Online Learning for netTrekker Search
Are you looking for a convenient flexible option for learning how to get the most out of your netTrekker Search subscription …
Then be sure to check out Online Learning - your one stop shop for all online opportunities to learn about netTrekker Search.
Check out the FREE online videos, FREE webinars, FREE Moodle Class, and more extensive non-facilitated and graduate level Moodle Class.
Tip Tuesdays - Join us each Tuesday at 4:30 PM EST for a FREE 30 minute webinar as we share ideas on how to use netTrekker in your classroom
Connection Wednesdays – Join us each Wednesday at 4:30 PM EST for a FREE webinar co-hosted by netTrekker and one of our valued partners as we demonstrate the connection between our products including BrainPOP, NSTA, Weekly Reader Express, and Teachers Domain.
netTrekker TV (Tutorial Videos) – View netTrekker TV, our library of FREE Tutorial Videos for targeted training on netTrekker features. If you ever need that just-in-time learning, or if you are a visual learner, our set of FREE online video tutorials will help acquaint you with netTrekker features and tools.
FREE non-facilitated Online Courses (1.5 hours)
NT001 – Learn to Search and Differentiate digital resources using netTrekker features and tools
NT001S – NT001 with Scantron Integration
Advanced non-facilitated Online Courses (2 hours) – under construction
NT002 – Learn to Organize and Integrate digital resources using netTrekker features and tools
NT002S - NT002 with Scantron Integration
Graduate Level facilitated Online Course (30 hours with optional 3 graduate credits)
NT101 – Explore netTrekker features and tools, to share best practices for implementation into teaching and learning, and to create standards-based projects, all in the context of differentiated instruction. Discussion boards, an interactive webinar, and a variety of 21st Century Learning resources are included in this collaborative learning community.
Social Studies Goes Digital
As school districts around the country look for solutions to a variety of challenges, including ever-shrinking budgets, disengaged students, growing class sizes with students of all different abilities and interests to name a few, many are exploring how a transition from print textbooks t
o digital resources can help them address some of these challenges. When the Indiana Department of Education issued a blanket waiver allowing school corporations to use a broad range of multimedia, computer and Internet resources to supplement or replace traditional textbooks, two districts quickly took advantage of this new option and chose to implement netTrekker as a replacement for their social studies textbooks.
Delphi Community School Corporation, a small district in Delphi, Indiana, and Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation with over 11,000 students in Columbus, Indiana, both subscribed to netTrekker in 2009 to provide more engaging, dynamic resources specifically for their social studies curriculum. Both districts realized that a transition from traditional print textbooks to a new way of teaching with digital resources was not something that would happen overnight, and not something that would be successful without the right combination of digital resources, professional development, technology/hardware infrastructure, and a commitment to transform teaching to meet the unique learning needs of their 21st century students.
Both districts have seen exciting results including a more current and vibrant social studies curriculum, a more engaging collegial classroom atmosphere, the ability for teachers to quickly find resources for differentiated instruction, and even increased attendance and graduation rates. But the most powerful result of this print-to-digital transition might be summarized in this statement by Greg Lewis, a member of the Bartholomew Textbook Adoption Committee.
“Students have choices as to how they go about accessing the information – versus one pathway to the assignment like in a textbook. They can be masters of their own education.”
Click here to read more about the print-to-digital transition in Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation.
Is your school or district making a transition from print textbooks to digital resources? If so, what has been the biggest impact you’ve seen on teaching and learning?
netTrekker Spotlight User: Jan Williams Shares How netTrekker is a Hit with Teachers!
netTrekker is excited to introduce this week’s Spotlight User. Jan Williams is the Educational Technology Coordinator for Youngstown City School District in Youngstown, Ohio. Jan shares how teachers have enjoyed exploring netTrekker through integration with other technology and professional development.
This is the first year we have had netTrekker in our schools. It has been a huge hit among our teachers, and we have had many workshops to roll out the training for the teachers. Everyone loves the efficient way to drill down the results according to readability and the other options. The opportunity for differentiation is phenomenal and easy to use. Since we have many teachers using Promethean Boards, they love that they can search for flipcharts in netTrekker and be sure they are good ones!
We have asked the district to provide the money to renew the subscription for next year due to the high use and high satisfaction. There are currently 5 people taking the nT 101 online course right now, so each of those folks will become our next netTrekker trainers in their buildings and in the district.
The Earth’s Rumbling
I turned on the TV this morning to listen to the news for just a few moments, and another earthquake was reported in China. This is what–the fourth one this year? Haiti, Chili, California, and China have all experienced a quake this year, and many of them caused horrible damage, large loss of life, and tested the architecture of man made buildings. My son, who is definitely an out of the box thinker, asked me during a weather report about the Olympics if maybe the Earth had shook a bit off it’s path with all these quakes and that’s why the cold and snow seems to be coming closer to the south and not so much in the north like Canada. Definitely something to look into, if you’re a scientist with patience to study this phenomenon.
An Interactive website about earthquakes found in netTrekker.
Having lived and taught in South Carolina, a state that is not known for it’s earthquake activity but has had two and is on the charts to experience another one of greater than 6.0 magnitude in the next 300-500 years, I had to teach earthquake drills and prepare my students in case that Earthquake were likely to happen today. I was thankful for my Weekly Reader articles to help, since my science books were weak on this topic, and other newspaper articles (thank you newspapers in education) with current information. netTrekker’s collections will also give you resources from BrainPOP, Teacher’s Domain, and Promethean, so definitely something available to help you teach this hot topic.
Another possibility is to check out the current events of netTrekker. While the news is not glaring at you when you log into netTrekker, it is there. Depending on your grade level, the content of the current events can be very basic to very deep. In the middle school section, I clicked on current events, news by topic, Science news, Earth Science news and found a website with information on the Weather News. High School has even more topics to choose from, and I really am fascinated with searching news by topic and looking at the various newspapers for art, science, sports and such. Another option is to search by breaking news, local or world news, or the impact of current events. I found some great articles that I may have missed otherwise with my usual news sources.
March Madness Blowing Our Way
In like a lion, out like a lamb, the madness of March winds are almost upon us! Do you hear it’s not so distant roar?
I’m working on my presentation for tomorrow’s netTrekker Tip Tuesday webinar at 4 pM EST. We’re going to look at the different events in March, resources in netTrekker and ideas on how to integrate. As I began my journey of discovery, pulling out my old lesson plans, searching netTrekker for new ones, creating a calendar, well – I became overwhelmed! MARCH IS CRAMMED! It’s Women’s History Month, Craft Month, Peanut Butter month, American Red Cross Month, National Nutrition Month, and Music in Our Schools Month. Then there all sorts of great days like National Reading Day, Pi Day, Energy Education Day, World Meteorologist Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Johnny Appleseed Day. Oh, and if you like to eat we have Banana Cream Pie Day, Chocolate Cheesecake Day, Potato chips Day, Lobster Day, Clams on a half shell day…………….well you get the picture.
So now I’ve put away all those old books and I’m looking for 21st Century ideas and lesson plans in netTrekker. This is the fun part. I’ve checked in on netTrekker Village, Twitter and Facebook and have a few ideas. Can’t wait to share them tomorrow!
Butterfly Garden of Words
A Glogster about the word butterfly.
This weekend Amy Ellisor, our netTrekker 101 instructor, and I talked about a project some of her teachers were working on about etymology. There was a bit of frustration for some of her teachers because they couldn’t find all of the resources they wanted on the topic of etymology. If that ever happens to you, and you have great resources to share, please consider suggesting those websites to netTrekker through our suggest a link form on netTrekker Village, or via twitter by using #netTrekker along with the URL of your suggested resource. The other thing that you can do is add a link in your My Portfolio Project. This link will not appear in netTrekker as a whole, but rather in just your folder and will only be available to the people you give the rights to see that folder.
The other tip I’ll share is to check out the reference section. In the high school reference section I found quite a few great resources under the English Language area about word origin and meaning. My favorite, that I had not clicked on before today, was the iTools! and I did find a few resources there that would be very beneficial to this group of students in nT101. (I love it when I learn something new!)
But what in the world do you do with etymology? It’s interesting to discover the origin of words, but what do you do with that knowledge besides winning the next game show? I took the word butterfly and applied it to Glogster. It’s not a complete project, but definitely one that can be replicated. I added the definition, some other ways the word is being used, along with the origin of butterfly. I could definitely add some more information, but for a start, I’m feeling pretty good.
A Trek through Mardi Gras
This is a screenshot from my Mardi Gras Museum Box.
Next week is the biggest party day in New Orleans, although I suspect that due to the major victory last night they are already celebrating in a huge way. Mardi Gras though is more than a tourist draw to New Orleans. I decided to go ahead and look at how this event can be used with netTrekker and the classroom.
First, it’s not just held in New Orleans. Okay, I might be the ONLY person who really wasn’t up to date with this celebration and always just paired the two together. I did find out though, thanks to some great websites in netTrekker, that I actually attended several “Mardi Gras” events in Germany as a youth. There it’s called Fasching. Mardi Gras has been around since the 1200′s, maybe even before, and is the last ditch effort for good Christians to live on the wild side before they have to give up something to make themselves a better person and to repent for their sins for Lent and Ash Wednesday.
Wait, let’s back up. Mardi Gras is actually the name of Fat Tuesday, which is the day before Ash Wednesday, which is 47 days before Easter. This year, Fat Tuesday lands on February 16th. The carnivals, which start on the twelth day of Christmas, January 6, are the festivities that lead up to Fat Tuesday. They include parades, lavish costumes, masks (to hide the identity of highly respected community members as they let loose their wild side), and balls that are complete with a coronation of a King and Queen.
The official colors of Mardi Gras? Purple for justice, green for faith and yellow for power. These colors and their meaning came from Rex, the King of the Carnival in 1882. Rex was one of the founders of the original Krewes (I hope I read that right), and the Krewes are private organizations that gather to plan the parades, balls, and other festivities. They plan the themes for the event and crown the Royalty.
How does this translate to school? First, DO NOT encourage the students to run wild and party. I’m sure you already know that though. If I was teaching cultural geography with my students, I would divide them into different “krewes” to study how Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, is celebrated in the various countries. Each krewe would make a mini table top parade of at least 3 or 4 floats (to bring in the arts), a sample mask or costume, and maybe even a popular dish that is served during this time.
Another possibility is to create a Museum Box. I am waiting for mine to be approved, so I can’t share my actual sample. For those of you not familiar with Museum Box, it’s an online tool to add all the pieces of study for a project. Your box can have one or more cubes and several layers. You add the information for your project to the cube walls. I found images to represent the country or geographical region, wrote a document, created a video in PhotoStory, and added a link to where you can get more information. You can also add audio files and files. It was actually pretty fun, and a great way to share the knowledge I learned in netTrekker about Mardi Gras.
Among the Hidden
On the recommendation of a friend, Chad Lehman, I selected Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix as the book to read this week for my entry in our month long blog series about books in honoring the National Book Month. I was totally engrossed in the book, that to be honest with you, I let my ice-cream melt! It’s that good!
I don’t want to give the book’s plot away, but it’s the first in the Shadow Children series, set in the future where we have things such as “Population Police” and the government is fiercely involved in the daily lives of people. Due to a drought and then a famine, a law has been enacted that only allows families to have no more than two children. A third child is to be aborted right away. However, many families have chosen to have the third child and hide them away, hence the name “Shadow Children”.
Many comparisons can be made to this book and to the one child per family law of China, using a graphic organizer. Another topic for discussion is how droughts can effect the food supply and demand, and even how a pet, cattle, or other things we take for granted help drive up costs and take food away from others. So many possibilities and ideas, making this a great novel for the classroom.
Either way, you will definitely find resources in netTrekker. I found an interesting article about a family in China who had twins after their first born and therefore their home was sealed up until they could pay the extraordinary fine for having more than one child. I found lesson plans based on this book, and information on the author.
I’d love to hear how you use this book in your classroom! Leave a comment below.
Ethnic Identity in a Multicultural World …
The importance of ethnic identity in coping with a variety of life situations has been a major focus of current literature. While identity development is a difficult task for all adolescents; it is particularly complicated for adolescents belonging to ethnic groups. Teens feel a pull between their “home” and “school” identity – caught between parents’ ethnic beliefs and values, and that of the mainstream society.
To help your students understand our multicultural world, you may want to use a story to provide context and understanding. A great example of such a story is a semi-autobiography by Julia Alvarez titled, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.
This story spans 30 years in reverse chronological order of four sisters that fled from the Dominican Republic with their family. They were forced to adapt to American life which proved to be difficult and embarrassing as they met friends, and tried to fit in. They experienced identify confusion as they adjusted to life in New York and trips back to Dominican Republic. The story is told in a series of episodes beginning in adulthood and moving back to their early life as a wealthy family on the island. Themes on family life, character, and love are intertwined in the story as topics of immigration and ethnicity are addressed through Hispanic eyes.
To extend these topics in the classroom check out netTrekker’s Multicultural Pavilion
It provides geographic and cultural information on continents, countries, and regions. Resources on ethnic identity, acculturation, cultural sensitivities, diversity, cultural heritage, and social justice issues are also included here.
To provide a multicultural experience for your students, check out these netTrekker resources:
PBS: Beyond the Border
A companion site to the PBS site that explores the story of 4 brothers who leave their family in Mexico to seek a better life in Kentucky – and find a different version of the American dream.
BrainPOP: Faces
Face the facts as Tim and Moby introduce you to the wonderful world of the human face! In this BrainPOP movie, you’ll learn about some of the many roles the human face plays in your life, and you’ll find out how faces differ from each other. Discover a few reasons that facial features vary from person to person, and why where your ancestors came from might affect how your face looks. Finally, you’ll see why the face is so important for communication, and you’ll find out which emotions look the same on faces all over the world. Are you ready to put your best face forward?
Lower East Side Tenement Museum: We Are Multicolored
Explore the multicultural influences on your life by creating a flag that combines flags of different countries. Also learn the symbolism of colors and shapes in the flags of the world.
Education World: Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month!
Lots of activities that can be done in a classroom to celebrate the month. Includes biographies of Hispanic Americans in History, graphing from the US Bureau of Census, trivia questions, and more. Site also provides a long list of related sites about Hispanic Heritage on the Internet.
A Christmas Carol : A sneak peek into the Victorian Era
What a perfect project for Christmas time – and spectacular way to introduce the Victorian Era, while learning a wonderful lesson about the true spirit of the holidays.
The newest version is a 3D Animation by Disney Studios. Students will love the rich characters and mystical nature of this classic holiday story, A Christmas Carol. The main character, Ebeneezer Scrooge, is a miserly old man who hates Christmas and whose heart has turned cold since the death of his business partner and the break-up of his engagement many years ago. As Scrooge meets up with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, they help him to understand his misgivings and start celebrating the holidays in the true spirit of giving and compassion.
The tale has been viewed as a reflection of nineteenth century industrial capitalism and provides a “sneak peak” into the Victorian Era. The novella captures life in London between 1830 and 1840 – the midst of the Victorian Era.
The Victorian Era is defined by the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 – 1901. netTrekker provides many resources to compare and contrast what life was like at the start and end of the Victorian Era. This time of tremendous change is most evident by where people lived and worked in London, England.
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1837 |
1901 |
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People lived in villages and worked on the land. |
People lived in towns and worked in shops, offices and factories. |
Check out some netTrekker resources that will bring the Victorian Era alive in your classroom. These and other similar sites can be found by refining your search on Victorian Era with Interactive Media.
Travel back in time to the Victorian era in this interactive journey to help Ruby & Michael search for Sam, their missing dog. While you are searching, you can learn about Victorian life by examining the objects in the house, listening to the characters, and answering the questions.
Be a Victorian Millionaire Now! Benjamin Gott was a model of entrepreneurial skill. By taking risks and experimenting with new ways of doing things, he managed to hit the cash jackpot and become a powerful businessman. Can you solve business problems and make money by taking risks?
Virtual Victorians. Interactive examination of life during the Victorian era. Home, work, leisure, education, and technology are just a few facets of life addressed through photos, brief summaries, interactive games, newspapers, and documents. Questions about daily life can also be submitted on-line to a role playing persona.
To learn more about integration ideas other resources to support your learning objectives, contact your Account Manager. We’d love to provide the perfect Professional Development solution for you.
Glogging It
This past weekend I was invited to hang out with the Florida Discovery Educator Network at SeaWorld for a great learning event. The teachers learned how to create a waypoint for geocaching and how to create a Glog as a way to share what they have learned. Being the netTrekker fanatic that I am, I created a SeaWorld folder with resources, a link to a map to use with geocaching in the classroom, classroom project ideas and a link to my Glog. Unfortunately, you can’t access this project folder unless you are at my school. However, if you want a copy of it, leave a message of how to reach you and I’ll move the folder to your school or district.
Aside from catching up with good friends and making new ones, the fun part for me was creating the Glog. I chose to do one on Polar Bears. Unfortunately this exhibit was closed (SeaWorld is getting ready for sharing their Polar Express), so I couldn’t add any photos I took first hand. However, netTrekker did point me to a great video and some interesting facts.
For those of you new to Glogster, it’s a way to posterize your knowledge with graphics, text, video, images, and even sound! (The sound I found in a resource under References!) The even better thing is that they now have an “edu” version. If the regular version of Glogster was once blocked, I encourage you to see if this version can now be made available. It’s a great way for students to be creative in sharing their knowledge.
Quick note about the video, I ended up using the link from YouTube. The same video is on a website found in netTrekker, but it didn’t have the link-ability that YouTube has. Sorry about that!
Ruth is a netTrekker user, showing Debbie how to use our great tool to create a Glog.
Anyone up for a free webinar on Glogster? I’d love to share what I learned! Or contact your account manager to learn how to book your next professional development with us to learn how to integrate netTrekker with many great tools out there!
Techno-Novice Call For Help
There’s a request for help on the discussion board by a netTrekker Villager who would like me to fly to him and assist him for a week. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to make it to Northbridge, but I still want to help. My first tip, take it at an even pace. Try one thing at a time, and then add the next step. Don’t try to do all of it at once!
There are more great tips and ideas in the Teacher Tools Section of netTrekker. There are a few resources that are linked to the One Computer Resources and a few more for the One-to-One Computing.
A great tip I have learned over the years came from a friend of mine, Tom Turner. Tom’s school bought a bunch of SMART Boards last year and he needed to find a way to “hook” his teachers into using them. His secret weapon? netTrekker.
Tom did a search, refined his search by the collection of SMART, and pulled up those resources to share with his teachers. Once he showed them how easy it was to find SMART notebooks already created by other educators, how cool they were to use on the SMART Board, and what other interactive sites were like on the SMART Board, they were hooked! Once they got used to just using pre-made SMART notebooks, he then taught them how to make their own. He even used resources in netTrekker to help build those resources.
If you have a great tip on how to get started, please visit netTrekker Village and let Dean know. Help a fellow teacher out.
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