Last month at our Talking Tech session, we had a special guest: Fran Hewett. Fran is the Instructional Coach at Croninger Elementary, a Four-Star school on the northeast side of Fort Wayne. She shared with everyone 5 tips she recently picked up at a conference that could be used immediately in the classroom. I thought I'd take this chance to pass them along to you...
- Answer Garden: http://answergarden.ch/
This is a very cool tool to help form word clouds based on responses that students give. The more an answer is given, the larger the word becomes. It is a wonderful (and free) formative assessment tool that can be used with either an iPad or a computer.
- Discovery Education Video Streaming: http://www.discoveryeducation.com/
This incredible resource is often overlooked in our district. Every teacher has access to it using your network username@fwcs and "media" as the password. Students would use their 9 digit student number as their username. You can find videos that match our new 2014 Indiana Academic Standards. Fran also suggested using Discovery as a way to safely search of images (it's not just full of videos!) to use in projects.
Plickers might be the coolest app out there for the iPad. It is mind-blowing!!! When Fran demo'd it last month it was the first time I'd actually seen it used, and it was every bit as cool as I heard it was. You really do have to check it out for yourself, but basically, it turns 1 single iPad (your teacher iPad) into an entire set of "clickers" for your classroom. All you have to do is print out some cards that your students can use for answering questions. Then you simply ask a question, give students time to respond by holding up their cards, scan the room, and view your results... Incredible!! Seriously, anyone who doesn't already have a class set of iPads permanently in their classroom needs to check out this app immediately.
- Kidrex Search Engine: Kidrex: http://www.kidrex.org/
This is a great (and safe) way to have students use a Google custom search in order to be sure only safe websites are searched when students are doing research. Fran also pointed out that you can search by article complexity levels- Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced when doing a Google Search. In order to search by level, just click Search Tools, All Results, thenReading level. Click on the level to see sites with that reading level. Another unique search engine to check out is Wolfram Alpha. When you search for a specific topic, person, or date, you'll be shown tons of data and information. Try it now by going to https://www.wolframalpha.com/ and typing something like "Indiana" or type in your date of birth.
- SpeakIt! Chrome Extension: http://goo.gl/xvKYeh
There are some pretty amazing Chrome extensions out there and this is one of them. "SpeakIt!" allows students to have highlighted text read to them. All you have to do is download the extension to your Chrome browser. It will appear as a little gray speaker icon on your Chrome browser. All you have to do is highlight text you want read to you and then click on the icon. A very friendly voice will then read the text to you!
I hope you've found these few ideas helpful. Thanks again to Fran for sharing the things she has found to be the most impactful in the classroom. Please comment or email me if you have any further questions or would like to see a more in-depth review of any of these tools. Have a great weekend and God bless!
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