What's a good app/website to use in your classroom?

In today's digital age, educators are inundated with so many tools and resources. It's often hard to figure out what is good to use and Common Sense Education is a great site to help you out with this.

Why Common Sense Education?

• Comprehensive Reviews: Offers unbiased evaluations of edtech tools, helping educators make informed decisions.
• Digital Citizenship Curriculum: Provides age-appropriate lessons to instill responsible online behavior in students.
• Professional Development: Features webinars, articles, and training materials to enhance teachers' digital literacy.

Classroom Application: Imagine integrating a new app into your lesson plan. Before implementation, consult Common Sense Education's reviews to assess its suitability. Additionally, utilize their digital citizenship lessons to prepare students for responsible usage.

Common Sense Education isn't just a resource; it's a partner in fostering a safe and effective digital learning environment.

What is Immersive Reader?

You may have heard of Immersive Reader, but if you haven't (or just want to learn a bit more) I got you! It's basically a tool that helps to improve reading comprehension. It's great for new readers, language learner (not just English language learners) and anyone with learning differences such a dyslexia. The best thing is that it works in so many programs! If you want to see some examples of program, this short video goes through many of them.

So let's take a look at some of the things it can do. 



One thing it can do is to isolate content to improve readability.  This can be by highlighting a specific word or only showing a line or two to help focus. 



If you click on a word you can use the picture dictionary to see a graphical representation of the word as well as hear the word spoken. 

It can also help when learning parts of speech and grammar by highlighting verbs, nouns, pronouns, and more.

You can break words up into syllables to help new readers sound out words. 



The last thing that I am going to mention is that Immersive Reader can translate text into a wide variety of different languages . The great thing is that all of the above tools also work when the text is translated!

How to play Quizlet Live

Quizlet Live launched several years ago, but it's still one of my favorite games to play with my students.  Basically it takes a Quizlet set and turns it into a collaborative game.  Once you open the set that you want to use and select the live option a website and code are presented to students.  Students are assigned to teams and then they they need to work together to answer the questions.  Each student will have a possible response on his/her device, but only one person on the team will have the correct answer.  This means that students need to talk with one another to make sure that the wrong answer isn't selected.  If it is, the team's score resets itself.

When I really want to challenge my students, I don't let them sit with their teams.  This means they really need to know their stuff as they won't be able to talk with their team.  Students run the risk of having the correct answer, but not knowing it or thinking they know the answer when it's actually wrong.

What are some of your favorite review games?

252 iPad Apps for your Classroom

Ipads are great to have in the classroom.  When I got my first set (even though it was only 4), I was so excited to use them with my students.  Then reality sets in and you need to figure out how to use them.  What apps are you going to use?  Where do you even look for apps?  AskATechTeacher.com has created a list of her favorite iPad apps and placed them into categories.  Even if you think you have enough apps for your classroom iPads, I suggest that you take a look at her list and see if you can find anything new.

What are some of your favorite iPad apps that you use in the classroom? 

5 Ed-Techs Tips to make your time in the classroom easier!

Thank you to Alexis for this guest post!

Hello! Alexis from Science Beans here! I wanted to talk about some technology resources that all teachers can use to make your time in the classroom easier (and a little more fun!). Technology has changed my classroom in amazing ways. Here are some tools I use in the classroom that have transformed learning and saved me time ;)

Common Curriculum (CC)

Common Curriculum has saved me a tremendous amount of time when it comes to lesson planning. I wanted to find a way to make lesson planning easier and completely online rather than creating word documents for my weekly plans. It was getting tedious and very annoying having to type and retype the plans to place them in my lesson plan binder! I did a little research and after testing some online lesson planning sites out I fell in love with CC. The service is FREE for teachers but of course has upgrade options as well. The site gives you the option to plan for multiple classes in whatever format or template you like. One of my favorite options is being able to collaborate with colleagues making common planning time a piece of cake! The PRO version is completely worth it because you can plan by units, track standards in your lesson plans, export your plans as PDFs in different formats, and have a class website! No matter what version you decide to use, the lesson plans are all saved online. If someone needs to see my lesson plans, I share them (email, pdf, etc.) no need to print! For more info, see my previous blog post here.

This is what the lesson plan page looks like & the standards listing:

Edmodo

This for me is not only fun but extremely useful! I am pretty obsessed with it (I even have an Edmodo cape that I won at an online seminar – nerd alert!) Edmodo looks like Facebook but for schools and classrooms. The transformation of Edmodo over the years has been incredible. There is so much you can do and learn about on Edmodo that different PD’s and Seminars are given to teach you the various tools. Put simple, you make a class page, the kids sign up, and you get to collaborate! You can post notes, create assignments, create quizzes, you can create a poll, or use a ‘Snapshot’ (series of benchmark questions in math and reading that will show you which standards students need help in). I like to use mine as an online classroom platform.
All of the notes, assignments, handouts, you name it, are in folders on the class sections. One of the best additions to Edmodo has been the linking of your Google Drive or Office 365. It’s not only good for students but a great way to collaborate between teachers locally or around the world. I can probably write a book on everything you can do on Edmodo, trust me it’s awesome! Check it out!





Remind

This is a cool site/app that allows you to send out text message reminders to students. When I first started using remind (when it was remind101) it was simple. You received a unique phone number, the kids would subscribe to the text messaging service with a class code you created, and voila! They would receive text reminders every time you sent out a message. They could not answer and did not have access to your personal information. Over the years, the site/app has changed its name to Remind and has some amazing features. Now you can:

The number to sign up is the same for all teachers (81010) and the class code is the only thing that changes or is unique

• set office hours where students can respond back to questions
• students can “stamp” messages using the app
• Add pictures, sounds, links, to messages or set the delivery time
• receive the messages by email
• post a widget on your school website for the messages to be displayed
• send messages to a small group of students in a class
• download a pdf of your message history in any class…..

…..and so much more! Parents have signed up and love knowing what the students should be working on. My school has also moved to using a school wide remind where school announcements are sent out.



Kahoot & Quizlet

I don’t know about you, but my students love to play games (and so do I). No matter what the age or grade level, turning an assignment into any form of competition is usually a good idea. Kahoot is a free site that creates a game out of a set of questions created by the teacher. Once the game or ‘Kahoot’ is made, students answer the questions on their own devices. The question and answer choices are displayed on the screen in the front of the class and the students can choose their answer on their devices. It tracks the points and gives you data at the end with the questions the students did well on and what they need help with! Real time data! There are tons of way to use this resource: pretest style to see what they know, review game, bellringer, as a brain break, etc. Pressed for time? Many Kahoots are shared and you can use games created by others around the world. You can also create a discussion Kahoot and a survey version.

A similar option is Quizlet where you can make flashcards virtually, which seems cool enough, but it’s not just about the creation of the cards that’s awesome, it’s what you can do with them! Students can again play games using the cards and one of my favorites is Quizlet live. Students are placed on random teams and asked questions that match a set of cards. They need to figure out who on their team has the correct answer in order to win the race! Check out the video of students playing.




Discovery Education #SOS – Spotlight On Strategies

I am an extreme science nerd, which means anything Discovery or Discovery channel related is cool to me. I had
the opportunity to spend the last 3 years as a Discovery Education Leader and learn a huge amount of resources to help change the way students learn and how they create things. One of the resources we were taught focused on the use of something known as SOS (spotlight on strategies). Discovery came up with creative ways to use various media sources and formats to engage students in any subject or concept you are teaching. Here’s an example of one known as “take a Walk”. They come in pdf format and give you step by step what you need to do to complete the strategy. I love the last part with more ideas which is one way of extending any lesson. Click the link about to check out the Discovery Blog focused on all of their SOS strategies.




Thanks for having me and I hope you enjoyed these Edtechs!

BrainPop meets Primary Sources

Take a look at this post from BrainPop about how they are connecting primary sources to their movies.  Right now about 20 of their videos have primary sources attached to them, but more are being added.  To access the primary sources simply click on the activities icon from the main topic page and then you'll see a tab for primary sources.  Once you are on that page there is a worksheet that you can print out and then a link to the primary source.  If you take a look at the images below you will see the link on the Galileo page to the primary source, which in this case happens to be another quick video to watch.  I think this is a great way to connect subject areas.  Many students associate primary source documents with Social Studies, but now they can see that primary sources are in all subject areas

This post is cross posted on my science teaching blog Savvy Secondary Science

State Standards Reference Apps

Mastery Connect has developed an app for each of the 50 states. With this app you are able to easily have all of the standards for your state at your fingertips.

You can easily find these apps in your app store by searching "Mastery Connect" or by going to the Mastery Connect App Site.

Do you have an easy way to track standards in your classroom?

Socrative - collect real time data on formative assessments

Socrative is something that I have used in the past and plan to use again in the future.  I really like it because it allows me to have students answer questions about a topic.  Then I can use the data from their answers to the questions to see where they are confused and what things I need to review more with them.

One of the things that I love about socrative is that it works on any device or browser so kids can answer questions on ipads, computers, phone or whatever they have.

Socrative just updated to their 2.0 version. Below is a video that explains it and this link will take you to the new user guide.

How to collect feedback and data from your students.