What schools need are convertible tablet PCs as cheap as the ones from the OLPC project.

Why is this useful? I’ve accumulated 400+ bookmarks related to the material I teach, and I add more all the time. Even though I use del.icio.us to save and organize all my bookmarks, it can still take a long time to find what I’m looking for. Now I use my custom Google search engine to search through all the sites, instead of sorting them. It saves a lot of time.

My custom Google search engine has more advantages. There are several sites that I like but are very large and very time consuming to navigate through. Sites such as PBS.org, free.ed.gov, and the History News Network have an enormous amount of great material, but it can take a long time to find what you’re looking for. Now I can quickly search all of them for relevant content in a fraction of the time.

The same thing applies to all those sites that specialize in lesson plans. Most of their stuff isn’t very good and the sites themselves are slow to navigate through. It takes forever to find anything worthwhile on those sites. It’s much faster just to search though them, and search all of them at once.

I’ve created the custom Google search engine for myself, but I’m posting it on my blog so that I can share it with my fellow teachers. Please use it for yourself and share with the community any good websites that you know. My hope is that this can become a teaching tool used and maintained by a community of teachers, not just myself. You can post websites in the comments or send me an email. If anyone is willing, I can give you direct access to add sites to the index. All you need is a Google account.

The search box for me custom search engine is below. If you’re reading this using a RSS reader (more about those in another post), you’ll need to follow the link to nategrondin.com because RSS readers don’t support javascript.

The search engine can also be found permanently here.

If you’re a Social Studies teacher, or use maps in the classroom, try Google Earth. If you’ve never used it, Google Earth is a 3D virtual globe covered with satellite imagery, and it’s free! Plus, it’s fully searchable, so you can enter a city or a country into the search box and Google Earth will automatically take you there. It’s really a lot of fun to watch the whole globe rotate and zoom in on it’s destination. You can zoom in to see individual people or buildings anywhere in the world, or you can zoom out to see the entire planet. It also uses a layer system to display information about borders, roads, landmarks, etc. Google Earth has huge potential as a teaching tool.

I recommend using Google Earth in large part because of the “wow” factor you can get from students. Students want to be entertained, and a 3D moving globe is much more entertaining than those dusty maps you probably have hanging in your classroom.

I’m able to use Google Earth in my classroom with a projector and a laptop computer connected to the internet. You could even put Google Earth on each computer in a lab and let the students play around with it.

Lesson Ideas
Here are some quick lesson ideas of mine using Google Earth. Nothing too fancy yet, I’ll save those for later posts. Please share your lesson ideas in the comments.

• Quiz/review - Have your students guess where a country or city is located. Just type into the searchbox and Google Earth will take you there.
• Quiz/Review - Turn of the layer that displays state/country borders. Point to a spot on the globe and ask students to guess the state/country/city, or landmark that is located there.
• Quiz/Review - Pick Latitude/Longitude Coordinates and have the class guess the continent/state/country that contains those coordinates.
• Historical Google Maps - Google Earth has historical maps that you layer onto the globe, such as “World Globe 1790,” or “Lewis and Clark 1814,” and a dozen others. You can find them in the layers window under Featured Content –> Rumsey Historical Maps. Put up the “World Globe 1790″ map and ask students to come up with a list of ways that the 1790 view of the world is different than that of today.

The possibilities are endless, and Google Earth is cool enough that you don’t need a very complicated lesson. In fact, I bet most students would have fun and learn something just by letting them play around with it for a little while.

Check this article from Google Earth Blog about Google Earth in the Classroom.

Download it here.

School districts should switch to OpenOffice.org instead of paying all that money for MS Office. I use OpenOffice.org Writer as my main word processor, and it does everything I need it to do. School districts must pay somewhere between $50 and $100 for MS Office for each and every computer in the school.  Every time the school replaces those computers (usually every 2-4 years), there will probably be a “new” version of MS Office that has tons of “new” features that no one will use, but the school district will still pay for.    This adds up to a lot of money.

On the other hand, OpenOffice.org is free!  Even if you believe that OpenOffice.org isn’t as good as MS Office, it’s hard to argue with that price.  As school budgets become tighter and tighter due to rising energy costs, health care costs, or new requirements under NCLB, OpenOffice.org will look better and better.

As I said, I’ve used Writer extensively, and I have no complaints. On the other hand, Impress (the PowerPoint clone) isn’t yet up to Powerpoint’s maturity. However, it’s close enough to get the job done. I haven’t used Calc (the Excel clone) much, but I bet the performance perfectly adequate, if not outstanding.  Plus, OpenOffice.org is becoming more and more mature with every release.  They’re only on their 2.0 release right now, where MS Office 2007 is their 10.0 release.

Someday soon, I believe, all students will be given a personal laptop for school use.  I’ll talk more about this in a later post, but just think about how much it will cost for a MS Office license of each of those machines.  $$$$$$$$$

Tradition and continuity are really the only reasons that schools are still buying MS Office, but not for long.

For instance, for the American Experience episode Reconstruction: The Second Civil War is very well done. The website includes additional materials and more research that didn’t make it into the show. There is also a section for teachers with lesson plans and other ideas about incorporating the show into the classroom.

The best way to find materials on a site as massive as pbs.org is to use my Search Engine for Educators.