Enjoy your holiday!

 Be safe and I will be posting in the New Year.

Stanford University - Teach Your Class Online: The Essentials

 

This would be great to look at over the holidays if you are going virtual for quadmester 3.

Available for instructors worldwide, this free course offered in July 2020 covers the essentials of online teaching. The five-day course covers general guidelines for adapting your course to an online format, best practices for varied situations, common pitfalls in online course design, and how to troubleshoot student issues online.

Teach Your Class Online: Day 1  
This two hour course will provide you with the essentials of online learning.

Teach Your Class Online: Day 2  

Getting Specific: Situations and Tools
Science: Labs in Online Pedagogy

Teach Your Class Online: Day 3

Online Classroom Example Clips
Building and Maintaining a Classroom Community

Teach Your Class Online: Day 4

Review of Submitted Sample Lesson Drafts
Troubleshooting Obstacles to Success in the Online Environment

Teach Your Class Online: Day 5

Math: Using Writing Tablets and Whiteboards
Modern Languages: Tips for Highly Interactive Class During Which Students Actively Speak and Write in the Target Language
Humanities: Productive Classroom Conversations About Challenging Subjects
Closing Thoughts

M.O.O.C.

M.O.O.C.s = Massive Open Online Courses

These are free creditless massive courses offered in partnership with some of the biggest universities in the world.  They offer courses from many different disciplines and in many different subjects.  Maybe over the Christmas holiday you can take a course and get a certificate.  Some examples are: Coursera , EdX and Udacity.  If you would like more click here and here.  Also here is a list of 1500 free online courses.

Cell Labelling and Biorender

 

I have posted about this site in the past.  Last week I posted about Cells Alive so I thought you might want to some more cells and biology.   If you are teaching Science or obviously Biology you might want to take a look at The Biology Corner website by clicking here.  There are many great worksheets.  For example if you click here you will get a great set of slides for labelling plant and animal cells.  The images were created with Biorender which provides a huge bank of images to create scientific illustrations.  From their website, "Create Professional Science Figures in Minutes.  Browse thousands of pre-made icons and templates from more than 30 fields of life sciences."  It is free for educational use.  

Study Stack

 

I have posted about many different flash card sites such as Quizlet and Flippity.   With Study Stack you can make your own flash cards or use some that are already premade in many different  topics.  To see the website click here.

Santa Reads Your Script

 

 Would you like to have Santa read your script to a friend so  that you can send them the video?  You just select one of 4 backgrounds for Santa, type your message and give them your email address.  Then by AI you will get Santa to read your message.  It takes a bit of time for them to check your message for profanity etc.   This might be great to do in your class, especially an ELL class.  To see the website click here.

Creative Chemistry

From their UK website, "Whether you are a teacher, doing chemistry at school, or are simply just interested in chemistry, Creative Chemistry has lots for you.

There are full-colour worksheets and teaching notes for fun activities suitable for a chemistry club, and around three hundred pages of question sheets and practical guides for GCSE and A Level Chemistry.

You will also find fun chemistry puzzles, interactive revision quizzes and molecular models. Choose from the featured selection below, use the Search facility, or enjoy just browsing"

To see the website click here.

 

Cells Alive

 

If you are teaching a unit on cells in your science class this website is a must see. It has  To check out this website click here.

Making the most of Quizlet

 

On October 31 2020 I posted about Quizlet.  You can see the post by clicking here.  Today I read an excellent article, "Making the most of Quizlet" by Sandy Millin.  She goes into depth about using it for her class.  To see the article click here.

Citation

 

I know I have discussed using bibme, mybib, easybib, Citation Machine,  University of Alberta's Centre for Writers and purdue owl before.  Here are a few others that you might want to use for your citations. Bibcitation can be found by clicking  here.  Formatically can be found by clicking  here.   Quickcite can be found by clicking here.

Artemis Moon Pod Essay Contest

Only available for our American friends.  Drats.  

NASA is taking remote learning to the Moon! 2020 has been a year of working and living at a distance. Now consider what it might be like if you were living with a pod of astronauts 250,000 miles from Earth. Your challenge is to imagine leading a one-week expedition at the Moon’s South Pole – with the whole world cheering you on. Tell us about the types of skills, attributes, and/or personality traits that you would want your Moon Pod crew to have and why. How many would be in your pod? And of course you’ll need high tech gear and gadgets! In your essay, also describe one machine, robot, or technology that you would leave on the lunar surface to help future astronauts explore the Moon. Your entry must meet these requirements:

Grades K-4: Essay, up to 100 words

Grades 5-8: Essay, up to 200 words

Grades 9-12: Essay, up to 300 words

Please DO NOT put your name in your entry.

To see the contest website click here.

Most Dangerous Writing App

 

I posted about this in 2019 but it is as a good time to repeat it.   This website might be great to get your students writing.  You can ask it to give you a prompt or not.  You can set it to a preset time or preset number of words you must write for or it stops and you are finished.  When completed you can save your work in many different formats.  To see the website click here.

What is contact tracing?

 From Common Craft, "A short (and silent) video that explains the basics of contact tracing as a way to slow the spread of COVID-19. This video is part of a free resource called the COVID Communication Kit. https://commoncraft.com/covid"

Why Masks Matter

 From Common Craft, "This short (and silent) video briefly explains why masks matter in helping to slow the spread of COVID-19. It's part of a free resource called the COVID Communication Kit: https://commoncraft.com/covid."