Welcome to Mrs. Torres's Webpage

Visual Learners

Visual learners learn through seeing and retain more information when it’s presented in the form of pictures, diagrams, visual presentations, textbooks, handouts and videos. Here are some Web resources that cater to those needs.

Get your ideas charted out in a visual format with these easy-to-use online brainstorming and organizational tools.

Mapping,flowcharts

Students could use tablet writing software such as Windows Journal and One note to create outlines. If students do not have access to tablets, they could use interactive tools to organize their thoughts. Below is a link that provides a nice online outlining and notetaker tool:

 http://interactives.mped.org/view_interactive.aspx?id=722&title=

 Visual students can also use mapping software like Kidspiration, Inspiration or Pixie to create graphic organizers to help organize their ideas. Students can also create visual graphs using excel.

Below are some nice online alternatives you can use  to create many different graphic organizers and graphs:

·         Acoustic poems

·         Animal Inquiry map

·         Bio Cube: This tool allows students to develop an outline of a person whose biography or autobiography they have just read; it can also be used before students write their own autobiography.

·         Circle plot diagram

·         Compare and Contrast map

·         Essay map

·         Graphic map

·         Make your own graph(bar, line, plot, circle, etc)
Literary Elements Map

·         Persuasive Essay map

·         Story Map

·         Timeline

·         Venn Diagram 2 circles

·         Venn Diagram 3 circles

·         Web Mapping:The Webbing Tool provides a free-form graphic organizer for activities that ask students to pursue hyper-textual thinking and writing. The tool provides a quick way for students to trace out options and rearrange connections.

·         Many different ones-make them and print out them out.

·         Another webbing tool

MindMeister: The name of this tool represents "for two", and is indicative of the collaborative nature of this mapping tool. It can make it easy to keep track of your ideas, share them with friends and teachers and take them with you no matter where you are.

MindMeister

Thinkature: This site allows real-time collaboration on flow charts, diagrams and mind maps with features that include color organization and freehand drawing.

Thinkature

Charting and Diagrams

FlowChart: Create great flow charts for your classes using this online tool, which comes complete with drawing tools and objects as well as collaborative tools.

FlowChart:

DrawAnywhere: This online program allows you to create diagrams and flow charts to represent all kinds of information. Best of all, you can log in from anywhere to get access to your diagrams.

DrawAnywhere:

AjaxSketch: This web-based drawing tool makes it easy to not only create flow charts and diagrams but to do freehand drawing as well and you can use it right from Firefox.

AjaxSketch

Project Draw: This program is a feature-rich web-based vector drawing application that will allow you to create diagrams and graphs of any kind of information as well as making a variety of other kinds of drawings.

Project Draw

LovelyCharts: Charts created through this tool really can be lovely with full color capabilities and loads of graphics.

LovelyCharts

Videos and Photos

Videos-Videos are always a good way to help visual and auditory students. There are a good amount of online educational videos available to you-many of them free of charge. Below are some links to some of the best online video resources:

BBC Streaming Videos: Type in the search box to see the streaming videos available to you- for free! (all subjects!)

http://tinyurl.com/dhdut6

Annenberg Media's web site Learner.org is an educational resource with hundreds of educational videos and a satellite TV channel you can view online:

http://www.learner.org/index.html

Educational Videos Database! Screened by teachers!This incredible site is a database of videos on an abundance of topics! They are arranged by topic and very easy to access. The general subjects include physical science, life science, earth and space, social studies, math, English, and the human body!

 http://www.neok12.com/

National Geographic Video is the section of the National Geographic website devoted to

online videos about animals, people and places, the environment and more.

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/index.html

Free streaming videos of PBS' series Nova area available online.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/programs/index.html

 Green Tv: Green Energy TV is an online television channel dedicated to educational programming about green and renewable energy.

http://www.greenenergytv.com

The VPW Classroom Information Network offers free sponsored educational videos and print materials to teachers, librarians and group leaders in the United States.

http://www.vpw.com/

Brain pop :BrainPop features short, animated educational videos on a variety of topics.

www.brainpop.com

Picasa: Picasa is Google’s answer to photo sharing and you can upload images from an art history or anatomy class and study them from anywhere on the Web.

Picasa

Scooch: Scooch is a Web-based slide show program that will allow you to post photos and make slide shows that you can share with others over the Web.

Scooch

KartOO: Kartoo is a visual search engine, giving you results laid out in a networked chart so it’s easy to see how topics relate.

KartOO

Multimedia

Allowing students to download multimedia presentations with graphics, is also useful for visual learners. Several powerpoints are available on my site for your use. The powerpoints cover a lot of material from math, science, social studies, language arts, P.E, dance, China, Spanish, French and game templates. Click here to access these powerpoints. Click here to access many more powerpoints on all subjects.

Ppt to video- Powerpoint is a wonderful software that lets you make presentations.  It is a great tool to use for visual and audatory learners. Author stream is a free service that lets you concert your ppt presentations into Video so that you can access to your presentation anytime. Students an download the video to their ipods, you can e-mail the video to your students for review and you can copy the link on your webpage so students can see the presentation regardless if they have powerpoint or not! You can also embed it into your website too.  Works on Macs and PCs too. And best of all, it's free! 

http://www.authorstream.com

 Visual math students can benefit from using virtual manipulatives. Below is a great link to virtual manipulatives:

Grades Pre-K to 2nd Grade

Grades 3-5

Grades 6-8

International Children’s Digital Library (Free access to actual page images of 900+ children’s books in 35 languages, categorized by ages 3-5, 6-9. 10-13 and other groupings, such as real stories, imaginary creatures, and award-winning books. Reader options include using your browser or a java-enhanced “comic” reader.

Click here to  access the International Children's Digital Library

More interactive stories:

http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/interactive/onlinestory.htm

Engage your students in higher-order thinking skills with a collaborative activity using Intel Education’s free Visual Ranking Tool. Visual ranking leads students though focusing, identifying, and refining criteria as they assign order or ranking to a list presented as a visual diagram. Students use a simple click and drag to organize ideas, explain their reasoning, debate differences, and reach consensus with each other. This web-based tool is accompanied by project ideas, instructional strategies, assessment tips, and research. There are also detailed lesson plans for grades 3-5, 6-8, or 9-12. Registration is free and creates a teacher workspace in which to build the class project. The password-protected workspace is accessed through the Internet where students log on with the teacher-created ID, team ID, and password.

Teachers can use the comprehensive tutorial to learn the features of the tool. The Try the Tool section has a demonstration workspace for teachers to practice with ranking a sample list and then comparing it to other lists. Take advantage of the experiences of other teachers in six detailed unit plans that provide usable handouts and student work samples.

Click here for the tool

 Wordle:This site takes any quotation or poem and creates a "word clouds" (graphical display) of the words in a passage of text. Paste in any passage or the URL for any blog entry or web page (including newspapers online) to create a wordle of the text. Students (or teachers) can choose their own colors, type of display, and font. The most frequent words appear larger and darker. Students can view creations others have made, or make their own with or without saving them to the database of clouds.

·         Wordle

This is a terrific visual tool to share on an interactive whiteboard or projector. Paste in a passage or URL for a political speech to visualize the politician’s “message.” Analyze advertising propaganda by visualizing the language used in TV or print ads. Use this site as a way to help students see and memorize text, especially visual learners. Use it also when writing poetry or reading passages of great literature to “see” themes and motifs of repeated words and images. Have students paste in their own writing to spot repeated (and monotonous) language when teaching lessons on word choice. Students will be surprised to see what words appear to be dominant. ESL and ELL students will eagerly use this site since word order will no longer be a problem for them. Have students work in groups to create word posters of vocabulary words with related meanings, such as different ways to say “walk” or “said” and decorate tour classroom with these visual reminders of the richness of language.

Another idea: use this site during the first week of school. Have students create word clouds about themselves and create a “Wordle” bulletin board introducing your students (and yourself). Remember that the most frequently appearing words will appear larger so plan accordingly.

Kinesthetic Learners

Kinesthetic learners do best when they interact and touch things. They prefer a hands-on approach to learning and enjoy interacting with classroom materials and those around them. These tools can help keep these inquisitive learners busy.

Note Taking Tools

No matter what you’re reading or watching you can make it more interactive by taking notes and these tools can help.

Google Docs: With this program from Google you can take notes online, save them, and even send them to your peers for collaboration.

Google Docs

Zoho: Like Google Docs but you can do much more! Make wikis for your students, save online work, take notes online and more!

Notely: Keep your class notes, to-do lists and more organized and easy to access with this site.

Notely

ShortText: This is a very simple tool for taking notes online. Simply enter your text, hit save, and you’ve got an online note you can revisit anytime you like.

ShortText

Interaction

Get involved with the material with these online applications.

Flash Card Machine: This site allows you to create web-based flash cards to study the information you have for class using text and pictures.

Flash Card Machine

Quia: With Quia, you’ll be able to create your own online quizzes and educational games to help you study your materials in a more interactive fashion. We do have a quia account. See me for our login information.

Quia

Zoho Challenge is a powerful, feature-rich software that automates and streamlines online test creation, distribution and evaluation/scoring process.

 Zoho Challenge

Quizlet: Quizlet makes it easy to study things like vocabulary words with it’s online study tools. Quizlet

Learner.org Interactives: Need a more interactive explanation of a concept from class? You’ll find dozens of educational ones here that can help explain geology, pharmacy, chemistry, math and more.

Learner.org Interactives 

REFLECTIVE LEARNERS

Reflective learners need time to grasp and review the content.

Since reflective listeners need time to grasp and review the content, they can use interactive flashcards. They can use interactive websites such as :

http://www.flashcardexchange.com/index.php,

http://www.scholastic.com/kids/homework/flashcards.htm

 and http://www.studystack.com/  to create their own flash cards.

They can also create their own flashcards using the following flash card template on PowerPoint: flash cards template.ppt Using this template, students can add their own audio clips to help them with remembering the content.

 Practice math facts online.

·         Addition

·         3 digit addition

·         Telling time

·          Addition review galore

·         Subtraction review galore

·         Number sense

·         Multiplication

·         Addition

·         3 digit addition

·         Telling time

·          Addition review galore

·         Subtraction review galore

·         Share this site on your projector. Then create a learning center and have students practice on their own or in cooperative learning groups. Share this site on your class web page, so students can practice basic addition at home.

 Wow! You can make your educational games from this site, save it and you can embed it into your webpages. All for free!

http://classtools.net/

Sensing Learners

Sensing learners do well with facts and do well with information that has a real world connection.

Discussion boards would be very useful for students here, as they can discuss how the content they learned is useful in the real world. Sharepoint does have a discussion board capability. They are easy to create and use. Click here for an example of how to use a discussion board.

Students can also use pre-made powerpoint templates to input the facts and use it for content recall. The following powepoint templates are examples of what you can use:

·         Animal Research.ppt

·         Elements of Style.ppt

·         Personal Interest.ppt

·         Science Experiment.ppt

·         Science Fair.ppt

·         sequence.ppt

Students can also use free story software such as Microsoft Photo Story 3 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx) to create a digital photo album about events in history and the impact that these events had.

 Shopping math! This is a fabulous site on money. Students are given a specific amount of money to spend in this virtual toy store. Basic addition, subtraction, counting, and money skills are all necessary to play this great game!

·         http://teachersfirst.com/getsource.cfm?id=8519

Use an interactive whiteboard or projector to introduce this activity (or review basic concepts of money). Then allow students to work independently and try out the activity. This one will work well for students practicing during assigned times on a single classroom computer or cluster.

 Use the metric system to measure the height and weight of boxes being placed on a large ship. You are told the specific height and weight to locate. Then you are presented with three packages to weigh and measure. You click and drag the items onto an interactive scale that measures the height and weight. There are three levels of difficulty.

http://teacherfirst.com/getsource.cfm?id=9424

·         Come to this website to practice the metric system. Share this website with your class on a projector and show the students How to use the program. Then, create a learning center for students to use this website, or provide individual laptops from our laptop cart. Use the three difficulty levels to differentiate for your students. Play a game of "Around the World" using this activity. Or divide your class into teams and have some healthy competition. You can also have the students write or type journals that explains how they were able to find the solution for their problem.

 Practice telling time at this site created by the BBC. Molly and Max (your child guides) are at Big Ben in London. They need your help to make sure the time is correct on this famous building. There are three levels of difficulty. Simple questions ask for the time, while the more difficult questions ask what time it will be in a specific amount of time (for example, what time will it be in 3 hours and 10 minutes.

·         Clock use