A Cyberbullying Lesson

In my new book Using Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools in the K-12 Classroom, there is a lesson on bullying, a topic of concern to educators and parents today. Check this YouTube video for a lesson on cyberbullying and how to explain it to your students. This interactive lesson provides questions to answer after each part to reinforce the concepts presented. It also contains additional links to other videos on bullying.

Review this 9-minute video, and read Chapter 3 on Wikis in my book and try out the unit plan related to bullying, designed to be used in a multidisciplinary unit for English and social studies using wikis.

New Additions to Web Site

New additional have been added to my Web site Bev's Educational Website that accompanies my book Using Web 2.0 Tools in the K-12 Classroom.

--Enter the Video Science Challenge contains information about an individual science project for middle school students as well as Web sites that offer free resources to get started using video in the classroom. The project is similar to Science Fair projects with video as the main tool.

--New wiki projects for the social studies.

Using Wikis – New Projects

Essential questions activities usually lend themselves well to multidisciplinary investigations, requiring that students apply the skills and perspectives of math and language arts while wrestling with content from social studies or science. Two new projects emphasize the use of Wikis, collaboration, and inter-disciplinary learning.

Take advantage of some exciting new Wiki projects put together by Vicki Davis at Westwood Schools. Ms. Davis, teacher and author of the Cool Cat Teacher blog , has a wiki-centric classroom as shown in a previous example on the Flat Classroom in Chapter 4, page 65 of my book Using Web 2.0 Tools in the K-12 Classroom.

Click Current Events to review two new projects, ideal for social studies, history, mathematics and English/language arts: 1) Arab-Israeli Conflict Simulation: Political Reality in the Classroom, a joint project with the University of Michigan and 2) Stock Market Simulation.

All the material is available so you, too, can create your own Wiki project. Send me your comments! I'd love to hear from you.

• Website: http://aic.conflix.org/ - A joint project with the University of Michigan. Six teams will participate on the project this year.
• Stock Market Game: http://www.vse.marketwatch.com/Game/Homepage.aspx

250,000 Free Wikis for K-12 Educators

If you haven't heard, Wikispaces.com has committed to offering 250,000 free wikis for K-12 educators on their website. They had previously offered 100,000 and had such a good response that they have agreed to offer 250,000 more. Check their site to see what teachers are saying about this unprecedented offer.