Dinosaur come alive

     Which will I find first:  the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot or high speed internet in my neighborhood?  The technology class I am taking has made me realize how many teaching tools I have been missing since I cannot surf the web at my house.  I have been surfing the web after work and I have found some fabulous sites I can use at school.  I feel like a dinosaur that has just come to life.  One site is Shaloc.  It allows you to share your iphone’s GPS location with friends in real-time by using the Shaloc iphone App.    When you open the Shlaloc App, it allows you to create a temporary URL that you can email to your friends so they can track your phone’s GPS location.  You can stop their tracking at any time and you get a new URL every time you want them to track you.  I can use this in class for my 12^th grade Earth Science class when we have our lesson on longitude and latitude.  We always discuss GBPs and how they work.  It would be great to have one in class to demonstrate.  We could turn it on the phone and monitor them on the computer as well as another phone.  To get this App, go to http://shaloc.com and you can get early access so when it launches publicly. 

     Another site I thought would be good for school is Pen.io.  It is a site where you can write essays, blog, shape recipes, or tell of future events.   I would use it at school to encourage all my students to write.  My students are mostly 9^th graders and one class of 12^th graders.  Many of our objectives in science class are reading and writing objectives.    So many students like to write poetry and that would be a way for them to share their writings.  I could write a something in class from science items to character education items and get the students to write their response on pen.io.  Students actually like to express themselves and this is a great way to let them.  I could also use it as a reading assignment by having them read each other’s work or something I want them to respond to.  The site for pen.io is http://pen.io .   Check out these two sites for cool things to do.  Don’t wait until you start to feel like a dinosaur before you surf the net.