Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Mary Oliver

Monday, November 19, 2007

You've got to try these resources!

Last Wednesday I helped facilitate a full day workshop with middle school social studies teachers on preparing for History Day. In the course of the day I shared information about WorldBook, Destiny, and NetTrekker. We invited JoEllen Haugo from the MPL to share Minneapolis's rich resources. That's a BIG WOW! It could take weeks just to look at everyone of them, without getting in depth. Todd Pierson also shared two excellent research tools that are available online: Think Tank and Note Star. Think Tank allows users to narrow down a topic and create powerful subtopics. NoteStar is as you can imagine, a notetaking program that can be managed by a teacher and allows collaboration between teams of students. Both programs come from the same group, http://4teachers.org, which has also created a rubrics program. Think Tank and Note Star can theoretically work together, but there are problems with the length of subtopics created in Think Tank and a cut and paste method works better. http://thinktank.4teachers.org/ and http://notestar.4teachers.org/

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