 In this meeting, I'm just starting recording right now. So thank you again for coming. I've already done the introduction, so we'll just get started. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to share with you, I'm just going to share my screen and what's going to happen is we're going to then just show some of the various websites and pieces and items that we decided to make available to you for you. So what I'm doing right now is I'm going to cover up a lot of your land space for the moment here and then I'm going to be sharing my screen. So if you would just hang on for a moment here. Okay, you should be able to right now see my screen and I'll spread it out and I wanted to start with, I wanted to start with our ESU8 homepage. And the reason why I'm sharing this with you is there's a lot of great information that you can get from a couple of things that we purchase for our schools. And one of those is World Book Web, which is on the right hand side. And by clicking on that then you can immediately search within World Book Web for Olympics. And I'm going to go out to that first right away, but also within Snap. Snap is our federated search and you can get onto Learn360 and also search Olympics and find many items that you can use within your classroom. So I wanted to start by reminding our ESU schools that we do purchase those things for you. So let's start by looking at the World Book Web and what I did when I logged in, excuse me. All right, actually I've closed that. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to do it with you. I'm going to go to World Book Web and then I'm going to go to Advanced. Now notice all of these windows here, all these choices, each choice will get you something different depending on what it is that you're looking at. But what I wanted to look at today was the Advanced section and I'm going to click on Advanced and then I'm just going to search for Olympics. Hey Corey, while you're doing that, I noticed in the chat that people were having problems accessing that doc. So just to let you guys know we're aware of that and we'll get that fixed here before we get done today or at least we'll get you a new link of that document so that you can access it. Okay, right, right. If it's not working, we will definitely fix that. Okay, so World Book Advanced, which is, I'll call about the higher, if you're older students. Notice there are 324 items that are related to this and I go down the left hand side here. Okay, there's video, special reports and things like that, but I'm going to go to just the Olympic Games, for instance, in this case and just see what a general overview of the Olympics. Now, there are many things you can do with this, of course. You can save or print your article, you can save it if you have set up your own research section. You can also hear this text read aloud. Now down the left hand side here, you've got pictures of the flag, okay, various sites. Right, plenty here to look at and use and this is all just from one search that you have available to you via the web. Some of these, you know, are obviously from the previous Olympics, but they'll be updating this as time goes. But enough information, if you're just wanting to start that discussion with your kids on the Winter Olympics or just the Olympics in general, I would start somewhere with World Book Online. Okay, all right, next. Mickey, I believe, is going to talk about this site. This is Sochi2014.com. Mickey, I'll let you go. Yeah, this is a great site that gives you information pertaining to the Sochi Olympics. And this is probably one of the sites that I would start off with, especially if you have older kids. Back when I was in the classroom, I remember I did a whole project around the Nagano Olympics, which was in Nagano, Japan in 1998. And at that time, if those of you, if you were around at that time and you were in education, you know that the web was just pretty new back then. So there wasn't a whole lot of resources that were available, but the Olympic Committee, the Olympic site did have a web resource that we could access. Now this looks a lot different than it did back in 1998. But one thing that I had my kids do was I had them plan a trip to the Olympics. And you know, if you're talking about an international trip, then you're talking about a lot of money and sometimes kids don't get that. And one of the things that you can do here on this website is you can actually purchase tickets for the different events. And that is, I think I found that under four spectators, Cory, it's under four spectators. And you can look at the ticket prices. And another thing that you can pull in here is because this is in Russia, you would actually be talking about currency exchange rates. And so I think that's a good thing you can bring some math into your classroom that way. And this site is just full of information. And as the Olympics start, it will be updated continuously and you'll be able to see metal counts and results. And obviously you can see here when the events are taking place, you could talk about time zones because this is gonna be in a completely different time zone than what we're used to. And so this is just a great website to get started with some basic information. And we've got some other sites that will go into more detail about each of the different events. But I like this website because you can have some information about the culture of Russia. It talks about the mascots for the Olympics. So a lot of great stuff on this website. Very good, very good. I've poked around this too. And like we said, there's so much to look at. We were just wanting to give you just a taste of some of the things that we've come across. Okay, next, this is if you're more of an elementary teacher, some of these ideas are pretty basic, but I found this on Scholastic. It's called Winter Olympic Math. And down here, for instance, and some of these sometimes seem obvious, but the lesson plan idea I took out of this, depend on the grade level that you're at, you can create this gold medal graph. And you obviously saw on the last site where they're gonna do that for you, but you get the kids involved with this and you get them to make something that says as a class, keep track of the number of gold medals the United States has won. Create that graph, chart, paper, and then it even says, you know, bring in recycled yogurt lids to represent the medals and just do things like that. It's great ideas to get kids involved and then just, you know, when we get in a rut and we're doing the same lessons over and over, perhaps hopefully you're not, but when you have a large event like this that's worldwide, I love to bring this in and it re-engages students. Don't you think, Mickey? Did I lose, Mickey? Yeah, absolutely. It's possible. And you're still there? You talked about doing, yeah, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. You talked about doing graphing activities. Wouldn't that be great to put up on a smart board? You know, you could do the graph and you could make it interactive. You know, there's all sorts of things you can do in Smart Notebook where you could have some little medals and have the kids drag them over under, you know, for keeping track of the United States medals. We could have them build a gold medal and silver medal. And so that would be kind of fun and a little interactive especially for those younger kids. Absolutely, because so many of us have either Promethean board or a smart board or whatever the case is or Mimeo in their rooms and you get them up out of their seats and you get them active and participating. This next site, NBC Learn, I thought this was a wonderful site because it's full of appropriate videos that really get into, again, the science of Winter Olympics. Now, as I scroll through these, I'm gonna play just a little bit of one, not a lot. But I wanted to point out that I am under the science of Olympic Winter Games, but also within this, I wanted you to notice the others. There's a science behind the news. There's a science between of the Summer Olympics, science of golf and so on. So it's much more than just the Olympics here but also up at the top, there's a science and engineering of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. So these are all about five minute videos and of course they're well done. So as I scroll through this, you got everything from the aerial physics, from the aerial skiing, banking on speed with the bobsled. So I'm going, there's a math leads one here. I'm going to show you just a brief, few minutes of the science of skis. So you get an idea of the quality of these videos and that they're short. So I'm gonna click on this. I don't know how well you'll be able to hear it so I'm gonna turn it up a little bit, okay? In skiing events like the downhill, slalom or ski jump, it's often the skis bound to athletes feet and the materials used to make them that give these athletes an edge over the competition. This year's Olympians along with researchers funded by the National Science Foundation explain how the materials used to make their skis play a final role in performance on the mountain. Barrel down the mountain, fly through the air, weave through gates, beating the competition by only hundreds of a second. Athletes on skis, long slender runners that glide over the snow. Skis used to be made of simple wood slats but today's skis are marbles of chemical and materials engineering. Over the past say 100 years, there's been a real evolution in the properties of skis. Okay, so they go on to talk about how the skis are made. And then what's great about this is if you look over on the right hand side, hopefully you can see that okay, there's a transcript of what it is they're saying. But also, when I close that transcript window, there's also an activity. So right here, you've got a lesson planned for you, it tells you what you need, it says what to do, and then you've got the video that goes with it. And then even questions. I mean, this is great stuff. Kids are going to love doing this. So I would definitely recommend spending some time on NBC Learn. And once again, we'll make sure that link works so that we get you the link for sure. NBC Learn, full of great, appropriate, wonderful videos. Okay, I'm gonna jump over here to Twitter. And let me pull that one up here. And the reason why I wanted to do that is because, I'm just gonna create another tab here, because Mickey is into Twitter, I am as well. But some of you who may be watching or listening may not be into Twitter, but what I wanted to make sure that you knew is that you don't have to belong to and use Twitter on a daily basis to be able to see what it is that Twitter has to offer you. Mickey, do you wanna just talk a little bit about what you might do or what you might see here on the Twitter stream? Yeah, absolutely. Cory's pulled up the official Olympics account for Twitter and you can tell it's the official account because it has that blue check mark next to the word Olympics there in their profile picture. And they have a great stream of pictures and comments. And Cory and I were looking at this earlier today and the pictures are just amazing that they're sending out. So this is the official Olympic stream. And actually, I've been on Twitter a little bit today and it's kind of interesting if you have heard the news reports, how shall I say this? The accommodations in Sochi are maybe not up to Western standards. And so there's also a little bit of controversy. And you may also have heard the controversy as far as are they going to be able, is Russia going to be able to keep our athletes safe? Now you're probably not gonna see too much of that on this particular stream, but that was coming through on my Twitter stream just today was the fact that they were tweeting pictures of the poor conditions in the hotels and things like that. But this particular Twitter stream is the official Olympic account. And you can see like Cory's scrolling through there, there are some awesome pictures on there. And like Cory and I were talking about, you could take any one of these pictures and do a great writing activity on that, that picture with the, I don't know if they're scooping snow or something, but there's all sorts of interesting winter sports that we're not so familiar with, but you could definitely have your kids do some kind of writing activity based on one of these pictures. Absolutely. And I guess what I wanted to take out of this is if you don't have enough Twitter account, you just go to twitter.com slash Olympics and you're able to see this. You don't have to sign in, you don't have to create an account. You don't even have to be a Twitter user. Right, Mickey? Right, and that will give you some really current up-to-the-minute information if you're using Twitter to just kind of gather some information. Absolutely. Okay, so these next few sites, these are all under Olympic.org. So I have several things I wanted to point out, but again, there's so much to look at. Here are a few of the things that I like about Olympic.org. Of course, just like that other website that we looked at earlier, there's a nice little schedule on the homepage, okay? So just be aware of that. But as far as this goes, when you're talking about lesson plans and just talking about the Olympics, there's a great video under the video section, and I have this on our link again, so you don't have to go back and find this later. There's a beginning video, it's called The Beginner's Guide to the Olympics, and it's five minutes long again. I love the length of it because if it gets too long, maybe it's not as quite as entertaining or as good. And I won't play this for you right now, but this is something that I would start with, just talking about the Olympics as a whole. All found within Olympic.org, okay? The next one, the next part of Olympic.org was the news, and it's this tab over here that's highlighted, it's called News. I found myself going to this one a lot because it's keeping you updated with some of the latest news, but also articles like this. There are 12 Winter Sports that are new this year, okay? And we'll have a quiz and we'll have you guess at them later as far as what that is, what the 12 Winter Sports are, but this is a great discussion. And then with each of them, they have videos. So here's one, it's Olympic, this is a biathlon mix relay, figure skating team event, there's the Luge Team Relay, okay? And these are only a couple minutes long. Great place to start your day, talking about maybe one of the new events, watching a quick video of it, like you said, Mickey, write a journal, entry about it, you name it. And then you combine that with the NBC Learn, when you get some science activities in there, you've got plenty to do around the Olympics. Okay, this next, there's my Twitter. Okay, this next one I wanted to show you, and again, this will be in our link. I wanted to make sure, so you're not trying to write these things down, but I have found this in a blog, but I really like this visual here, okay? Plenty of things to discuss here, as far as the facts and numbers that are related to the Olympic torch relay, okay? How many regions? So just bring this up, another something to talk about. There's also a map here, yes. And you know, great, infographics are all the rage right now. You see them everywhere, and that's what you have an example of right there. It's just taking numbers and putting it into a picture so that it's easier to understand, you know? And so you could have, you know, pull this one up and have your kids look at it, and then you could have them make their own infographic on some particular topic. You know, they could do the research and they could find the numbers, and then they could do their own infographic related to the Olympics. And there are lots of free websites that you can use to make an infographic. There's some iPad apps also available, so you could have your kids get into the technology that way, creating something. You bet, I love infographics. It's just a fun way to look at this stuff. But to go along with the torch relay, also a link found within this blog here was this map here, and I really thought this map was fun because it's interactive. I can make it larger here, and then as I click on Moscow, let's see down here at the bottom, and it pulls it up, and where I'm looking at right here is Moscow. So again, now you bring your social studies into it. You talk about where Moscow is. Moscow is. And then when you click on number two, where it goes next, how many you could figure out the distance. And then I can also click on the name of a city, and it takes me out to that city, and it gives me various information. So you could spend plenty of time talking about what is going on here with this torch relay. You can look at the landscape. You can look at the terrain. You can talk about the climates and so on, all within this torch relay map, and what's better, again, than an interactive map. You can see how far it's traveled. I just found this one. Yeah, and going off of that, Corey, you talked about calculating the distance. Well, those measurements are gonna be in kilometers, and we're used to miles here in the United States, so that would be a whole another thing that you could introduce, a whole another topic you could introduce to your class. Right, the whole conversion business, absolutely. Okay, next, there's an Egitopia website, and what I thought was interesting regarding this Egitopia website is we're talking about many of the STEM resources, but the reason why I won't spend too much time on this is a lot of these, like right here, the science and engineering, okay, they point you right back to NBC Learn, but there are some other things in here that I wanted you to be aware of in the Egitopia site that point you to different activities. Here's the Winter Olympics Math from Scholastic, that's one we covered earlier, but I wanted you to be aware of it that there are other things here to point out and look at, okay? All right. Next, okay, this website perhaps doesn't look great, but it's full of lots of information. This is CybraryMan.com, okay? And as I scroll through here, many of these sites that we're looking at today were found here, or there are many others. Here's my countries of the world page, and here's basic words in Russian, you could bring in some language again there. Okay, here's the Dog's Fled, inspired by Sochi Russia Winter Olympics. There's all kinds of information here, but all these are links, and this guy, I love how he focuses just getting lots of quality links to teachers, but doesn't necessarily make the page look great, but when I click on this, I go out to Winter Olympic posters. I go over here to this side, and I can see the Olympic flag, okay? So I wanted to make you aware that this site is just already a big list created for you, and that's CybraryMan.com, okay? And we'll make sure, again, that you have access to that. Mickey, anything else you have to add as we continue? I'm gonna throw in, I'm going to throw in now a poll, okay? So I'm gonna bring that in, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen right at now at this point, okay? Now here, I've got a poll for you, okay? So if you're out there listening, I'm going to open this poll, and what's the Olympic Twitter handle? If you would go ahead and click on that and submit your vote at Olympics, at Sochi Russia, or Sochi 2014 Russia, at I Love the Olympics, or at Justin Bieber. Let's see how people are voting. I am quite shocked that no one has yet selected Justin Bieber. Well, I haven't broadcast the results yet, okay? All right, here's the results. You should be able to see them. And then, oh, someone did. Someone did, yeah. Thank you. The correct answer is at Olympics, and then you don't. Again, I wanted to emphasize that, have to be a Twitter user to take part in that. Let's have another quiz here. Okay, this might be a little more difficult. Maybe not, maybe not. I'm gonna open this poll here. All right, which is a new sport event for Sochi 2014? Is it snowball throwing, where they throw snow for accuracy, as well as distance? Ice sculpting, primitive tools, and they also use local ice, which helps that ice economy. Mountain climbing, where they climb for speed, both individual and team. And team figure skating, where teams of six skaters, male, female, pair, and an ice dance couple. Okay. I don't think anybody is biting on your suggestions there. Yeah, I figured as much. You're right, if you picked team figure skating, that is one of the 12 new events. Good job, we have a high ability learning crowd here. All right. What's the motto? I don't know. Okay, is it slower, smarter bananas? Outplay outlast, or faster, higher, stronger? And the votes are coming in, boy. Everybody is right on today. All right, that's our little check for understanding. You all have done very well, by the way. In the check for understanding, piece of this. All right, good job. Okay, any closing now? As far as the link goes, I can get in there and I'm going to adjust, if it's asking for permission to access, I'm going to just adjust that. And if it's not working, we'll figure that out. But just in case, I want to make sure that you have my email, cdolladysu8.org. Micky, do you want me to share yours? Or would you rather I didn't? Well, I don't care. But I think the documents just shared with me. I just think you need to make that public. Right, and if you have used Google Docs, that's, you know, we do that once in a while. I think you can relate to that. So I will adjust that. You let me know at cdolladysu8.org if it's not. And we did record this. So you'll be able to either share this or point back to it another time. Thanks for coming, Micky. Anything else? Yeah, I think the Olympics just gives you a world of opportunities to bring the world into your classroom, no pun intended. And, you know, it lasts for, what, two weeks? And it starts on Friday, I believe. So you've got lots of time that you can think about it and look at the sites that Corey has found and possibly develop something. You know, it doesn't have to be all, you know, during the entire two weeks, you know, just come up with a day activity and have your kids look at it. But it's something, it's a way that they can't, you know, they're going to be seeing it on the news. They're going to be watching it when they go home. So it's a way to bring that into the classroom and kind of teach them something at the same time. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, there, Otis says it starts tomorrow, right? Opening ceremonies are on Friday, yep. And if you follow that Twitter stream, twitter.com slash Olympics, they count it down there as well as all those other sites. I think one of the websites had a countdown teacher there. It is beginning. Thanks for attending and let us know if you have any concerns regarding this topic or others and we'd be glad to get different topics on here for you. We're always open to suggestions. But with it starting tomorrow, we thought we'd just touch base with Olympics. Thanks, Mickey, for helping out today from the far away side, yeah. I appreciate it, it was fun. You bet. Time goes fast. Thanks everybody.