My Top Ten Tech Tools by Kelli Stair
Voicethread Voicethread.com is a multimedia conversation tool that allows teachers to upload or connect to multimedia sources and enable student conversations about each media piece. Teachers can give directions and students can respond through text, audio, or webcam. Voicethread engages multiple learning styles and allows all students to participate. Voicethread also encourages revision as students will replay their comments until they are satisfied with the result. Voicethread allows publishing of student-created multimedia projects for evaluation and teacher-created projects to enhance students learning. The free version allows multiple identities under a teacher’s username or allow students to create their own identities with an email account. An annual subscription allows a teacher to manage a list of students’ identities with advanced features to track and manage comments.
Study Stack Studystack.com is a site that lets you create your own flashcards for review. You can print out flash cards, use your words to review, play study games, and quiz yourself. What makes this site unique is the extensive lists of pregenerated study stacks, particularly SAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT test prep words. In addition, vocabulary lists are arranged in different subject areas and for different languages. If you are tech savvy, you can embed study stacks, games, and activities onto your own website!
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use learning management tool for blending your classroom, look no further than Edmodo.com. You can keep track of assignment posts, make quizzes, track progress, and let students interact with each other on Edmodo. Excellent for discussions, quizzes, and easy management of assignments, this tool has a comfortable layout and intuitive design. Students will find the layout easy to navigate as it resembles social networking sites. The possibili ties for using this platform in the classroom are limitless. With thousands of teachers using it, groups designed around sharing teaching ideas have forums that really help you get acclimated. Students in your classroom get a virtual backpack to put their work in, so no excuses about leaving homework at home! Students can submit work to you any time and you can leave comments with your grades.
How did I make this great magazine to post to the site? ISSUU.COM is the site. It’s never been easier to publish online magazines and embed them anywhere! In addition to publishingsay, student magazines, creative writing, art, subject matter journals- you can manage your own library and make different shelves of magazines. Students could sign up for free accounts and send you a link to their magazine projects or portfolios. You can also subscribe to magazines and you receive the latest published version. If you wanted to, you could keep track of your students throughout their portfoliodeveloping careers! Talk about an authentic audience for writing- can you imagine the thrill students would get from publishing their writing to subscribers all over the world?
ISSUU.com
Todaysmeet.com allows users to create a backchannel for discussions. A backchannel is when you use networked computers to have real-time conversations online at the same time that you have a live speaker or panel of speakers. Think about sitting in a lecture hall with a speaker while also having your laptop or cell phone in front of you. On the projection screen is a list of any comments or questions the audience has for the speaker. The speaker can use this backchannel to answer questions, address comments, ask listeners to provide resources, etc. Using free software like Today’s Meet allows listeners to participate and archives the whole backchannel for future reference. Speakers can have immediate feedback about the direction of their lecture and listeners can actively participate in the discussion without having to interrupt the speaker. If you lecture at all in class, using a backchannel can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your lecture and participation of the audience.
Screencast-o-matic is an online video recording platform that allows users to create videos using screenshots- whatever is on their screen. Screencasts are especially useful for how-to videos of things relating to education that are done on the computer. For example, if I wanted to show someone how to format pictures in a Word document, I could make a video using my voice as I performed the task and my audience could see my screen as if I were right in front of them demonstrating. These screencasts can be added to YouTube, archived in the system, or sent as a link to others. Screencasts could be used for direct instruction or as a way for students to show what they are doing as they are doing it. You can record 15 minute screencast videos with a free account, and no downloads are necessary. Students could create videos for portfolios of tasks and show that they knew how to complete all requirements of a task. Use it with another program like Scrible and really have a powerful tool! www.screencast-o-matic.com
Scrible.com is a research tool that bookmarks webpages and allows you to annotate those webpages by highlighting in various colors,
adding notes directly to a page, organizing those notes and annotations with a legend, and sharing your annotated webpage as a separate URL.
If using screencast-o-matic and scrible together is too complicated and you want a simpler solution, Jing is your answer! Jing can be downloaded at http://www.techsmith.com/jing-features.html and allows five minutes of video screencast recording with simple annotation tools. Because it is a download, you may need administrator access to download to school computers.
Do you have shelves full of 3-Ring binders? If so, livebinders.com is for you. If not, you are probably like me and have stacks of papers, sticky notes, index cards, lists written on napkins‌ and you need livebinders most of all! Think of a 3-Ring binder‌ for the web. Livebinders allows you to organize websites, videos, pdf and Word files, and images into virtual binders that you can make public for others, collaborate on with colleagues, and have access to from any computer with an internet connection‌ including your cell phone! Not only for education, livebinders.com is searchable for recipes, hobbies, activities, and more!
Glogster
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http://edu.glogster.com/ has a catch phrase: Poster yourself! Glogster software allows you to create an interactive poster with images, videos, and other animated elements. While there are many more options with the paid version, the free version will give you an idea of the capabilities of glogster. Students love the creativity, design, and production aspects of creating their own posters. The paid version allows embedded activities within the poster and a student management system!
Whether you teach remedial English or AP Literature; math, science, or social studies; projectbased learning or standardized test prep, shmoop.com is an invaluable tool. Written in a conversational tone, shmoop lays out the basics in a fun, easy-tocomprehend way. Under literature, for example, books and poems are broken using the following categories: summary, themes, quotes, characters, analysis, questions, quizzes, resources, and write an essay- a step-by-step tutorial that leads students through the writing process. Under Biology, topics are covered in the following categories: intro, in depth, terms, roots, big themes, real world, study questions, quizzes, best of the web (resources) and citations. If students need extra incentive, shmoop offers shmoints that you earn and can redeem for prizes. Shmoop is one of my favorite resource sites and will actually help students become independent learners.
While not technically a technology tool, www.freetech4teachers.com is my go-to site when it comes to what is new in technology for the classroom. While it can be overwhelming- and the editor posts every week, if not daily- the site is well organized with easy-tonavigate internal links and great connections. I’ve included screen shots of two of my favorite posts. If you love technology- or even just have some curiosity- plan to be amazed by how the time flies!
Did anyone catch the 11 tools, not 10? I lost count and added an extra. It was too hard to decide which one to let go!