A Digital Christmas Gift to You: Nintendo8.com and 8Bit Christmas Music

Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Nintendo8.com is an old school gamer's dream, it hosts emulations of some of the best early console games of my generation including the Sega Master System, the original 8-bit Nintendo, and even some Commodore 64 games. If you have never experienced these early games, I would suggest you take a look and appreciate the evolution of gaming. This will make you appreciate your now generation consoles!

Here is a link to the top games played on the site. This is a good place to start your adventures!

As an added bonus here is the link to the 8Bit Christmas music all you OG's (Old Gamers) have to have for Christmas. You can listen to the songs or download them and play them on your MP3 player.

A special thanks goes to Dusty our WebMaster for showing me the game site. Thanks!

Build Your Own Snowman from Yahoo

Here is a fun little site that lets you build your own snowman. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of different choices you can make with the snowman and the ways they have for you to share your creation are extremely limited. To save your picture you will have to do a screen capture!

My Recomendations for the Edublog Awards 2009

Here are my votes for this year's Edublog Awards. While I realize I am not influential enough to lead any of these suggestions to a victory, I hope my explanations for why I chose these will be appreciated.

If you would like to vote for any or all of these, simply click on the badge and it will take you to the appropriate site.

Best individual blog Learning Is Messy
This blog is one of my favorite blogs to read. The reason I enjoy it so much is because the author, Brian Crosby, shares his successes and failures from his classroom. I love being able to look into his thoughts and see what he sees.

Best new blog East Dragon Den
I chose this blog for the Best New Blog because of the amazing experimentation that is taking place here. Mr. Moore and Mrs. Vander Velde have incorporated back channeling throughout their curriculum. If I were still a regular ed teacher I would "borrow" their great ideas regularly.

Best class blog Mr. McClung's World
Yes, this blog has been nominated for this award, but I chose Mr. McClung's World as my choice for best class blog. He is consistently blogging about what his class is doing and is incorporating those posts in his daily work with his students. An amazing example of what class blogs should look like.

Best student blog Tiffany
Tiffany is a student at the Shanghai American School in China. Her blog posts are top notch. When many students would write as little as possible, Tiffany does much, much more. This student blog should be used as an example of what we should expect out of our students.

Most influential blog post This, This, That
This post started what became a very important part of the education of two different schools. It started a series of events that connected Jabiz Raisdana, Dr. Strange's EDM 310 class at University of South Alabama, and my class. To completely understand what happened, I suggest you read these two posts: Singing Hearts, and Kai and Room 10

Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion #edchat
Edchat allows me to vent about what is happening in education today.

Digital Media Reflections

Here is the link to the spreadsheet with your answers.

Make Your Own Winter JibJab

JibJab is a fun site where you can take pictures and insert them into movies. I have picked two movies you can use Elf Snowball Fight and ElfYourself. There are many JibJabs you can make, but most of them require you to purchase a membership.

Here is the link to our eighth grade picture set on Flickr. You will have to download pictures and then upload them to create your movie. Just click on the the pictures you want to download. Right click on the picture and save as: name of person to your desktop. Then you will have them to upload.

When you have created your JibJab, download the video and upload it to the video section of the 8th Grade Ning. Don't forget to log in first.

Bomomo: Create a Visual Masterpiece

There really is no way to explain the beauty and simplicity of this creative art site. I would suggest you go and check it out immediately. If this doesn't make you happy, you need to get a head check! Here is the link to Bomomo.

I found a link to this site and several others I will be sharing at East Dragon Den, which has been nominated for Best Class Blog in the Edublog awards.

Snow Ball Fight

Justin's Part Time Job

Here is what Justin does on his day off. I was as surprised as you!

Create A Graph: Explore and Learn

Create a Graph is a wonderful tool for creating graphs (especially if your students don't know how to create spreadsheets). You can use the program to create bar, line, pie, and other types of graphs and you can print them or save them as a pdf or jpeg.

I want you to explore the site. Find three neat things you can share with the class. Create a graph using made up data and then save them to the desktop of your computer as a jpeg. Then upload the picture to the class Ning.

This is the site you will be using to graph your data for your science fair project (unless you want to use a spreadsheet.)

Cool Site: Grammar Ninja

Grammar Ninja is a grammar game where you identify parts of speech by throwing shurikens.

There are three difficulty levels in the game. It tests your ability to find adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, conjunctions, articles and more. This is a pretty fun way to drill yourself over the parts of speech!

My Nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards

Here are my nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards:

Best individual blog Learning Is Messy
Best new blog East Dragon Den
Best class blog Mr. McClung's World
Best student blog Tiffany
Most influential blog post This, This, That
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion #edchat
Best educational use of video / visual Little Voices, Little Scholars

I want to encourage you to nominate your favorites as well. While not everyone can win, being nominated is an honor. It is a small thing that can make someone else very happy!

Here is a link to my nominating post from last year.

MAP Rewards Assembly, November 24

Noel Lady Tigers vs. White Rock Lady Roosters

Here is the link to tonight's program. If you right click and open in a new tab you can view it without losing the stream.

Science Fair Ideas

Below are some science fair project sites. While these are not inclusive, you can still use them to get some ideas. When you have picked out your project make sure you fill out the form below. You will not be allowed to duplicate other ideas so act fast or you may not get to do the project you want.

All Science Fair Projects

Science Buddies

Science Bob

Science Club

Science Fair Central

Check out the spreadsheet to make sure your idea hasn't already been taken.

BeFunky: Keyboarding App of the Week

BeFunky.com is a picture editor that allows you to put "filters" on your picture. It is a pretty basic editing site for your pictures. Go to the site, upload your picture and try out the different filters. When you have decided on a picture or two, click save and choose download to the desktop. Then you will upload the picture to the class Ning.

You Are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving from Plimoth.org

Plimoth.org is an excellent website filled with great information about the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth Massachusetts. Since we are a week away from celebrating Thanksgiving in the United States I thought this would be a good time to share the site. One part of the site I would like to share is the You Are a Historian investigation. Here you can learn about both the pilgrim and the Wampanoag.

I would suggest you download the web based program to use in class or at home. I am sure that this site will be extremely hard to access for the next week. You can click here to download it. After you unzip it (double click on it) drag out the folder onto your desktop. Go into the folder and open up the webpage that says Start_Here. The page will open up in your default web browser and it will run off your computer. No need to install or to fight slow internet access!

Year Two Blog Wants You to Comment!

Mr. Sloan from Year Two Blog would like some comments quickly! I made a mistake and forgot to add him to my list for Comments4Kids Wednesday. Please help me fix my mistake and leave a comment on one of the posts!

Comments4Kids for November 18

Our first stop today is Sarah's Blog, the Digital Media student of the week. You can check out the cool things she has made in class. (Make sure you watch the Battle of the politicians!!!!)

Next is the Lytton Street Jump Jammers from New Zealand. Check out their creative dancing. and leave a comment. This is like a dancing version of the PS22 blog from two weeks ago!

Mrs. Blystone's 3rd Grade Blog has a daily recorder that explains what happened in school every day. This is a great idea for a blog! Pick a post and leave a comment.

Mrs. Goerend's Students blog has contributed some descriptive essays. Their assignment was:

Students will be posting their descriptive essays on the blog soon. The goal of this assignment was to use word choice that "spices up" their writing and makes you understand the place, thing, or person they're describing with all five senses. Are you able to paint a picture in your mind of what they've described?

Read a few of the stories and leave a comment or two.

On the M9 Daily Diary is a post about a product a couple students created to sell at their school fair. Apparently it is not unusual for students to create and sell products in New Zealand! Leave a comment and tell answer the questions they have asked about the product.

The Ball

This is a quick animation I did to mirror the flip-book my students created yesterday. Since we have been looking at animations I decided they need to make both hand drawn and digital animations. To create the animation we are using Paint on the Windows machine and Tux Paint on the Linux machines. We then insert the individual pictures into Windows Movie Maker to create the "movie". I am not sure what program we will use with our Linux machines. If you have a recommendation it would be much appreciated. I will try to create a how-to video for what we are doing.

Noel Lady Tigers Versus Southwest City Lady Indians

5-6 Game

7-8 Game