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.

Why you want to check out Microsoft Search Coach

Search Coach is a tool I learned about last year and think it's a tool that everyone should be using.  We use search engines everyday and this tool teaches students how to form efficient search queries and evaluate their results.  What I really like is that the feedback that Search Coach gives you are tips that you can use on any search engine.   The video below gives you a quick overview of what it is.  Microsoft has also created some lessons that you can use with your students. 

 

Certified Media Literacy Educator

Media literacy is something that I feel is very important, but I sometimes struggle with how to teach it in a meaningful way.  The students seem to think that approaches so far have been corny.  I've found that this course has some better resources (hopefully my students will find these less corny 😉)

PBS has a Media Literacy course for educators to develop and hone literacy skills across several forms of media and communication.  These skills are important to help your students grow. The PBS Media Literacy Certification gives you tools to implement lessons that help students foster media skills.

The modules in this course include: Evaluating Online Information, Analyzing Media, Creating a Code of Conducts, Evaluating Online Tools for Classroom Use, Making Media for Classroom Use, Assessing Student Media, and Implementing Media Projects (an option for either Early Childhood or Upper Grades).

If there are modules that you don't feel comfortable with or don't want to take the whole course) PBS offers courses that focus on just one of the modules.  Even if you don't directly teach media literacy, these skills are important for all teachers to have.  We all use the internet with our students and we need to be able to ensure that we are guiding them in the best way possible. 

searching for Creative Commons images

I know we all like to practice good digital citizenship and encourage our students to do the same.  One of the biggest places were people fail is taking images that don't belong to them and aren't licenced to be shared.  Creative Commons is an a way for people to give a copyright license to their work to specify what permissions the public has to share and use their work.  (This blog has a Creative Commons licence).  Creative Commons has come out with CC Search which is a a search tool that allows you and your students to search for images that have a licence that allows you to use the images it finds.

Right now CC search looks for images from 500px, Europeana, Flickr, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and Rijksmuseum.  While it's not perfect, it's nice to know that you won't be violating any copyright laws by using an image.  If you are looking for other ways to search check out my blog post about using your search engine to find images you can use.

Removing all of the related videos from YouTube

Showing a YouTube video in class is great.  There is so much awesome educational content on there and the videos can really add to your lessons.  What isn't always great is the related content videos that show up on the side.  Sometimes I wonder how YouTube thinks that what they are showing is actually related to what I am watching.  Often times it's not inappropriate, some some times it is and you don't want that.  Even when it isn't inappropriate, kids will always look at the related content and ask to watch that video next.  There are a few different website that will allow you get ride of those annoying related content videos.


Watchkin is a site that will allow you to both search for YouTube videos and also watch YouTube videos without any of those sidebar add.  It's very simple to use; you just copy and past the URL into the site and you are good to go!  If you have a topic you are interested it you can also use Watchkin as a search engine to find videos to watch that will play without the annoyances.


ViewPure is very similar to Watchkin is that you can paste in a video URL or search for a video.  In addition to getting ride of sidebar ads and related videos, it also hides the comments.  There is also an option to create a clean URL to the video. You can create a URL like viewpure.com/BabyDebate instead of youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY.

Find images you can legally use

We all use images in our lessons whether we are putting them in our presentations or students are using them in their projects.  It is important that we are not taking images that the creator didn't give us permission to use.  It is very easy to take images from a website and to justify our use under the guise of fair use.  The fair use doctrine was create to allow copyrighted works to be used fro classroom instruction (among other things).  Many teachers believe this means that they can use anything in their classrooms and this is not true.  I'm not here to discuss the ins and outs of fair use, but if you want to learn more you can visit this site from the US Copyright Office.

While, many times I am covered under fair use when I use images for my teacher, I like to be sure that I am covered.  To do so you can filter your searches in your search engine to include ones that are licences for your to use.  While each site uses slightly different language here are some ideas as to what each term means.

• Public Domain - the creator has basically waived all copyright rights
• Free to share and use - you can use it and share (but not change it) for personal purposes only
• Free to share and use commercially - you can use it and share it for personal or commercial purposes
• Free to modify, share and use: you can use, edit and share it for personal purposes only
• Free to modify, share and use commercially - you can use, edit and share it for personally or commercial purposes 

Here are some short animated gifs that show you how to find these search filters on a few different search engines.

Google

Bing

Yahoo

Internet Safety - Hover before you click

If you hover your mouse over a hyperlink you can see what website the link goes to in the bottom left of your window. It’s a great way to check to make sure a link is legitimate before you click on it.




Alice Keeler has a great post on her blog about this and I suggest that you check it out!
http://www.alicekeeler.com/teachertech/2015/05/14/internet-safety-hover-before-you-click/

What tips do you have to keep safe on the internet?