 2, 2022, and time for Other Electives at ClickSchooling!

Free DVDs – Stossel in the Classroom

(stosselintheclassroom.org/shop/)

Grades 6 & up (middle school – college level), with parental supervision

A big THANK YOU to ClickScholar Nancy Hogan for recommending this website “Stossel in the classroom.” Sponsored by the Center for Independent Thought (a non-profit educational foundation) it has produced a free DVD each school year that is a compilation of John Stossel’s television programs and specials, along with a teacher guide with lesson plans and ideas for complementary activities. Though they have discontinued their DVDs to focus on streaming videos and other online content, you can still order some of their past editions, and they’re still 100% free, shipping included.

When you get to the site you’ll learn how to register (free) to get past edition DVDs, as well as an accompanying downloadable “Teacher’s Guide” containing lesson plans, activity suggestions, handouts, and vocabulary.

In addition to getting the free DVD and resources, you can use the menu at the top of the home page to watch streaming videos from Stossel on thought-provoking topics in the “Video Library”. These videos cover a variety of categories including business, college, consumer issues, healthcare, law, privacy, and more. You can also search the videos by subject including:

  • Business
  • Government
  • Science
  • Technology
  • Economics
  • Health
  • Physical Education
  • Personal Finance
  • History
  • and much more!

Again, all of this is provided for FREE – they simply request that you send them your feedback on the website and products to share with fellow teachers/educators.

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Computer Programming Teaching Tool!

June 4th, 2022

It’s Saturday, June 4, 2022, and time for Other Electives at ClickSchooling!

Computer Science – Free Alice Computer Programming Software

(www.alice.org/)

This website offers “Alice” – free educational software from Carnegie Mellon University that teaches students computer programming in a visual, 3-D environment. It makes it easy to create animation for interactive games and videos and much more.

The description from the website best explains it:

“Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production-oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.”

When you get to the site you can read the latest news and media coverage about Alice software and then click on the menu items that include:

  • Downloads – Get Free downloads of the software designed specifically for middle school students and/or high school and college students that will allow you to get started learning computer programming in a fun and engaging way.
  • All About Alice – Click on this item and a new page opens that explains how Alice works – and provides promotional videos you can watch to better understand how to get started.
  • Teaching Materials – Alice provides instructional materials to support teachers and students in classrooms. Resources include textbooks, lessons, tests, and more that you can download and print out.

NOTE: Some of you may have heard about “Alice” in the context of media coverage about one of the developers, Randy Pausch. Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, died of pancreatic cancer on July 25th, 2008 at the age of 47, leaving behind his wife and three young children. He gained worldwide attention through an inspirational “Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” in which he recounted how he achieved his childhood dreams of becoming a football player, experiencing zero gravity, and developing Disneyland attractions. There are lessons in his last lecture for all of us. You can view it here: ClickSchooling

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Posted in other electives

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Learn How To Type!

May 7th, 2022

It’s Saturday, May 7, 2022, and time for Other Electives at ClickSchooling!

Teaching.com – Typing.com

(www.typing.com/)

Grades 4 & up, with parental supervision

This ad-supported website offers a complete typing course (for beginners to advanced students) absolutely free! (Registration is recommended to save your progress.)

The program supports all major international keyboard formats, and displays key position and proper finger placement to help keep beginners from looking at their hands. In addition to practice exercises, there are several typing games that reinforce skills while they entertain.

Helpful tips are constantly provided to reinforce proper typing techniques. Typing tests are provided and students can track their progress (if registered) with detailed graphs and statistics. As a student progresses, the program “learns” which keys cause the most difficulty and creates custom lessons focusing on the student’s top 5 most troublesome letters. When a student completes a lesson, they earn a virtual trophy.

As we mentioned, this program is ad-supported which is why it’s free. If you don’t want the ads displayed, there is a reasonable fee option to remove the ads.

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Learn 3D Programming

April 9th, 2022

It’s Saturday, April 9, 2022, and time for Other Electives at ClickSchooling!

Computer Science – Free Alice Computer Programming Software

(www.alice.org/)

Grade 6-12, with parental supervision

This website offers “Alice” – free educational software from Carnegie Mellon University that teaches students computer programming in a visual, 3-D environment. It makes it easy to create animation for interactive games and videos and much more.

The description from the website best explains it:

“Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.”

When you get to the site you can read the latest news and media coverage about Alice software and then click on the menu items that include:

  • Downloads – Get Free downloads of the software designed specifically for middle school students and/or high school and college students that will allow you to get started learning computer programming in a fun and engaging way.
  • All About Alice – Click on this item and a new page opens that explains how Alice works – and provides promotional videos you can watch to better understand how to get started.
  • Teaching Materials – Alice provides instructional materials to support teachers and students in classrooms. Resources include textbooks, lessons, tests, and more that you can download and print out.

NOTE: Some of you may have heard about “Alice” in the context of media coverage about one of the developers, Randy Pausch. Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, died of pancreatic cancer on July 25th, 2008 at the age of 47, leaving behind his wife and three young children. He gained world-wide attention through an inspirational “Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” in which he recounted how he achieved his childhood dreams of becoming a football player, experiencing zero gravity, and developing Disneyland attractions. There are lessons in his last lecture for all of us. You can view it here: ClickSchooling

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Free Interactives for Music, Art and More!

August 31st, 2019

 

It’s Saturday, August 31, 2019, and time for Music at ClickSchooling!

 

Recommended Website:

Toy Theater

(toytheater.com/category/classic-toy-theater/classic-music/)

Age Range: 4-10 (Grades PreK-5, with parental supervision)

 

This website offers all kinds of high quality interactive games for learning music, art, math and literacy that have real educational value.

Because this is Saturday and “Electives Day” at ClickSchooling, we focused on Music for this review. When you get to the site, you can choose from: 

  • Drum Beats
  • Piano Puppet
  • Composer
  • Music Maker

Your child will have fun creating drum beats, using a virtual puppet to play piano tunes, and composing music.

Then, when you are through learning with Music, get ready to explore the MAIN CONTENT on this site that is archived in these menu items: 

  • Art – Your child can use interactive online media to draw, color, create animations and more.
  • Math – Play a variety of interactive games that teach kids about addition, multiplication, subtraction, line plots, pictographs and more!
  • Reading – Enjoy an animated alphabet, learn to type and practice keyboard skills, word finds, word searches, alphabet doodles, word scrambles, original & classic stories and more! All of these activities are designed to enhance language arts skills.

Just click on a topic and a new page opens with a selection of activities that will engage and entertain your kids. You’ll also find puzzles and games at the site – so be sure to bookmark it to return often.

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Free Foreign Language Courses

November 25th, 2017

 

It’s Saturday, November 25, 2017, and time for Foreign Languages at ClickSchooling!

 

Recommended Website:

Georgia Virtual Learning – Shared Content – World Language

(www.gavirtuallearning.org/Resources/WLResources/WLShared/SharedChineseI.aspx)

Age Range: 13-18 (Grades 8-12, with parental supervision)

 

Learn a foreign language with these shared content, self-paced courses from the Georgia Virtual Learning website.


Using the sidebar menu choose from the following languages: 

  • Chinese
  • Japanese
  • Spanish
  • German
  • French
  • Latin

These languages are also available for different levels. Once a selection is made, choose a lesson by selecting the “View” link across from the name. Lessons vary in presentation – some lessons are solely textural while most have images, audio, interactives, and videos. There are also downloadable resources available throughout the lessons.


There is also available shared content for other subjects including Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, Fine Arts (music and art) and Electives including computer science, health, business, marketing and more. Most courses are for the high school level but there are courses for middle school as well.

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