Sara+Barnes-+HippoCampus

[] = Introduction =

HippoCampus.org is an interactive resource for high school academics. It has numerous math tutorials and presentations, as well as natural and social science. This site can be used in many ways, but is most often used as an supplemental resource for student study. A teacher can register and is given a personal URL that she can pass along to her students so they can access her custom site. On her site, she can create 'playlists' for specific content, pulling resources from the many options within the site or adding from outside sources. The site is easy to navigate and compiles information from various sites together in an organized format. Another great feature of HippoCampus is that it allows the user to link other sites to their site, so, for example, a teacher could link their wiki or edmodo to a resource for an assignment or study guide. HippoCampus.org is not a Learning Management System because it does not give the individual student an identity, nor does it track student progress. It is a supplemental resource that the teacher can provide to her students as necessary. = = = Incorporating HippoCampus into your Curriculum =

The resources on HippoCampus.org can be used in multiple ways. The site can simply be shown to students as an additional resource that they can utilize as necessary to prepare for tests or to clarify understanding of concepts. The site also has a feature which allows the instructor to coordinate specific presentations and examples with pages from popular textbooks. HippoCampus has a list of the most used textbooks which the instructor can choose from, and then when a lesson is viewed, the page numbers of that text that coincide with the concept are labeled. I think this is a great idea because it truly links traditional resources with the Web 2.0 resources, and very easily integrates the two together. It also gives the student the ability to be sure that the material they are studying is accurate for what they are learning in class. They have ownership in learning the material. Another way this site is used is as a homework assignment tool. The instructor can assign a specific concept to watch, then have the students take notes or write out examples from the videos.

One way that I have used HippoCampus in my room is to supplement my functions unit. I gave my students the URL to my page, [] and instructed them to find the playlist I created labeled "functions" and review the materials on the playlist. I also linked our class wiki and our edmodo to the HippoCampus site, and could have assigned the students a quiz on functions through edmodo to complete when they were through with the HippoCampus resources. This is just one of many ways in which these resources can be used together. Images taken from hippocampus.org = =