Washington Tech Tidbits

Earth Day is this Friday, April 22. Here are 16 educational resources to check out with your students.

Some highlights:

Global Footprint Calculator - Take this quiz to find out your Ecological Footprint--determine your biggest areas of resource consumption, and discover how many Earths it would take to provide enough resources if everyone in the world lived like you. Very interesting!

How Much Have We Polluted? - an interactive heat map that shows the per capita and total yearly CO2 emissions for individual countries from 1960-2008.

Expedition Earth Day: A Deep Dive into the World's Coral Reefs - Register for this free event by Discovery Education. Watch a 30 minute video about the world's coral reefs and learn about what you can do to preserve the oceans. Then, you can participate in a live Twitter chat this Friday with scientists and experts using the hashtag #EarthDay2016.

My Garbology - interactive game where students sort garbage into one of four bins: reuse, compost, recycle, or landfill. This would also be great as a whole class activity!

Google Classroom will now allow you to create polls for your students. This is a quick and easy way to check for student understanding after a lesson! Students can respond with a short answer or select from teacher-created multiple choice options.

Click here for more information, and check out this blog post about 4 ways to use polling in the classroom.

Bookopolis is a FREE, kid-friendly social network that allows students to find books based on their interests, as well as share their favorite books with friends.

Students can write book reviews, earn badges as they read, find reading buddies, discover new books, recommend books to others, and make connections between texts. Teachers can create accounts for their students and keep track of their independent reading with their built-in reading logs. Bookopolis was designed for children in grades 2-6.

Check out the infographic below to see "what happens in an internet minute"!