“Spent is an online game designed to teach players about the challenges of living on minimum wage (or slightly higher) employment. Players begin by selecting a job which will provide the wages they have to survive on for a month. Then throughout the game players are confronted with challenges that they have to handle by making an “either or” choice. After each choice the player’s account balance is adjusted. In addition to the change in the player’s balance sheet, each choice is followed by an explanation of consequence of the choice made.

Applications for Education When I saw Spent it reminded me of a simulation activity called Life on Minimum Wage that I developed and have used for a couple of years now. Both activities are useful for teaching students about the difficult decisions that some people have to make just to take care of the basic necessities.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.)

District Technology is pleased to announce that Aviary is now available as part of Google Apps. Aviary is a web based design suite with drawing, image markup and even audio editing capabilities (though I’d stick with GarageBand for audio editing). Documents that you create are stored in your Google Docs so you can access them from anywhere, and since aviary works in a web browser you can edit them from anywhere too. Unfortunately, aviary is currently only available to staff but we are investigating student access. Note: Aviary requires flash and will not work on an iPod, iPhone or iPad

To access Aviary:

1. login to your Google account at http://webmail.d181.org/

2. Click on the more link in your top Google Apps navigation menu

3. Select Aviary from the drop down menu (It takes a minute for aviary to load after clicking the link)

4. Select the Aviary application you would like to use and start creating

NY Times – Inside the Olympic Action:

“The New York Times has good collection of videos and audio slideshows designed to take you ‘inside the action‘ of Winter Olympic events. The videos will take you down a luge run at 90mph, through a snowboard half pipe, and down the men’s downhill ski course. Along the way athletes and coaches explain intricacies of each event and how the athletes maneuver through their events.

Applications for Education

Inside the Action could be a good resource for learning about Olympic events from an ‘insider’s perspective.’ You might want to use these videos in conjunction with a Google Maps Street View tour of the Winter Olympics.”

(Via FreeTech4Teachers.com.)

Defend your space station from incoming meteors by solving multiplication problems or drag race your friends through division. AcademicSkillBuilders.com has a number of great math games covering Multiplication, Division, Fractions, Addition, Subtraction, and Integers. The games run great under any web browser and are quick to start and easy to play. All of the games are research based, and aligned to state standards.

Theres also a selection of language arts games focusing on spelling, vowels, verbs and Social Studies games focusing on State Capitals and countries. Now I better close the window so I can get some work done…

Social media has transformed the communication landscape, and its use is only continuing to explode. Gary Hayes on his “Personalize Media” blog has created a Social Media Counts tracker which shows the growth of social media over a given time period. Just while writing this blog post facebook has gained 1300 new members, 4 million searches were done on Google, and 40 Billion Text messages were sent. Mind blowing.

I’ve embedded the tracker below: