23 Microsoft Free Teaching Tools for Educators Are you interested in a list of 23 free teaching tools that you can use in your classroom? From helping students learn through interactive 3D experiences to transforming ordinary classroom experiences into immersive education and much more… Would you like to engage your students with free classroom tools in an active learning classroom environment? Learning Suite by MicrosoftOver 20 of Microsoft's most popular education tools and teacher resources - all in one place! You may also find the following lists of tools useful: Get 2 Free eBooks Get the eLearning Industry's Articles in your inbox.
Great Infographic Making Tools for Teachers 1- Visual.ly This is my favorite tool. It helps you easily create awesome infographics using pre-designed templates. It also lets you create an infographic out of any Twitter Hashtag provided you are signed in which you can do using your Twitter account. 2-Easel.ly This is another great web tool to create infographics. 3-PiktoChart I love PiktoChart and I have used it a couple of times and found it really great. 4- Infogr.am Infogr.am is an easy to use online service that lets you create, share, and discover infographics and online charts.It is also very easy to use, you can select a pre-designed template, add charts, videos and maps and within a few clicks your template is ready to go viral. Other infographic creation tools you might want to try :
20 Awesome BYOD and Mobile Learning Apps We have now been Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for three years, and boy, do the students bring it. They bring it all! We have iPads, Surface, iPhones, Droids, Chromebooks, Macs, and PC laptops. Here's my current thinking. Please share yours in the comments section below. Note Taking If students can't find, review, and access their notes or pictures of the board, their mobile note-taking system is useless. Microsoft OneNote In my opinion, the most robust single note-taking app is Microsoft OneNote because it looks just like a traditional notebook. Evernote Evernote is a multiplatform app, but you cannot edit simultaneously. The premium version searches handwritten text so that photos of the board or your notes can actually be found later. eBooks With ebooks as the current battleground of education technology, students should know how to find and download ebooks and PDFs on Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo. Writing Traditional Essay Writing Collaborative Writing Moving Between Platforms Blogging Cloud Sync
The Official Voki Blog | Welcome to the Voki Blog! 5 Free Tools to Collect Student Feedback There are several free web tools that teachers can use to gather feedback from their students both formally and informally. You can also use these tools to poll your students about a learning event, assess their level of comprehension, or simply to get to know their opinions about a certain topic. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has already posted a list of such tools last year but today we are updating this list deleting the ones that no longer work and including new ones . Check out the list below and as usual share with us your suggestions or additions 1- Poll Everywhere This is my favorite. 2- Kwiqpoll This is another polling service that you can use to create polls for your classroom. 3- TodaysMeet This tool lets you maintain a back channel chat with your students. 4- SimpleMeet Me This is an awesome web service that enables users to chat with others without having to install any software or even registering. 5- Utrack
Turn YouTube into a Classroom with eduCanon You know the Internet is loaded with great videos that can teach just about every subject imaginable. But holding students accountable for watching an assigned video, or making the viewing experience more active, is a challenge. Without standing right over students, how do you know if they’re really watching? This issue is put to rest with the arrival of eduCanon, a free, web-based platform that allows you to build formative assessments right on top of any YouTube or Vimeo video. Once you sign up for an account, which takes about 60 seconds, you are given access to a lesson builder, where you select a YouTube video, then create your own multiple-choice questions to go along with it. You can build your own library of video-based lessons, and even maximize higher-level thinking by asking students to create their own eduCanon lessons. Check out this video to learn more about how eduCanon works: Here are some of the best features of eduCanon: Embed questions at specific points.
Public Media for Northern CA Cost-effective means an app should be affordable for students and their families, Lanier says. He encourages teachers and schools to choose free apps that are accessible to everyone. Even in schools where every student is given a device or can bring their own, not every student has the same access to apps and programs. Because of that, an app should also be "cloud-based" or "cross-platform." Both phrases mean that an app works on a variety of devices. Finally, he says, collaborative apps allow more than one person to interact with an application at the same time. Educators use mobile apps for everything from grading homework to communicating with parents. Kahoot! Kahoot! Questions are displayed on a shared screen, like a smart board, so everyone can join in. "The students like it because it is interactive, fun, fast-paced, and a bit competitive," says Alyson Solomon, a high school biology teacher in Pennsylvania. Remind G Suite Apps Padlet Seesaw
Presentation Design Guide: How to Summarize Information for Presentations Bad presentations. We’ve all had to sit through them. Heck, we’ve probably all given one or two. You know the type: twice as long as they need to be, slides chock-full of text, no visuals in sight. How can you ensure you don’t fall victim to these presentation faux-pas when designing your next presentation for your team, class, or clients? Let’s get started: Watch: How to design a presentation [10 ESSENTIAL TIPS] Include less text and more visuals in your presentation design According to David Paradi’s annual presentation survey, the 3 things that annoy audiences most about presentations are: Speakers reading their slidesSlides that include full sentences of textText that is too small to read The common thread that ties all of these presentation annoyances is text. In my experiences speaking at conferences and in webinars over the past few years, audiences respond much more positively to presentations that use visuals in place of text. I’m not the only one who has found this. 1. 2. 3. Keep: 4.
Why Generation Z Learners Prefer YouTube Lessons Over Printed Books Many students now turn to YouTube before books to grasp difficult concepts in math and science or to investigate topics for English and history classes. —All images: YouTube Video learning outranks printed books in survey By Lauraine Genota Fifteen-year-old Jaimie Moreano is on YouTube all the time. She can learn how to do anything she wants using the video-sharing platform. But makeup tutorials aren't the only videos she watches on the popular video platform. "When I'm doing my homework, I'll look up how to solve a problem on YouTube," said Moreano, a sophomore at Locust Valley High School outside New York City. She's part of a majority of Generation Z kids who have a higher preference for learning from YouTube and videos, compared with printed books. In a survey released last month of people ages 14 to 23—the so-called Generation Z group—YouTube ranked the highest as a preferred learning tool. 'Grasp the Concept' The members of Generation Z seem to agree. Privacy and Content Concerns