Noisli is a tool that allows you to customize your own white noise to help you stay focused while you work. You can choose from a variety of sounds (campfire, rain, coffee shop, etc.) and combine their volume levels to create the perfect combination. Personally, I like the “nighttime” sounds set to medium volume, with “railroad” sounds at a lower volume. Noisli could obviously be used to help improve your concentration at home but can also help students avoid distractions when they are working independently on their devices. It’s actually a lot more awesome than it sounds- go watch a demo video here.
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Skype gives us the opportunity to make connections with other educators, students, and professionals around the globe. There are a few options for integrating Skype into your course that are all worth checking out:
Backchanneling, or having a real-time conversation alongside an event, can be a great way to keep students engaged during lessons. Backchanneling improves direct instruction, meetings, presentations, Socratic seminars, movies, silent activities, oral reviews and more. One of the easiest ways to facilitate backchanneling in your classroom is by using a website like Today’s Meet. Today’s Meet gives everyone in the classroom a voice by allowing students to make comments via their device, while a teacher (or student) is presenting information. It is like having your own personal chat room for your class. Today’s Meet does not require students to have an accounts and it requires very little set-up on the part of the teacher. Even the quietest students are empowered to share their thoughts during class when you use Today’s Meet.
5 Easy Ways to Use Today’s Meet in the Classroom Dotstorming is a fun and useful tool for collaborative brainstorming and decision-making. It works similarly to Padlet, in that students are given a link to an online “wall” to post digital sticky notes to. The difference is that Dotstorming then allows the students to place a dot to “vote” for their favorite ideas. The teacher can set parameters on how many votes each student can cast. This is a quick way to settle debates, make decisions, or get feedback on everyone’s input on a particular topic. Dotstorming could be used by all grade levels and content areas. In the example below, students were asked to list the strongest piece of evidence to support their thesis and then the class voted for three pieces of evidence that they found to be most effective.
Elementary teachers, this one is for you! I think we have all had those moments when you “Google” a seemingly innocent word or phrase and get an inappropriate result in your image results. Teachers are often afraid of turning their students loose on Google’s search engine for that very reason. There’s a solution to that problem and it is called Kiddle. Kiddle is a kid-friendly search engine, with all the power of Google, but with strong filters. Not only is Kiddle clean, but it also a visual search engine, making it easier for kids to find what they are looking for. Check it out today and have your students bookmark this one!
Prism is a tool for “crowdsourcing text interpretations.” Students use different colors of digital highlighters to annotate text that is added to Prism by the teacher. The colors of the highlighters correspond with different categories that the teacher has prescribed for the text analysis. As students are highlighting the text, a visual representation is created that demonstrates the combined interpretation of the text in different text colors and different font sizes. The idea of Prism is to reveal patterns that exist in the subjective reading of text. Although it sounds complicated, Prism could be used by all grade levels and various content areas. The categories that the teacher sets for highlighting could be as complicated as detecting the author’s tone, or as simple as distinguishing fact from opinion. Some other ideas for categories to highlight could be detecting different emotions, locating key words or vocabulary, establishing themes, locating parts of speech or other literary elements. Any text that can be copy and pasted can be added to Prism. Check out the demo video on their website for more information, http://prism.scholarslab.org/.
Blendspace is one of the best tools that can be used to facilitate online activity in a flipped lesson. Blendspace helps to organize digital material (videos, files, images, links, quizzes) in a visually appealing format that is easy for students to follow. All from within Blendspace, you can search for digital content from the web, from your Google Drive, or from your computer to add to the lesson. There are even pre-built public Blendspace lessons that you can make a copy of. The Blendspace format gives students the opportunity to leave comments/feedback on the various items in the lesson and gives the teacher the ability to view the number of student views, with some other basic analytics. This is definitely a tool that every teacher should have in their blended learning tool belt! Check out the Blendspace lesson gallery to see how others are using it.
Here’s a full-length webinar on flipping your class with Blendspace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=D_5x3MW3p7A Padlet is a quick and easy way to get students collaborating. Teachers will start off by creating a virtual “wall” and will then share a link with students so they can add notes to the wall, all displayed in real-time. The possibilities are endless with the option to upload a custom background and add multimedia content to the notes on the wall. Padlet is perfect for brainstorming, note-taking, writing activities, collecting resources, organizing information, formative assessment, and much more! This tool can be used synchronous and asynchronous and all Padlet walls are exportable to various formats. Since Padlet is web-based, it works on all devices and is very easy for both teachers and students to use. Check out these examples for inspiration in all content areas.
You can use ClassTools’ Keyword Checker to scan student essays for key words. With a simple copy/paste of a student essay and a list of vocabulary/key words, you can run the check to get a table that details which words were used and unused in the essay. This tool could be used by teachers or even students too to check for assigned vocabulary words in writing assignments.
As we all know, one of the Common Core ELA shifts is to build knowledge through content-rich nonfiction text. Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant- daily news. The articles on Newsela allow you to differentiate to different Lexile levels, with a minimum of a 440L and maximum of 1210L on most articles. Even if you are not an ELA teacher, please take a look at their website. There are articles in science, social studies, arts, technology, and other categories that could possibly align with your content. These articles could stem discussions and debates, prompt writing assignments and projects, or you could just use them to teach students close reading skills. Check out their website at https://newsela.com/ and use the Quick Start Guide to get started today.
Kahoot is a completely free game-based platform that is appropriate for all grade levels and all content areas. Students join with a pin number and answer a collection of questions, creating a social, fun, and game-like learning environment. Students can earn points for correct and timely answers, and teachers can run reports of the student responses. With the ability to ask a multiple choice or open-ended question and upload an image or video, the possibilities for integrating this tool into your classroom (or virtual classroom) are endless. Set up an account and start Kahooting today….your students will thank you! For more information or to get started, visit https://getkahoot.com/. Check out some interesting ways to use Kahoot here.
Go Formative is a completely free, next-generation student response system. As the name implies, this platform is perfect for formative assessment. This tool goes beyond multiple choice questions, giving students to option to type, draw, or submit images to demonstrate their understanding. Teachers see real-time answers from their students as they are typing or drawing and auto-score or manually score their responses. Teachers could use Go Formative for do-nows, checks for understanding, exit tickets, quizzes, and more. What differentiates this tool is that you can upload existing assignments from pdfs, Word, and Google Docs to make them interactive. Your existing printed lessons and resources can find new life in a digital format. It is much more impressive in action so check out this video. Go to https://goformative.com to get more information and get started today!
VideoNot.es provides students with an easy way to take notes that are synchronized with online videos. Each line of notes that is typed has the time of the video automatically recorded next to it. Later, just click on a line of text to make the video jump to the relevant parts. Videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Khan Academy, and other providers stream in a split screen with your notes. You could even create your own screencast or instructional videos and upload them to YouTube for flipped lessons. VideoNot.es syncs with your Google Drive account, creating a new folder in Drive and making sharing incredibly easy between students and teachers. Check out more information and try it out for yourself here.
Are you tired of calling on the same students to answer all of the questions? Get more students engaged by creating your own random name generator with this Google Sheet template and Flippity. This random name generator allows you to draw a random name, lineup, group, team, or seating arrangement. It’s easy to use and your Google Sheets are always in your Drive for future editing. Visit flippity.com for instructions to also create a gameshow-like quiz, flashcards, and more with Google Sheet templates.
Deliver videos like you teach with eduCanon. This free online tool can be used to enrich instructional videos with powerful questions. This tool allows you to interject formative assessments during the delivery of a video, giving the opportunity for student explanations and immediate answer-specific feedback. It is very easy to create and share a “bulb” or eduCanon lesson, with a variety of formative assessment tools and all of your favorite video streaming services available. Keep students engaged in online video and hold them accountable for actually watching video with eduCanon. This tool is perfect for flipped lessons on the student’s independent work days. Sign in with Google and check it out today!
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AuthorKristen Wolf Archives
June 2016
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