The 10 best classroom tools for gathering feedback Getting feedback from your students can serve multiple purposes: it can help you understand your students’ comprehension of the material, it can give you insight into what teaching methods work or don’t work, and it can help engage students in their learning process by knowing they have a voice that is heard. Not only can feedback offer insight for both teachers and students, it can be an integral part of group work and classroom time, given the plethora of connected devices in the hands of our students these days. That said, there are a lot of classroom tools available for gathering feedback. Twitter Sometimes, a particular tool ends up being awesome for a slightly different purpose than it was originally designed for. Socrative Socrative is one of the most well known (and widely used) student response systems, and for good reason. Verso Plickers Plickers is a great option if you don’t have a classroom full of devices. Doodle Polldaddy Poll Everywhere Google Forms Infuse Learning Kahoot
Create Killer Presentations with Explain Everything Explain Everything is a whiteboard and screencasting app that makes creating interactive lessons a simple proposition. Its full-featured editing options and its import/export functions allow it to stand apart from the other competitors I tested. Read on to find out why the Explain Everything app’s educational focus, adaptability, and user engagement make it the best its kind. Explain Everything Review Background: According to MorrisCooke, the force behind Explain Everything, the app is a “unique interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool used by over 1.5 million students and educators.” The app is recommended for grades 7-12, but teachers of lower grades may still benefit from the app by using it to liven up lessons. Methodology: I began the evaluation process by downloading several popular interactive whiteboard tools for tablets, including Explain Everything V. 2.55. Pros: Integrate content from myriad sources and incorporate social media for easy sharing. Scores How Do You Use It?
9 Digital Learning Tools Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Use The 21st century is a time of rapid change, and while the brain may not be changing (much), the tools we use to feed it are. This puts the 21st century teacher in a critical spot–of mastering constantly evolving technology and digital learning tools–the same tools their students use every day. So below, we’ve started with 9 such tools, but this is obviously just scratching the surface. This list is not meant to be exhaustive (obviously), or even authoritative (but rather, subjective). This is the 21st century, after all. And incidentally, it pairs nicely with a related post, 36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do. Let us know what we missed on twitter or facebook. 1. While Google Reader is going the way of the dodo, social readers like Pulse and Flipboard continue to surge in popularity because they’re attractive, accessible across devices, and make it easy to skim large amounts of information at once. Why Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Use It 2. 3. 5. 6. 7.
emaze - Online Presentation Software – Create Amazing Presentations 81 Dash - A Nice Backchannel Tool for the Classroom 81 Dash is a nice backchannel platform that I learned about today during the "Smackdown" at Hack Ed 2014. 81 Dash provides a place for teachers to create chat rooms to use with students to host conversations and share files. Once you are registered you can begin creating rooms. In your chat room you can exchange messages and files. As the owner of a room you can delete messages written by your students. Students join your 81 Dash room by going to the URL that is assigned to your room. Applications for Education81 Dash resolves the complaint that teachers have about many backchannel tools. Backchannels in general provide a good way to hear from all of the students in a classroom.
10 Word Cloud Generators You Have Probably Never Tried A few days back, we looked at five great ways to incorporate word cloud generators into your classroom. There are obviously many more uses out there for them – but that is a discussion for another post. We’ve mentioned most of these before – in a post from way back when – so I won’t go into too much detail about each individual one, but we’ve added a few notable ones to the list. (Of note, the list is in no particular order). The vast majority of them work the same: plug your text into the box, select a few options, and you’ve got yourself a word cloud. Some offer more options than others, some offer word clouds with words going in any and all directions, some offer shapes, others create much simpler word clouds. If you do a quick search for word cloud, you’ll see so many different types. Do you have a favorite word cloud generator from the list below? Wordle Jason Davies’ Word Cloud Generator WordSift WordItOut Tagul TagCrowd Yippy WordMosaic AbcYa Tagxedo VocabGrabber
5 Ways To Use Word Cloud Generators In The Classroom Photo Courtesy of flickr and Sue Waters The popularity of word clouds remains pretty constant in education, and it’s not difficult to see why. They’re a great way for students to distil and summarize information. However, it’s important to remember that the process of creating word clouds is just as important as the resulting resources. How to Use Word Clouds with Students Far from just an assessment tool, creating word clouds can be useful in promoting critical thinking, relationship building, and even as a great kick-starter. 1. As educators, we’re well aware that words are the building blocks of comprehension and cognition. Word clouds are an excellent way to help our students develop their vocabulary. One Edudemic reader commented on the previous version of this article to explain how she used word clouds as a way to encourage her students to come up with a bank of synonyms and antonyms that could be used when approaching particular topics. 2. 3. 4. 5. What’s Next?
The Backchannel: Giving Every Student a Voice in the Blended Mobile Classroom A backchannel -- a digital conversation that runs concurrently with a face-to-face activity -- provides students with an outlet to engage in conversation. Every time I think about this tool, I remember my student, Charlie (not his real name). Given his learning challenges, he struggled to keep up during class discussions. At the time, we did not have mobile devices. TodaysMeet would have let teachers create private chat rooms so that students could ask questions or leave comments during class. Consider the students like Charlie who cannot process at the same pace, the ones unable to speak up over the din of the class, or those who want to share ideas to a point of disruption and need an outlet for their enthusiasm. Capturing Curiosity To start the year, Rhonda Hahn (@mrshahn) asked her ninth grade biology students, "What are you curious about? From time travel to stem cells, her students unleashed their ideas. Connecting to the Conversation Ann Feldman asks: Ubiquitous Opportunity
Kaizena · Give Great Feedback · Voice Comments for Google Drive Mind Mapping Software: Mind Maps | MindMeister Fastest Way to Create Comic Strips and Cartoons - Toondoo 20 Options for Real-Time Collaboration Tools About ETR Community EdTechReview (ETR) is a community of and for everyone involved in education technology to connect and collaborate both online and offline to discover, learn, utilize and share about the best ways technology can improve learning, teaching, and leading in the 21st century. EdTechReview spreads awareness on education technology and its role in 21st century education through best research and practices of using technology in education, and by facilitating events, training, professional development, and consultation in its adoption and implementation.
Adobe Slate: New App for Creating Beautiful Sites Is Almost Too Simple Adobe Slate: New App for Creating Beautiful Sites Is Almost Too Simple Adobe, as you’re probably aware, is the huge software company best known for Photoshop and other high-end design programs. They’re complex, they’re for professionals, and most of them require you to pay a subscription fee instead of buying them outright. So it’s eye-popping to see Adobe unveiling apps that are free and aimed at normal people: students, teachers, photographers, small business owners, just folks of every kind. A few months back, Adobe’s first stab in this direction was a free iPad app called Adobe Voice. It’s a clean, lovely, incredibly easy-to-use program that lets you make “explainer videos” — a popular kind of online narrated persuasion videos. Now there’s a second app in this line: Adobe Slate. It’s hard to explain this special Web effect in words; you really need to see my video above. Parallax sites are great for telling stories. Photos and formatting A primitive slate